Knowledge Sharing in Professions

Roles and Identity in Expert Communities

Alexander Styhre

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317108757
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Information Management

No professional is an island. Despite their capacity to monopolize and erect entry barriers in terms of either formal credentials or membership of certain organizations, professionalism is inextricably bound up with collective accomplishments on a day-to-day basis and the capacity to share all the resources that constitute the professional domain of expertise. Knowledge Sharing in Professions looks at professionalism as a form of systematic and institutionalized knowledge sharing. It analyses professionalism through the everyday practices in professional communities and the organizations where they work. Three empirical studies, of pharmaceutical clinical trials researchers, management consultants, and architects, are presented, serving to illustrate the relational nature of these and other professions, and how members of professional communities are constantly exchanging data, information, and know-how in their everyday work. Alexander Styhre seeks to understand the role of professions and other forms of experts in contemporary society on the basis of complementary perspectives, that is to say, the communal and collegial nature of professional work. This book represents a valuable contribution both to the sociological literature on professions and the business orientated literature on knowledge management and should promote further new research on professionalism.

PART 1 Theory

CHAPTER 1 Professionals, Practitioners, Practices

DOI: 10.4324/9781315591193-4

Introduction

Contemporary society has been declared a knowledge society, a society wherein abstract modes of thinking are playing a central role in the economy. As opposed to the traditional economic resources of soil, work, and capital, abstract thinking is a societal, organizational and individual resource that demands that there are people who can apprehend the ideas put forth and see the value in them. This is one of the key characteristics of a knowledge society: at the same time as ideas, creativity and innovative capacities are generally credited as the motor of the economy, such ideas are never developed in isolation but are always the outcome of collaborative efforts. In some cases, for instance when scientific breakthroughs are credited in hindsight, through the complex and intricate exchange of ideas and findings over periods of time and across research teams and research institutions, some contributors believe their part of the effort has not been sufficiently recognized. Paul Rabinow's (1996) ethnography of the work preceding Kary B. Mullis's Nobel Prize in chemistry for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a standard method in genomics research, shows that many of Mullis's collaborators, both inside the biotechnology firm Cetus and outside of it, were disappointed because they thought they had not received proper recognition for their work. Once success is ensured, quite a few people will demand their share of the cake. In other words, a knowledge society and a knowledge economy are about balancing the contributions of the individual with those of the team or community. However, even though great breakthroughs emerge as serendipities, in the margin of things, as sudden and insightful ideas appearing at unexpected moments, and so forth – scientific folklore is filled with stories about this kind of instant insight. Most work in a knowledge society is structured around collaborative efforts in professional or occupational communities. Numerous studies show that what really makes a difference is the ability to collaborate in teams and to share and discuss as openly as possible about the opportunities and challenges facing the work team (Huckman and Pisano, 2006; Groysberg and Lee, 2009; Bechky, 2006). The capacity to produce value is thus a function of both individual human capital and relational, social capital enabling a sharing of ideas and experiences (Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005; Kirsch, Ko and Haney, 2010; Andrews, 2010).

In this chapter, the literature on professions and practices will be reviewed. As was suggested in the introduction, professional work is essentially based on the ability to acquire information and know-how from peers. A fully skilled and experienced professional may be able to operate for some time in isolation but will over time find himself or herself gradually drifting apart from the rest of the community. Professional work is of necessity collective work. The literature on professions is extensive and includes contributions from both sociologists and management researchers. The literature on practice or theories of practice is also quite significant. What is aimed for by wedding these two perspectives is the ability to demonstrate not only that professional work is a matter of imposing entry barriers to the field or maintaining the areas of jurisdiction, i.e., engaging in boundary work vis-à-vis other professional and occupational communities or groups, but also that professional work is inherently structured as the constant exchange of ideas and know-how in the course of action, of everyday work. Much of the literature on professions emphasizes the defence of the entrenched positions of the community (its prerogatives, status, the value of its credentials, etc.), but it must not be forgotten that professional work is ultimately a matter of the performativity of the work, the ability to accomplish certain effects that are valued in society. Physicians must be able to cure patients, architects must be able to design qualitative buildings, and laboratory researchers must be able to produce credible research results. In order to accomplish this work, there is a constant and continuous exchange of insights, learning, advice and other pieces of information that could be helpful in making things work in the professional setting. At times, these pieces of information may be of great economic and practical value (e.g., the molecular structure of a new pharmaceutical compound being in the last stages of the clinical trials), but in other cases they may consist of small bits of advice on how to handle a specific operation in, for instance, laboratory work. Access to this constant flow of information is imperative for professional practice. In some cases, direct contact with the leading figures in a field may be of key significance, as in the field of scientific research, while in other cases this is useful but not of immediate importance, as in the case of juridical practice where the laws and regulations are only slowly changing over time. What professional communities share, however, is that everyday practices are always based upon joint collaborations, more or less intense, and that this collaboration is embedded in the capacity of sharing know-how and experiences. Professional work is inextricably bound up with collective knowledge sharing.

