Art, science and the professions

Abstract

Professions are sometimes characterised as comprising a mixture of art and science. Such labels do not offer an adequate account of the nature of professional work, singly or together. Professions are better understood on their own terms and an alternative approach takes as its point of departure the engagement of professions in doing rather than knowing. Such doing can, in turn, be conceptualised in terms of the characteristic functions of each profession, the contingencies that bear on such functions and the procedures or processes used to carry them out. This framework suggests three root questions: What do professionals do? What affects what they do? And how do they do it?, that together form the basis of a three‐dimensional model of professional work. To date, three models, of teaching, management and medicine, have been published and work on others is continuing. This framework also allows us to begin to sketch out a phenomenology of professional practice: what it is like to do medicine, engineering, architecture, social work, and so on. The approach implies a more autonomous view of professional disciplines, which does not merely assimilate them to or derive them from arts and science. It also encourages us to explore common ground between them, both in terms of what they do and the ways in which they prepare people to do it.

Notes

* Institute for Learning, University of Hull, Hull HU5 3DY, UK. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey Squires *

* Institute for Learning, University of Hull, Hull HU5 3DY, UK. Email: [email protected]