America's Culture of Professionalism

Past, Present, and Prospects

D. Brown

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137337153
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

America's Culture of Professionalism proves an emerging culture of interdependence is possible if and when enough professionals and laypersons refashion their roles and relationships having both something to contribute and something to learn from each other.

PART I

The Culture of Professionalism

Chapter 1

Knowledge as Property

The Legacy of Self-Reliance

America’s culture of professionalism has powerful ties to the country’s legacy of self-reliance, which emerged in the early nineteenth century among new landowners and artisans. “Self-reliance” was famously celebrated in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay, which was cobbled together from his lectures and journals of the 1830s. In his seclusion and self-absorption, Emerson was mainly addressing his own need to affirm himself, but the essay spoke to a fast-forming culture that was putting aside old world antecedents of “hireling” labor and replacing them with free bargaining agents. It was an ambitious culture of expansion that depended on men and women—both those of religious faith and those unsettled in their beliefs—who were determined to make a place for themselves without the promise of help extended by either church or state.1

Settling a new land and acquiring property was perhaps the most desirable way to facilitate and demonstrate self-reliance.2 Property broadly understood was considered not so much a physical asset as it was a right to be exercised when such property was threatened by a competing interest or superior authority. In America’s founding and expansion, property was a principal measure of one’s standing and, yes, self-reliance.In his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), William Blackstone put property at the center of human affairs: “There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.”3 And Alexis de Tocqueville observed: “In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States.”4

Self-reliance was undoubtedly necessary given the raw beginnings of land acquisition and emerging statehood. For at least some pioneers and settlers, the abundance of land and opportunities and the lack of a history to repudiate or reform made self-reliance more achievable. There was nothing to do but create whatever “Americans” wanted to pursue. Historian Robert Wiebe notes: “Everything depended on what individuals did for themselves. . . . Self-defined authority gave white men the mandate to rule collectively; self-directed work gave them the freedom to strike out individually. From one trunk came community self-governance, from the other economic self-determination.”5 There is abundant evidence, however, that self-reliance in this new land was enhanced by the cooperation of extended families and neighbors. Settlements became products of many hands working together, not just the property owner with his home as his “castle.” It is a history that belies the oft-quoted “every man for himself.” Sean Wilentz tells us that “contrary to still-persistent myths of rural rugged individualism, the yeoman households were tightly connected to each other—and increasingly to the outside world.”6

Property and self-reliance, so dear in much of America’s history, have always gone hand in hand. It may be why many professionals treat knowledge as a form of property. Both real property and specialized knowledge foster and reflect the desire and importance of self-reliance—especially in a young country like America where the cherished ideal of “liberty” has never been contested. Richard Flacks puts it this way: “Liberty idealizes self-sufficiency rather than interdependence . . . What is real and valuable for the authentic libertarian are the individual and his interests, not the society and its potential.”7 For Jedediah Purdy, property rights secure “not just exclusion of others from one’s own space but command over the scope and character of activity there,”8 which also describes the prerogatives of those who came to regard their specialized knowledge as a form of property.

The legacy of self-reliance certainly contributed to developing the culture of professionalism that emerged in the late nineteenth century. This culture was entirely consistent with the ideal of self-reliance in a young republic insofar as scholars and professional practitioners, by virtue of their specializations, were able to eventually secure positions that offered at least the appearance of being on one’s own. Burton Bledstein vividly describes the self-reliance that a professional specialist acquired: He “resisted all corporate encroachments and regulations upon his independence, whether from government bureaucrats, university trustees, business administrators, public laymen, or even his own professional associations.”9 John Dewey offered an opaque description of a professional’s false sense of self-sufficiency: “All specialization breeds a familiarity which tends to create an illusion. Material dealt with by specialized abstractive processes comes to have a psychological independence and completion which is converted—hypostatized—into objective independence and self-sufficiency.”10

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the possession of knowledge as a form of property would rival the ownership of real property and its entitlements for those who would govern. Where real property was once the primary measure of a man’s standing, proprietary knowledge and professional credentials became newly devised trump cards. Knowledge treated as a form of property in America’s culture of professionalism became a means to secure the autonomy of scholars and the self-regulation of professional guilds. And the status of professionals was directly related to hard-won possessions that others came to respectfully acknowledge. “No Trespassing” signs were not necessary, as almost everyone accepted and observed such boundaries. The “progressive era” of the early twentieth century was the beginning of what would become the professional dominance of public life. However, treating knowledge as a form of property that “experts” acquired often resembled narrow strips of land, but when this view was applied to multidimensional problems it proved to be far from sufficient. Nonetheless, the time was not far off when many Americans would seek the advice and counsel of professionals for almost all of their daily concerns—how to raise their children, how to save their marriage, how to lose weight—an “outsourcing” that seems to have no end.11

Ironically, the culture of professionalism promoted layperson dependence—the antithesis of the long-held American ideal of self-reliance. To be self-reliant a professional found himself necessarily encouraging the dependence of others who had no such title or expertise. So treating knowledge as a form of property—held in common among professionals whether in the academy or within the practice of a profession—gave them the leverage to make a living by excluding those who lacked such knowledge. Consequently, the legacy of self-reliance was renewed and sustained among scholars and professional practitioners at the expense of a lay public that no longer thought it could navigate on its own.

