Quality-in-Doing: Competence and Occupation

Abstract

This paper explores the connection between occupation and competence, or “quality-in-doing,” through an exploration of competence across a number of disciplines and theorists. John Dewey's concepts of functional coordination, habit, and imagination, Lev Vygotsky's views on cultural-historical development, intermentality, and fossilization, and Pierre Bourdieu's ideas on habitus, field, and capital are presented as part of an argument for a more robust theoretical underpinning of the basic sociocultural features, development, and consequences of competence as an undeniable function of occupation from a transactional perspective. I contend that competence creates essential space for describing skillfulness and effectiveness in doing, being and becoming (Wilcock, 1998) and mends dichotomies between social/individual, internal/external, and action/condition which are central to a transactional understanding of occupation (Dickie, Cutchin, & Humphry, 2006). Competence is deserving of clear articulation and attention because it illuminates how the ongoing reflexivity between knowing how to act and knowing why to act (Beckett, 2004) impacts perceptions of how well we act, which are essential features in determining if, when, and to what degree a client has responded to intervention, a student has responded to instruction, or a practitioner has responded to job requirements.

Keywords:

• Competence
• Quality-in-doing
• Dewey
• Vygotsky
• Bourdieu
• Action

There would appear to be profound and irrevocable difficulties with the idea that competence can be specified in clear and precise terms. (Lum, 2004)

The search for competence is a bottomless pit. (Watson, Stimpson, Topping, & Porock, 2002)

The notion of competence is not exactly trending in social sciences like anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and occupational science right now. Reasons for this are no doubt manifold;¹ however, the consideration of competence remains lively in other disciplines including organizational psychology, human resource and management studies, education, linguistics, and many of the biological sciences. That these competence-interested professions tend to be somewhat more applied, as opposed to theoretical, in their treatment of competence is not coincidental and may undergird the action-based understanding of competence that follows. While some work in the study and conceptualization of occupation has addressed competence (Christiansen, 1999; Fidler, 1981; Gage & Polatajko, 1994; Kielhofner, 1980; Meyer, 1922; Phelan & Kinsella, 2009; Smith, 1974; White, 1971), development of how and why competence matters in the study of occupation has not been sustained or fulfilled.

In this paper, the work of several prominent theorists of action is gathered to make an argument for reinvigorating the attention given to competence in occupational science and occupation-centered practice. Occupational science may be served by more robust theorization and articulated assumptions regarding a certain quality-in-doing that, if explicitly stated, could move the discipline toward an expanded understanding and leveraging of occupation.

In making the case for competence as an integral and unavoidable aspect of occupation, I will contend that it creates essential space for describing skillfulness and effectiveness in doing, being and becoming (Wilcock, 1998) and mends dichotomies between social/individual, internal/external, and action/condition which are central to a transactional understanding of occupation (Dickie, Cutchin, & Humphry, 2006). Competence is deserving of clear articulation and attention because it illuminates how the ongoing reflexivity between knowing how to act and knowing why to act (Beckett, 2004) impacts perceptions of how well humans act. As such, the discussion begins with some current definitions of—or, more accurately and as the opening quotes imply, problems with defining—competence. From there, analysis of salient constructs put forth by John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, and Pierre Bourdieu will be used to build a framework for the basic sociocultural features, development, and consequences of competence in action. Dewey's relevance to occupation has been well-established by several occupational scientists (Aldrich, 2008; Cutchin, 2008; Dickie et al., 2006; Garrison, 2002) and using his work to inform a discussion of competence is a natural next step. Vygotsky's interest in development and learning has the potential to inform the understanding of how competence is acquired and adds a cultural-socio-historical perspective to the emerging conceptualizations of the occupational situation. It should be noted that, because primary sources of Vygotsky's work are mostly in Russian, secondary sources are used for this paper. Bourdieu's framework builds on the centrality of social and cultural contexts in the emergence of competence, by adding considerations of power distributions that have shaped social science inquiry for the past 30 years. In exploring and blending these perspectives, opportunities for occupational science are presented in what is hoped will be the beginning of a long, enthusiastic discussion of how and why competence and occupation are deeply intertwined.

