Legitimating Professionalism?

Wendy Bacon, University of Technology, Sydney

Susan Groundwater-Smith, University of Sydney

Chris Nash, University of Technology, Sydney

Judyth Sachs, University of Sydney[1]

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Cardiff University, 7-10 September 2000

“... the unethical borders on the illegal - unprofessional, yes, but unethical, no.”

Response by a spokesperson for the Real Estate Institute for Australia when asked whether the practice of contacting bereaved persons regarding the possible sale of their real estate was unethical. (7.30 Report, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1st June, 2000)

Abstract

This paper grows from a dialogue which is being conducted across a range of professions in New South Wales, Australia. It discusses what Judyth Sachs calls “a methodology of practice” within a context of legitimation crisis. Professional practice is situated within a concern for the burgeoning of bureaucratic and corporate controls and constraints which are being applied to professional practice, whether in education, journalism or the health professions. The paper will consider what we understand professionalism to mean and the ways in which it faces dilemmas in responding to competing individual and social needs

Among other things the paper will present arguments in relation to: new discourses of what constitutes professionalism in the public sphere; consequences of the proletarianisation of professional practice in some, but not all, spheres; new ways of working with communities of practice which are interdisciplinary; and professional practice and the public good.

Introduction

Public service organisations in Australia (publicly positioned if not no longer necessarily publicly owned), be they related to the education, health or communications industries, are currently engaged in servicing practices which are in many ways in crisis. Professional knowledge as exercised by practitioners within these sectors, and the power which are associated with that knowledge, is being reconstituted and contested in a number of competing and contradictory ways. A particular tension concerned with professional autonomy exists both between the individual practitioners and those who utilise their service in the public space, and also between the practitioners and their employers in the relevant institutions, themselves governed by bureaucratized and corporatized cultures undergoing major changes.

As well, the external environment is one in which there is an increase in the diversity of stakeholders wishing to influence not only government but also business and services regarding their use and management of the nation’s social, fiscal and material resources. These participants, or would-be participants, include statutory tribunals, industrial associations, non-government organisations (NGOs), community based organisations, professional associations, social movements, religious organisations and special interest groups. The demands for influence, and the responses to these demands, are often made through the media, which provide a field (with its own specific and negotiable characteristics) in which the public standing of the professions is negotiated among professions, clients and stakeholders.

In short, many professionals now operate in a context where

  • they are salaried employees of large corporations, often national and transnational, whether in the public or private sectors
  • the communications media (and increasingly the internet) provide frameworks for professional identities and relations with the public and other stakeholders
  • traditional professional principles and ethics are under constant pressure from (often global) economic, social and political factors, and defensive actions by the professions can be characterised as self-serving ploys by labour market cartels
  • universities have a major interest in and influence on the development of the knowledge bases and ethical codes of the professions, at the same time are as they are experiencing similar pressures to other corporate professional organisations.

In this context, professionalism is a concept which requires close attention, even redefinition (Kritzer, 1999). In giving consideration to these concerns the Centre for Practitioner Research at the University of Sydney and the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney have convened a series of Roundtables in which participants have engaged in open and exploratory debate ( This paper seeks to develop a theoretical context for the consideration of issues which have been raised in the Roundtable. It is intended that ultimately there will be a more substantial publication arising from the knowledge and experience of the roundtable participants.

Professionalism and Class

There can be no question that what constitutes 'professionalism', and the multiple meanings which attach to the word, shift and change over time.

MacDonald (1995) in the preface to his book The Sociology of the Professions quotes Adam Smith:

"We trust our health to the physician; our fortune and sometimes our life and reputation to the lawyer and attorney. Such confidence could not safely be reposed in people of a very mean or low condition. Their reward must be such, therefore, as may give them that rank in society which so important a trust requires. The long time and great expense which must be laid out in their education, when combined with this circumstance, necessarily enhance still further the price of their labour." (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. 1 Ch.10)

Professions were historically defined as the broad and privileged class of occupations characterized by highly trained expertise, selection by merit, and subject to peer surveillance. It was thought that professional practitioners were in command of arcane and specialist knowledge; a knowledge which they controlled by the admission of only those who were like themselves and the exclusion of those who might constitute a threat or challenge. Their power was seen to be both economic and social. Moving on from Adam Smith, MacDonald (1995) draws our attention to the writings of the nineteenth century, in particular of Trollope, for example, Dr Thorne, where

“gentlemen (sic) desired to have their money, their property, their bodies and their souls dealt with by gentlemen, and ordinary people followed their example if they could afford it.” (P. 31).

