The Professional Identity Of Advertising Practitioners And The Construction Of Advertising Professionalism Of China

Advertising industry is a kind of service industries which is based on the knowledge. Therefore the quality of advertising industry depends mainly on the practitioners as a whole. The core task of advertising industry is to serve the business. However the method, process and outcome of work are culture production, in the form of media messages. This special combination of business service and culture production means that successful advertising work relies not only on profound knowledge but also on normative systems and the abilities of communication and planning etc. which can be obtained by higher education. According to the above features, advertising should be considered as a kind of profession which is characteristic of the knowledge and the abilities. The people specialized in advertisement production should be considered as the professionals. Nevertheless, Profession in nature is an identity that is the result of recognition by social world according to some signs.Only when the practitioners have professional identity, advertising can be truly seen as a kind of profession besides a job or an occupation.Professional identity is a concept coming from sociology of occupation, which means that the people in a society recognize and accept that advertising has special significance and value as a profession to their society.In this way, professional identity is the source of occupational dignity of thepractitioners, the base of professional autonomy, the justification of reasonable economic reward, and the intrinsic force of development of advertising industry. Therefore the assessment of the situation of professional identity of the practitioners of Chinese mainland can reveal the real situation of the development of the advertising industry. In this paper, the framework of the investigation is designed according to the concept and the connotation of professional identity. The investigation is performed on the practitioners and the results show that Chinese practitioners are in lack of professional identity. After the analysis of the literature, it is further found that the reason of this lack is due to the lack of the action of the construction of professional identity launched by the practitioners during the development process of advertising industry in China. Professional identity does not come into being naturally with time lapse. It is rather the result of the active social construction by the practitioners. There is conflict between the characteristics of advertising profession and the lack of professional identity of the practitioners. This conflict leads to the predicament of survival of the practitioners. It also affects the overall quality and capacity of advertising industry. This conflict is the core reason of the hotly discussed problem of "non-professionalization". Therefore in order to solve the problems of advertising industry of China and to promote the development of the industry, professional identity should be successfully constructed. This means that the practitioners should launch a movement of professionalization with the ultimate target of social identity. After the analysis of the relevant theories of sociology of occupation, it is suggested that professional identity is realized by the construction of professionalism and the basic condition consist of modern professionalism system. Here professionalism is not just a set of ideology system with ethics code but rather a set of institution system including ideology system, profession autonomy and the interaction between them.To construct professionalism of advertising industry in our country, we must consider the change of form of advertising as a kind social communication and the change of its core task which is brought by the change of media technological. And also we should blend innovation in new digital-media era preserving the value from mass-media era. Only in this way, we can successfully construct valuable advertising professionalism that will be able help to attain strong professional identity for people who work specially on advertising in China.