Professionals and Professional Work

Professionals, Experts, Intellectuals

The concept of professional is one of the key terms in sociological vocabulary (Goode, 1957; Wilensky, 1964). Seminal texts in the study of professions are Carr-Saunders and Wilson's (1933) classic work The Professions, followed a few decades later by Johnson (1972), Larson (1977), Abbott (1988) and the works of Friedson (1986, 2001). There are many definitions of professionals, but here we use the definition of Leicht and Fennell (2008):

We define professional work as occupational incumbents: (a) whose work is defined by the application of theoretical and scientific knowledge to tasks tied to core societal values (health, justice, financial status, etc.), (b) where the terms and conditions of work traditionally command considerable autonomy and freedom from oversight, except by peer representatives of the professional occupation, and (c) where claims to exclusive or nearly exclusive control over a task domain are linked to the application of the knowledge imparted to professionals as part of their training (Leicht and Fennell, 2008: 431).

In addition, the concept of professionalization is defined by Leicht and Fennell (2001: 8) as “the result of a successful professional project; an occupation is professionalized to the extent that it successfully defines a set of work tasks as their exclusive domain, and successfully defends that domain against competing claims.” Professionalization is thus the process whereby a particular social group is capable of monopolizing a specific domain of expertise and erecting entry barriers in the form of demands for formal education and other credentials to be admitted into the profession (Larson, 1977). The term deprofessionalization denotes the inverse process, wherein particular groups are unable to maintain the regulation and control of their domain of jurisdiction. Deprofessionalization may be caused by many processes, including political struggle between the state and international political bodies or professional organizations, or pressure from the market. Deprofessionalization is generally depicted in the literature as a painful loss of status and control over financial resources. In the present economic regime, based on financial governance and managerial initiatives, the professions are under siege and at times century-long traditions are displaced by what Leicht and Fennell (2008) call neoentrepreneurial ideologies. Freidson (2001, Chapter 8) is even talking about the “assault on professionalism” in the new economic regime. Other studies are less negative regarding the future of professions, showing that professional groups are in fact capable of accommodating, for instance, auditing procedures within their domain of jurisdiction and enacting new professional roles for themselves as new managerial initiatives are implemented (McGivern and Ferlie, 2007). Brint (1994) emphasizes that the ancien régime of professionalism, based on what he calls “social trustee professionalism,” is being displaced by an “expert professionalism,” a form of professionalism paired with managerialist doctrines and a strong emphasis on market value:

The shift from social trustee professionalism to expert professionalism has led to a splintering of the professional stratum in relation to the market value of different forms of “expert knowledge.” There is the real possibility in this split for the eventual consolidation of the professional stratum into a more exclusive status category, since “formal knowledge” implies gradations in the value, efficacy, and validity of different forms of knowledge … In this process of splitting, the technical and moral aspirations of professionalism have tended to separate and to become associated, respectively, with the “core” and the “periphery” of the stratum (Brint, 1994: 11).

Brint (1994: 39) dates the birth of expert professionalism to the early 1960s: “Beginning in the 1960s, social trustee professionalism came under increasingly attack for its apparent lack of correspondence to the organizational realities of professional life.” In Brink's (1994) view, social trustee professionalism is an outmoded form of professionalism and today we are seeing the emergence of an expert culture.

