Knowledge, Expertise and the Professions

Michael Young, Johan Muller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134683925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

It has long been recognised that specialised knowledge is at the core of what distinguishes professions from other occupations. The privileged status of professions in most countries, however, together with their claims to autonomy and access to specialised knowledge, is being increasingly challenged both by market pressures and by new instruments of accountability and regulation. Established and emerging professions are increasingly seen as either the solution, or as sources of conservatism and resistance to change in western economies, and recent developments in professional education draw on a competence model which emphasises what newly qualified members of a profession 'can do' rather than what 'they know'.

This book applies the disciplines of the sociology of knowledge and epistemology to the question of professional knowledge. What is this knowledge? It goes beyond traditional debates between 'knowing how' and 'knowing that', and 'theory' and 'practice'. The chapters cover a wide range of issues, from discussions of the threats to the knowledge base of established professions including engineers and architects, to the fraught situations faced by occupations whose fragile knowledge base and professional status is increasingly challenged by new forms of control. While recognising that graduates seeking employment as members of a profession need to show their capabilities, the book argues for reversing the trend that blurs or collapses the skill/knowledge distinction. If professions are to have a future then specialised knowledge is going to be more important than ever before.

Knowledge, Expertise and the Professions will be key reading for students, researchers and academics in the fields of professional expertise, further education, higher education, the sociology of education, and the sociology of the professions.

Part One

Introduction and framing the issues

Outline of the book

Michael Young and Johan Muller

Part 1 of this book begins with a chapter by the editors outlining the current state of the sociology of the professions and provides an intellectual rationale for taking knowledge more seriously than is currently the case in much of the literature presently being produced. It is followed by a chapter by Gerald Grace, who sketches the broader moral compass of the professions, and asks whether the professions are still able to perform their Durkheimian duty as moral guardians of our contemporary society, and what it will take to restore some moral coherence to our market-fragmented world.

The two parts that follow present specific explorations into the dynamics of knowledge and professional judgment. The chapters in the book’s second part all engage with contemporary philosophical work on theoretical and practical knowledge. The first chapter in Part 2, by Jan Derry, tackles a common misapprehension about the Russian social psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which depicts him as a kind of Cartesian rationalist because of his stress on theoretical knowledge. Using Robert Brandom’s work, she shows us a far more nuanced and interesting Vygotsky and his possible contribution to a theory of professional knowledge and judgment. The second chapter, by Christopher Winch, continues his current work by unpacking in further detail the varieties of practical knowledge that must be given due consideration in the professional curriculum, showing too that there is no practical knowledge that is devoid of some conceptual content. Ben Kotzee next tackles the ‘fluency theorists’ who place exclusive stress on practical knowledge, and engages with the recent sociological work of Harry Collins on ‘expertise’, expanding his framework. Like Jan Derry, David Guile in Chapter 6 recruits the work of Brandom to approach the question of professional knowledge from the perspective of professional practice, and depicts it as a continuous process of successive recontextualisations. In the final chapter in Part 2, Yael Shalem addresses the question as to how professional judgments can be stabilised in a ‘minor’ or ‘semi’ profession like teaching, where a broadly accepted and stable knowledge base is not in place. She shows the value of a good educational theory in anchoring judgments rationally. All of the contributions in Part 2 attempt to refine the conceptual armoury we currently have to discuss, analyse and explain professional knowledge and how it works.

Part 3 of the book showcases five cases of professional knowledge in the curriculum or in practice. The first chapter by Hu Hanrahan tackles the question of engineering knowledge, presenting a picture of how it has changed over the years, and distilling from this socio-historical overview an account of how engineering knowledge varies between the engineering occupational positions across the theory–practice continuum. Francis Carter looks at struggles over time in the French architectural curriculum, and how theoretical considerations – in this case aesthetic ones – have managed to retain a measure of dominance despite the rising technical demands of contemporary science and technology. Jennifer Case takes us up to the present, examinining key contemporary debates in the engineering curriculum, and argues for a model of curriculum reform that will not undermine the demands of conceptual coherence. Martin McNamara and Gerard Fealy analyse the contemporary nursing curriculum and show why attempts to shore up the knowledge base of nursing as a profession have gone about it the wrong way. In the final chapter Nick Taylor looks at the mathematics teachers’ curriculum in South Africa and shows that ‘subject knowledge for teaching’ – knowledge of mathematics itself – has to form the substrate to a strong professional identity, and an effective professional practice.