Clearly, then, in earlier times professionalism was legitimated as a high status and well rewarded activity, where practitioners shared a common cultural capital with their clients based on class membership. But as the class structures of the service industries became more differentiated in the twentieth century, the professions became (in Bourdieu's terms) 'the dominated fraction of the dominant classes' (Bourdieu, 1975, quoted in Garnham and Williams, 1980: 220). Class membership criteria as barriers to entry were challenged by the move from elite to mass education in universities after World War II (Hobsbawm, 1994: 295 ff), but nonetheless notions of exclusivity and abstract knowledge remained the foundation for determining what it was to be a professional

Subsequently the range of careers which could be termed professional increased. Some occupational groups could claim exclusivity through licensing structures (such as builders and plumbers) but were not seen to be in command of abstract knowledge (or appropriate cultural capital) and so remained working class crafts. However, others were in command of such knowledge, albeit uncodified. As well as the traditional professions such as law, medicine, the priesthood and the military, it was seen that those who were accountants, managers, architects, journalists, vets, teachers, social workers, health workers and so on could now constitute themselves as professionals. As the education of these occupations moved from an apprenticeship mode into the tertiary institutions, in some cases the class status of the professions' members started to change, prompting resistance to professionalisation from older, craft-defined members. Often this resistance was abetted by employers seeking to limit the autonomy of their workforces (Lloyd 1985; O'Malley 1987).

Universities as the licensing gatekeepers became key sites of struggle in the multi-dimensional transition of some previous working/lower-middle class crafts into recognisably middle-class professions (for recent insights into the epistemological and territorial dimensions of this struggle in the field of journalism education, see Media International Australia, 1999: 'Media Wars', and the inaugural symposium in Journalism 2000). Regardless of the outcomes of particular battles in this transition, because the keys to access to the cultural capital of the professions are increasingly controlled by relatively independent universities and are therefore more meritocratic, the professions themselves have gained some leverage in their relations with those to whom they sell their services.

There was some strategic benefit for the universities also in this transition: the expansion of their role as gatekeepers to an ever-increasing range of occupations has given them increased power and relevance to industry. But by the same token, this increasing engagement with industrial employment needs has severely compromised the role of detached civic conscience championed by academics (eg MacIntyre and Marginson, 1999). This reciprocal dynamic of educating industry / industrialising education is taking place on terrain where the power of the traditionalists (both liberal and conservative) within universities has been fatally undermined by the savage cuts to government funding (in Australia from a high of 5.1% of government expenditure in 1995 to 4.3% in 1999).

As professionalisation has spread as an organisational framework for intellectual work, the power attached to exclusive knowledges and the institutions which control them has come under attack. Professional omniscience and omnipotence are routinely questioned by critics speaking on behalf of client publics. Writing in 1977, Ivan Illich put it powerfully:

Professionals assert secret knowledge about human nature, knowledge which only they have the right to dispense. They claim a monopoly over the definition of deviance and the remedies needed. For example, lawyers hold that they alone have the competence and legal right to provide assistance in divorce. Gravediggers become members of a profession by calling themselves morticians ... Morticians form a profession when they acquire the muscle to have the police stop your burial if you are not embalmed and boxed by them. In any area where a human need can be imagined these new professions, dominant, authoritative, monopolistic, legalized - and, at the same time debilitating and effectively disabling the individual - have become exclusive experts of the public good. (Illich, 1977: 19 - 20)

Thus, as the century drew to a close a more pervasively cynical view of professionalism has grown. It is argued that the professionals’ effort has more to do with the creation of ‘exclusive shelters’ in the labour market than with providing public service, ethical standards or collegial support (Brint, 1993, p. 23).

Broadly speaking, there are now two paradigmatic approaches to the study of the professions. One is based in the North American social sciences and sees professionalisation as a way of organising middle-class labour in advanced capitalist economies (Bell, 1973; Castells, 1989, 1996; Friedson, 1994; Coady and Bloch, 1996). The other is based in the European humanities and emphasises the social context and normative responsibilities and struggles of the intellectual worker (Bourdieu, passim; Said, 1993; Garnham, 1995)

Industrialisation, proletarianization and globalisation

As professionalisation spreads into all sectors of intellectual work, it brings with it corporatisation and bureaucratisation of decision-making and hierarchical control of professional activity. Corporatisation can lead to displacement of professional judgement by codes and regulations and organisational imperatives. Codified goals and tasks displace the norms of reciprocity, trust and mutual collegiality, believed to be the hallmarks of professional practice. Inevitably there are eruptions of conflict between employees' sense of their professional rights and responsibilities, their managers' institutionalised framework for the exercise of those duties, and the demands of clients, whether public or private.

Sometimes this conflict is precipitated by individual 'whistleblowers' (Lennane, 1995; Perry 1998; Blonder, 1996); sometimes by unionised workforces (notably teachers, journalists, nurses); sometimes by community groups and sometimes by statutory agencies (eg legal and medical tribunals, Press Councils). All of these conflicts are typically political engagements over the definition and boundaries of professional fields of practice (Bourdieu, passim), and typically the communications media are a crucial terrain for the conduct of the conflicts. The media, of course, bring their own set of professional imperatives, practices, discourses and clients to the investigation and representation of these conflicts (Hall 1983; Ericson 1987, 1989, 1991; Hartley 1996).