Credentialed expertise as a new form of self-reliance was soon secured by self-regulating professional guilds as the like-minded drew together to organize. Through licensing, accreditation, and other forms of property-like monopoly, professionals made a secure place for themselves. Property was considered indispensable for those seeking a secure niche in the modern division of knowledge labor. It is interesting to note that where land tenure in England was traditionally considered “scarce and valuable,”12 tenure in America eventually became associated with the guarantee of lifetime employment for academic scholars and was conditioned on the scarcity and value of knowledge as a form of property. Isaiah Berlin characterized real property rights as a form of “negative liberty”; that is, “freedom from interference with one’s own choices and projects.”13 One could say much the same thing for academic tenure, which confers a property right. Brian Tamanaha reports that many professors now “demand that they be paid to relinquish” tenure.14 Knowledge as a form of property was also assumed in the establishment of copyright. Although not reserved just for scholars, a copyright did secure whatever they could produce and get published. Patents, too, were property. Unlike tenure, copyrights and patents “were limited in duration, but there was no doubt that they were property.”15

The Ascendance of Academe

The growth of professionalism took hold in a rapidly changing and complicated republic, whose population craved knowledge as much as their predecessors had yearned for land. In the late 1800s, many institutions of higher education moved away from their religious and denominational roots to become secular universities prepared to nurture both old and new professions. In addition, newly established universities offered specialized knowledge and services to an expanding economy and a growing urban population. Amateur seekers of enlightenment could now become “professionals” who could apply their expertise in a new, progressive era of government oversight and intervention. Even before American universities emerged in the late nineteenth century with all of their curricular specialties, Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, in 1869 pointed the way: “As a people, we do not apply to mental activities the principle of the division of labor; and we have but a halting faith in special training for professional employments. The vulgar conceit that a Yankee can turn his hand to anything we insensibly carry into high places, where it is preposterous and criminal . . . This lack of faith in the prophecy of a natural bent, and the value of a discipline concentrated upon a single object, amounts to a national danger.”16 The American university became a place where special fields of knowledge were the proud steeds that each professor sat astride as they sought to educate and train their student charges.

When knowledge treated as a form of property found a home in American higher education, academe grew rapidly and prospered. It developed, in part, through the journeys of approximately ten thousand young American men to German universities, where they acquired training and respect for a system that was far more academic than American higher education at the time. This academic training was detached, highly theoretical work, which offered a status that American students brought back home. In their eyes, America was in need of rigorous, specialized research and scholarship. They had acquired the necessary detachment to shape the idea of secular universities that would no longer be the product of, or beholden to, religious denominations, which had been the curators of traditional American colleges.

A generation before the establishment of what would become the research university model in higher education, legislation in 1862 created the Extension Service, part of newly created state universities where “adoption and diffusion research” was to be shared with a still agricultural-centered America. “Under the cloak of ‘scientific objectivity,’ land grant research and Extension programming” became an important influence in that agricultural world.17 Still, it was private universities and their graduate schools, beginning with Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in 1876 followed by the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Stanford, among others, which began to set the bar higher. By and large, the new secular universities established competitive, rather than cooperative, learning environments for their students who were tested on their individual abilities to be independent. American schooling, whether at home or in a schoolhouse, had long sought to develop the self-reliance of young people. The instruction to “do your own work” always served the interests of teachers who had to assign grades and determine which students advanced. The solo performance of the freestanding rational individual in a university classroom prevailed. Consequently, the acquisition of specialized knowledge was largely treated as a prized possession for graduates seeking to be self-reliant and to make a living in an ambitious era.

In academe, a scholar’s standing was also “dependent upon admission to and reputation within a community of peers,” since knowledge, considered and valued as a form of property, belonged first to an academic discipline or profession.18 It was not the personal property of those who contributed to its making, revision, and dissemination. It was property held in common by all those who contributed. Those in the know depended on learning from and instructing their peers in an academic give-and-take. The division of mental labor and the proliferation of nar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Culture of Professionalism
• Part II: Culture Change?
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index