1 From the sociology of professions to the sociology of professional knowledge

Michael Young and Johan Muller

Introduction: professions and their knowledges

In a review of research on the sociology of work written two decades ago, Andrew Abbott (1993) commented that work on the professions was unusually dominant within the broader field of the sociology of work, and within that, ‘theorizing dominates’ (ibid.: 203). Notwithstanding this glut of attention, the sociology of professions remains a frustratingly under-specified area, and the demarcation criteria that have emerged to distinguish professions from other occupations – deployment of expert knowledge, technical autonomy, a normative orientation, and social and material rewards (Gorman and Sandefur 2011) – do not unambiguously distinguish between professions and other expert occupations. Nor do they take us much further than Glazer’s depiction of ‘their hopeless predicament’ in analysing occupations that are variously described as minor (Glazer 1974), ‘soft’ (Becher and Trowler 1989) or semi-professions (Etzioni 1969). Opinion is divided on whether this matters or not. According to Evetts (2006, 2013), the bulk of researchers in the USA have ‘moved on’ (Evetts 2006: 134) and no longer seek demarcating criteria, since these do not help in understanding the power of some professional groups but not others, nor in understanding the ‘contemporary appeal of the discourse of professionalism in all occupations’ (ibid.).

For European researchers like Sciulli (2005), it decidedly does matter: how else do we distinguish between expert occupations like haute couture and cuisine, and professions like medicine or law? For Sciulli, it is important to see that:

expert occupations (compared to professions)… do not bear fiduciary responsibility, and they also do not institutionalise either theory-based instruction or ongoing deliberation. They do not typically establish and then maintain collegial formations, as reflected in on-going behavioural fidelity to the threshold of procedural norms.

(Sciulli 2005: 937)

What Sciulli is stressing here are the ‘structural’ or institutional features of professions. Yet here too, variation is so wide as to elude neat conceptual demarcation, and it is arguably growing wider still. Sciulli concludes, in a phrase that has resonance with the contributors in this volume below who draw on the philosopher Robert Brandom, that professions are ‘reason-giving collegial formations’ (Sciulli 2005: 958), but that too was already established by Abbott (1988).

The centrality of intrinsic normative commitments and responsibilities was established in what Gorman and Sandefur (2011) call the ‘Golden Age’ of the sociology of professions, by Parsons and Merton who, following Durkheim, emphasised the socially integrative function of professions. Although this was a diminution of Durkheim’s contribution, it did foreground the relation between the internal normative commitments of professions and their broader macro social functions, a point taken further in the first chapter of this book by Gerald Grace. In reaction to the perceived conservatism of this functionalist description, a revisionist period followed, of Marxist, Weberian and later Foucauldian proven ance, which put professional bona fides in question and, in an inversion of Parsonian optimism, pointed to the monopolistic and gatekeeping operation of professions and their broader ideological function. This phase of critique, with its shift of focus from professions as an occupation to professionalism as an ideology, also cast suspicion on the validity and value of expert and professional knowledge, a position that in science studies at least we have yet properly to emerge from, and one which made it difficult to establish the reality and efficacy of ‘expert knowledge’ (Collins and Evans 2009). Nevertheless, it was in this phase too that Abbott (1988) established the centrality of formal abstract principles for professional formations, as mentioned above.