In the period from World War II up until the 1980s we saw the steady growth of urban, public service bureaucracies which took on a momentum of its own. Their organisational goal was to survive and expand, sometimes at the expense of the service they were created to provide. By the late 1960s social theorists were postulating the emergence of a 'new class' based on the professional membership of the expanding bureaucracies encroaching on more and more areas of social activity (Gouldner 1979; Schlesinger 1982). However, in retrospect, this theorisation universalised a social phenomenon that was about to pass its zenith and enter a precipitate decline - Keynsian social democracy (Garnham 1995). Bureaucracies everywhere have been in tumult as management structures have been 'flattened', whole strata of middle management ripped out of hierarchies, and the supply of professional services outsourced to competing specialist agencies (Halsey 1992). In Mulgan's terminology, ‘weak’ horizontal networks of control have replaced ‘strong’ vertical lines of control (Mulgan 1991). The model of accountability in these networks is the employment contract negotiated in the (international) labour market, where the currency of accountability is one and the same with the monetary currency of the contract. Hence the nice distinction between the illegal and the unprofessional quoted at the outset of this essay: legality relates to the terms of a contract, professionalism relates to something less pressing even than ethics, and certainly doesn't involve any tangible accountability.

The great bulk of professionals, and especially those members of the more recently recognised professions, are employed as salary-earners in small to large corporations, whether in the public or private sectors. The relationship to their clients is structured by their employing organisations. These corporations themselves are experiencing massive pressures and consequent instability of a global nature as a result of the rapidly increasing internationalisation of economic activity (Halsey 1992; Castells 1996). Professionals whose methodologies of practice are conceived in the classic model of the individual or small team responding to the needs of personally familiar clients, now find their authority and autonomy caught in the relentless vice of two historical trends: on the one side a deferral of their autonomy to corporate hierarchies, and on the other the economic struggle for survival of these corporations in an increasingly deregulated and globalising marketplace. Caught between the tectonic pressure of these two trends, many professionals hark back to a supposed golden age of civic autonomy and responsibility (eg Coady, 1999), but this is unlikely to yield productive strategies for engagement with the problem.

In the globalisation literature, the 'network society' linking 'global cities' in a 'space of flows' (Castells, 1996) puts a premium on certain professional (renamed producer) services (delivered by highly paid professionals in privileged locations) and conversely devalues other services (delivered by lowly paid professionals, often with the same skills and education of their highly paid counterparts, eg lawyers, accountants, journalists, teachers, nurses and doctors). The 'dual city' phenomenon was early recognised (Friedmann, 1986; Sassen, 1991) in the global city literature, and relates not only to geographical, ethnic, age and gender distinctions, but also to the private/public sector polarity.

What Johnson (1972) described as the mediative professions - - teachers, nurses, social workers etc. - have been largely dependent upon public sector employment, and are most governed by the regulatory environment which bureaucracies engender. But in a time of shrinking government expenditure, it is the public sector which by its very nature is least participative in the market economy and is, as a result, resource poor. Indeed Brint makes the distinction between various members of the broader professional stratum on the basis of the ‘market value’ of the different forms of expert knowledge held by the varying professional groups.

Today, more clearly than ever before, a stratum of upper-level experts has become definable by the combination of marketable skills and location in resource rich organisations, while a stratum of lower level experts has become definable by the combination of less marketable skills and location in resource poor organisations. These defining combinations, growing as they do out of processes of social stratification, are clearly quite different from the combinations of community orientation and cultural authority that provided touchstones for the somewhat more unified and certainly more inclusive professional stratum of the past. (Brint, 1994: 11).

Occupations such as teaching and nursing are not necessarily those where the knowledge base is narrow and impoverished, but where the opportunities to exercise autonomy and judgement regarding that professional knowledge are constrained by their employing authorities and by the tightening fiscal circumstances in which they are trapped. Furthermore, in spite of recent discussions regarding the contribution that health and education make to developing the nation’s human capital and hence its long-term socio-economic health, they are increasingly viewed by governments (notably but not exclusively in Australia) in terms of their commodity value in local and international markets.

Clearly then, the professions are facing pressures which challenge the foundations of their authority and even legitimacy in the eyes of their publics. These challenges manifest themselves in many ways – in how the professions are publicly recognised and economically rewarded, in how they provide and perform their services, in the value given to ethics and in the modes of accountability. The pressures are experienced by each profession in ways specific to their own social and economic circumstances, but also in common with other professions experiencing the trade winds of change.

The professions, in responding to these pressures, tend to mobilise both analytical and normative arguments. The normative figures very strongly in the popular characterisation of the professions, and in some instances has even been used to characterise the fundamental imperative of the profession (eg Ettema and Glasser (1998) on investigative journalism). Especially when under pressure from economic factors it is the normative dimension to which critics turn to buttress their counterattacks, be they individual (typically whistle-blowing) or collective (often industrial action by trade unions). Perry, following Bourdieu, has pointed out the advantages in strategic thinking of bypassing the normative argument to consider political analyses of the conflicts over definition of the professional field (Perry, 1998).