Searching for a Definition of Competence

Definitions of competence, like other related concepts of performance (e.g., intelligence, independence, aptitude, ability, cognition), are so broadly cast, nebulous, contested, confused, customized, and categorized (Watson et al., 2002) that further efforts to elucidate the meaning of competence might seem futile. Indeed, “of all the various manifestations of human capability the least tangible and the least disposed to precise explication are those centered in the person: the understandings, the capacities for judgment, imagination, problem-solving and the host of other propensities and proficiencies that are so vital for competent action” (Lum, 2004, p. 489). It may be, though, the prevalence and endurance of its consideration across so many disciplines speaks to the importance and complexity of competence, and rather than shying away from the convolutions, one could, in the name of science, seek to unravel some of them.

Many descriptions approach competence as a thing: prerequisite, outcome, capability (Sandberg, 2009); buffer/filter, adjustment, as the cousin of resilience (Compas & Harding, 1998); efficacy, mastery, (White, 1959); or performance (Watson et al., 2002). The lure with competence being this sort of noun is that it can be named, objectified, and measured (Watson et al., 2002). Others view competence as a characteristic, state of being, or personality trait: adaptive (Pushkar, 1998); prosocial, socially appropriate, regulatory (Eisenberg, 1998); effective, adequate, responsive, goal-oriented (Bulkowski, Bergevin, Sabangui, & Serbin, 1998), and internal fitness (Kielhofner & Miyake, 1983). In this conception, competence is largely situated within the person and takes on an illusory permanence and impervious quality (Johnson, Barnett, Elman, Forrest, & Kaslow, 2012). Still others argue for a more integrated formulation of competence, where it integrates attributes of task/person with object (Lum, 2004), fulfills role expectations and obligations, meets personal standards, provides a sense of control and fulfillment (Kielhofner, 2002), and constructs the self through practice (Beckett, 2004). But even here the separation of the situation into component parts is apparent and the individual actor remains the focus. Even White's (1959) seminal treatise, while promisingly describing competence as an organism's ability to carry on those transactions with the environment which result in its maintaining itself, growing, and flourishing, centered the discussion on the adapting creature, rather than encompassing the entire milieu.

More holistic and action-oriented definitions of competence do exist, with many expanding on White and repairing his crucial exclusion of the social.² Bulkowski et al. (1998) viewed competence as a type of action informed by local knowledge, rather than as a state of being, and placed the unit of analysis in the midst of the actor's experience with others, to the extent that “one cannot think of individuals as being competent without knowing the contexts in which they are engaged” (p. 92). Descriptions of this nature make way for the social construction of competence, where the terms of its historical constitution and present experience are shared between the actor and the audience. This aspect of competence will be taken up more fully in the discussion of Vygotsky's theory below.

If the meaning of one's doing is appreciably determined by the views and values of others (Fidler & Fidler, 1983), then, competence emerges as observers of action recognize within the performance a non-accidental skillfulness (Lum, 2004) or a quality-in-doing which meets some agreed upon standard for what the performance of that particular action should reliably entail. Sandberg and Pinnington (2009) suggested a three-fold social conceptualization of competence which includes: 1) a collective understanding of what the action is about; 2) mutual engagement in the action made possible by established norms; and 3) a communal repertoire of resources available to all actors. Armed with these more comprehensive presentations, an appreciation of competence as trans-action among actors, audience, and the physical, social, cultural, and historical contexts in which it occurs begins to emerge. It becomes meaningful both within, through one's own experience of mastery and verification from others, and without, as observers invariably make sense of and assign worth to the action before them. Sandberg and Pinnington (2009) provided a helpful summary:

Competence is not primarily a thing we possess but something we do and at the same time are. It is the existential meaning of a specific human way of being that distinguishes and integrates aspects of practice, such as a particular self-understanding, essential activities, people, and tools. (p. 1147)