The phase that followed re-interpreted the Parsonian values, and returned to the normative emphasis of the Golden Age (as in Friedson 2001), but in a ‘more balanced and cautious’ way (Gorman and Sandefur 2011: 138). There have been a wide variety of case studies, which seem to say more about the occupational niche in question than they do about what professions are and how they work. Evetts (2013) detects a shift in the occupational structure of professions, with corporations and organisations, both private and public, increasingly being the workplace location for all kinds of professions – the long established ones like doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants, as well as the ‘new boys on the block’ such as social workers and teachers. This seems to have led to a shrinkage of autonomy and discretion in Evetts’ view, fuelling the literature on ‘de-professionalisation’ and even ‘proletarianisation’. This can be overstated, of course, and is not a major focus for European scholars, except in England.

There are two features that can be distilled from the contemporary work in the sociology of professions that are worth noting for the purposes of the present volume. The first is that, in the present discursive climate of the ‘knowledge economy’, ‘knowledge work’ and ‘expert occupations’, there is simultaneously concern about the increase in the riskiness of professional judgment, the threat that codification and standardisation poses to the autonomy and discretion of the traditional ‘liberal’ professional, and a residual suspicion about the probity and trustworthiness of all professions and professional judgment. Whether this reflects the views of an increasingly informed and sceptical public about the trustworthiness and value of the professions, or is a long hangover from the scepticism about knowledge that underlies public attitudes in an age that has distinct anti-intellectual overtones is hard to say. Second, the upshot has been that the nature of professional knowledge has escaped scholarly notice, and when spoken about at all, is spoken about in terms of professional expert judgment, and what professionals can do with the knowledge. What the knowledge is that professionals have had to acquire to be experts has, by and large, eluded scholarly attention.

The paradox we are left with is this: in an age where ‘knowledge’ as a qualifier is attached to a wide range of categories and actions, when expert occupations proliferate, and the legitimatory discourse of ‘professionalisation’ is deployed across the occupational spectrum, knowledge itself, and above all the sociological study of professional knowledge, goes virtually unremarked. In a nice twist to the paradox, ‘knowledge’ itself is increasingly used as a legitimatory qualifier for sociological work – but the knowledge itself is by and large passed over in silence (Young 2010).

The project we are pursuing by means of this volume is to put the sociological study of professional knowledge into the centre of scholarly focus in research on professions and their formation. This is not just a matter of restoring sociological balance. As educational sociologists, we (the editors) have also repeatedly come up against the intellectual lacuna left in discussions around the aims of higher education and the curriculum (Muller and Young forthcoming). We have noted in earlier work how the exclusive stress on the ‘can do’ side of the knowledge equation – on skills and competencies at the expense of knowledge; on skills in the design of national qualifications frameworks (Young and Allais 2013); and on outcomes in national school curricula (Young 2010; Muller 2007) – can distort the resultant educational achievements, and impair educational provision. It is the distinctive socio-epistemic properties of different kinds and bodies of knowledge that are put to use by members of professions in problem-solving and other kinds of knowledgeable practice that is our singular concern in this volume.

To say that, however, is not to make a strong split between knowledge and action; this would, in the case of professional knowledge, be particularly counterproductive. Indeed, as the various contributions to this book will show, there is a continuum between these, and it is easy to blur the lines. The distinctions we wish to refine are analytical. There is an interesting related body of work that focuses on ‘knowledge engagement and learning’ (Jensen, Lahn and Nerland 2012: 5), which has carved out new perspectives in understanding the knowledgeable nature of professional work. It starts, however, from our perspective and in terms of our central interest, just too far in the direction of ‘can do’ and the ‘practice’ of knowledge-based professions, and pays little attention to the ‘specialised knowledge’ involved in that practice. This perspective has obvious affinities with the work in this volume, and is represented by the contribution of David Guile, who makes a first stab at building a bridge between the two sets of interest. Other papers that reflect such bridge building are Afdal 2012, and Nerland and Karseth forthcoming, among others. We are mindful and appreciative of this work, but do not engage further wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Introduction and framing the issues: Outline of the book
• Part Two Knowledge, judgment and expertise: Theoretical perspectives
• Part Three Education and the professions: Case studies
• Index