Brint (1994) is suggesting that while professionals used to be intellectuals they are increasingly restraining their role to a narrower specialist field, i.e., they are becoming experts. The relationships among the concepts of professionals, intellectuals and experts are far from trivial. The concept of intellectuals was used in the medieval period to denote a category of individuals enjoying freedom from regular work (Le Goff, 1993). These literate scholars (from Greek, skholē) were defined in opposition to the illiterate, being referred to by a variety of terms, including illiterati, indocti, laici, and perhaps more instructively, rustici and idiotae (Stock, 1983: 27). Over the course of the centuries, these intellectuals were part of a small, exclusively male category that engaged first in theological discussions but increasingly took part in wider social discussions and in the development of the natural sciences. The enlightenment project positioned the intellectual centrally in the advancement of human reason, and until at least the middle of the twentieth century the intellectual maintained a rather well-defined and respected role in society. Foucault claims that we are no longer seeing the universal intellectual (Jean-Paul Sartre being perhaps the archetypical intellectual of this kind) but what Foucault calls specific intellectuals. These specific intellectuals are no longer spokesmen for universal values but for their “own particular expertise and situation” (Deleuze, 1995: 87–8). The specific intellectual is then gradually transformed into an expert. This new image of the intellectual has been debated in the social sciences (Said, 1994; Osborne, 2004). Julien Benda's (1969) The Treason of the Intellectuals (first published in 1928) is indicative of the change from universal to specific intellectuals postulated by Foucault. Benda's critical account of the intellectuals’ failure to quench brute nationalism during the First World War and his emphasis on the increased reliance on scientific procedures to support any statement made in the public sphere led to his conclusion that intellectuals no longer play a key role in setting the standards for discussions in modern society. “To-day all political ideologies claim to be founded on science, to be the result of a ‘precise observation of facts,’” Benda (1969: 28) writes. Rather than drawing on universal values and human interests, vested interests intervene and render the intellectual obsolete. Benda's (1969) daunting view of the future of intellectuals has been a persistent theme in the discussion about intellectuals.

While the intellectual has been portrayed in somewhat bleak terms, the present age is undoubtedly, as suggested by Brint (1994), an “age of expert.” As opposed to the intellectual, more concerned about maintaining discussions and posing adequate questions, the expert is prone to claim to have the answers. Herein lies also the standing concerns regarding expertise, namely to define its limits and adequacy outside of narrowly defined fields. “An expert is someone who doesn't want to learn anything new, because then he wouldn't be an expert,” Harry Truman (cited in McCloskey, 2006: 73) once claimed. Experts are not of necessity concerned with speculating about the validity of entrenched fields of expertise and therefore they may easily become technocrats, speaking on behalf of specific technologies or methods rather than societal and human interests. This is also why experts are regarded as being problematic in a social and organizational setting (Turner, 2001; Reed, 1996): they have the credibility of the intellectual without of necessity sharing the universal, humanistic values that the intellectual has (in the classic model stipulated by, e.g., Julien Benda) and they are therefore a potential concern for democratic open society. Shenhav's (1999) study of what he called the “efficiency craze” as the new emerging engineering class implemented scientific management principles in a variety of settings – eminently parodied by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), introducing the “feeding-machine” designed to rationalize the conveyor-belt worker's lunch – is indicative of how technocratic expertise without thoughtful reflections about the validity and meaning of the operations may easily lead to undesirable outcomes.

When defining experts, it is evident that professionals and experts have much in common. In Turner's account:

Experts who are members of groups whose expertise is generally acknowledged, such as physicists; experts whose personal expertise is tested and accepted by individuals, such as the authors of self-help books; members of groups whose expertise is accepted only by particular groups, like theologians whose authority is accepted only by their sect; experts whose audience is the public but who derive their support from subsidies from parties interested in their acceptance of their opinions as authoritative; and experts whose audience is bureaucrats with discretionary power, such as experts in public administration whose ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 Theory
• Part 2 Practices
• Bibliography
• Index