Wilcock (1998) suggested occupation entails something more than just an observable performance of an activity and it seems possible competence is that “something” in light of the suggestion that balanced doing and being are central to becoming whatever a person is best fitted to become. Wilcock defined occupation as doing well, which, again, can be creatively read as “well” in the skillful or effective sense (rather than the health sense of well-being), and becoming our most suitable selves. Christiansen (1999) made the connection between occupation and competence in highlighting how meaning-making, recognition and validation from others require competent action. Hocking (2000) proposed a structured examination of occupation in relation to quality of life, which can be framed as subjectively experienced and socially produced understandings of human capabilities. Here, inquiry reveals at the personal level, how the actor thinks, feels, and does in the midst of performance; at the performance level, how standards of performance are socially constructed, communicated, negotiated; and, at the environmental level, how actor, occupation, and context transact. This echoes previous descriptions of competence as transactional and having both personally and socially defined standards. To further explore and ground the connection of competence and occupation in accepted theories of action, several key concepts developed by Dewey, Vygotsky, and Bourdieu will next be examined to make a case for competence as a central tenet in the science of occupation.

John Dewey's Pragmatism

American pragmatist John Dewey (1859–1952) is the first source in this effort to establish a theoretical ground-map—Dewey's own term for a contingent, incomplete, working theory that enables inquiry (Cutchin, 2008)—for competence. Dewey, influenced by the theory of evolution emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, was deeply interested in how people, groups, and societies made their way on the planet. His expansive curiosity and consideration of how things work in the lived, natural, tangible world led to the development of a number of powerful concepts, three of which may help situate competence as a construct central to an understanding occupation, namely: functional coordination, habits and imagination.

Functional coordination

Garrison (2001) suggested functional coordination of action was the centerpiece of Dewey's pragmatic approach, which drops the first pin on the ground-map. In this view, human beings are not only situated and naturally equipped for transaction with the world around them, but are wired to turn indeterminate, fragmented situations into situations that are unified and whole (Garrison, 2001). For instance, given a bat, a ball, a lawn, free time, and a sunny day, a collection of American children will likely pace off a diamond, improvise four bases, agree on some rules, divvy-up teams, assign positions, and set about playing baseball. Very early on, Dewey, who was critical of the dualisms maintained by the behaviorist stimulus-response model, saw action as an ongoing circuit that, when interrupted, re-organizes as a coalescence of sensation, idea, and movement to achieve a reality “most conveniently termed co-ordination” (Dewey, 1896). Healthy humans don't simply and segmentally respond to a stimulus by acting; they are already caught up in the flow of action—as a function of being alive—the trajectory of which may shift, but not jump-start, events-in-context (Garrison, 2001). Dewey (1896) put it this way:

The stimulus is that phase of the forming co-ordination which represents the conditions which have to be met in bringing it to a successful issue; the response is that phase of one and the same forming co-ordination which gives the key to meeting these conditions, which serves as instrument in effecting the successful co-ordination. (p. 370)

It is worth noting, for the purposes of this argument, Dewey inferred quality. Functional coordination is not value-neutral; it is, by definition, somehow successful. The baseball game described above needs coordination of all the parts and players to be fun, which for children is one measure of success. To be functional is to participate in such a way as to meet the conditions of the situation effectively, to see the thing through to a newly or re-coordinated state. The living system, then, exists at the very least and thrives at best, when functional relations among the system and its various environments operate in a state of continual coordination, or transaction (Cutchin, 2008). In this sense, functional coordination is not only ultimate, as Garrison suggested, but primary.

Habit

From the foundational, durational, and aspirational contributions of functional coordination, the work of building a theoretical infrastructure for competence turns to Dewey's work on habit. Much has been said on the subject, both by Dewey and subsequent commentators, so for the purposes of this examination I will address those aspects of habit which best illuminate an understanding of competence. Beginning with how habits are formed, Dewey stressed the continuity of person and environment and pointed to habit as essential evidence of this unity; habits constitute and are constituted by the habitat (Garrison, 2002). Acquisition of these socially-constructed, patterned, predictable forms of action, from which Dewey did not distinguish thought (Boisvert, 1998), is a transactional process involving embodied coordination over time (Garrison, 2002). Habits, in their making, require repeated exposure to similar situations and, in their maintenance, repeated successful coordination of those situations. Keeping with the baseball illustration: standing in a batting cage, taking thousands of swings over the past decade, my son has developed a habit of hitting a baseball which is reinforced and refined every time he gets a hit in a game. Habits are silent, background markers of effective doing. They do not constitute competence, but an understanding of competence is incomplete without them, particularly in relation to the centrality of repetition in establishing quality. Dewey's (1986b) view was:

The workman's greatest asset was his skill. An all-round workman—carpenter, smith, mason, tailor, weaver—could not be trained in a day. Experience increased his competence. He could not be easily replaced by a casual and ignorant applicant for a job. (p. 395)

Not only are habits, in and of themselves, markers of competence in routine matters of life, but they also create space for successful coordination of other kinds of action:

The object of habit is thus, on the one hand, to create a mechanism which shall attend to the familiar and permanent elements of experience, and, on the other to leave the conscious activity of mind free to control new and variable factors. (Dewey, 1887/1972, p. 101)

Here, Dewey argued that as habit creates easily accessed paths of and for repeated action, provision is made for body and mind to squarely meet unique and indeterminate situations. For Dewey, nothing stayed the same, everything was in flux and flow, and habits—those background managers of the mundane—prime humans for problem-solving by protecting some portion of consciousness for reckoning with the next new thing.

With Fesmire's (2003) help, a summary of the functions of habit will reiterate the connection to competence. First, people acquire and are formed by habits gleaned from the natural and social world; i.e., what people take on and practice over time shapes them. The transaction of the individual and the environment, the internal and the external, occurs at the level of habit (Cutchin, 2007), such that there is some measure of co-constituting fit implicit in the notion of competence which is not located solely within the individual but in the situation itself. Next, habits mark the territory of possible actions insofar as they make up the framework of how humans think or intuit a certain action may turn out. The healthy person tends not to move in the direction of an action they perceive will turn out badly for self and others, or, in Deweyan terms, will not result in functional coordination for somebody (e.g., self or teammate) or something (e.g., the local forest or global water supply). Competence is both experienced and anticipated. Returning to my baseball-playing son: he does not step into the batter's box planning to strike out, get beaned by a pitch, or hit into a double play. His long-standing habit of swinging the bat has prepared him to anticipate—and experience about 40% of the time—getting a base hit. Third, habits are flexible; we have the capacity to adjust or augment habitual ways of doing when the practiced pattern doesn't fit the situation. Competence requires not only reliability but refresh-ability; our effectiveness depends on our capacity to act both efficiently and creatively. Finally, in healthy states, people abandon habits which no longer simplify the recurring parts of life or support coordination of novel conditions, which is to say, to change habits one must experience or effect a change in one's environment. Seemingly, some mark of competence would be the wisdom and ability to drop a “bad” habit; successful coordination implies a person will quit employing strategies and using tools that no longer work to carve out his or her place in the world.

Imagination

The last of Dewey's insights to be sketched onto the ground-map has already been mentioned. If the habits that undergird competence are to be agile enough to functionally coordinate life in an ever-evolving world, a certain exploratory openness and predictive vision must accompany them if people are to connect with (love?) others and sustainably occupy the planet (Fesmire, 2003). Dewey called this capacity to project possibilities for, and outcomes of, action imagination, or the knack of weaving together all the elements of a situation, no matter how disconnected they might seem, into an entirely new and coherent experience (Boisvert, 1998). At first blush, this might sound like a rather sophisticated capacity, spinning off novel solutions amid the onslaught of challenges that meet us every waking hour, but Dewey (1916) was a pragmatist and considered imagination to be a human capacity much like muscular movement or breathing. There is nothing fanciful and privileged here; imagination is not an accessory but a basic feature of every human being. Facing a skilled fastball pitcher, having just watched his teammate strike out on three pitches that were in the catcher's glove before the batter ever started his swing, my son might consider his options and, in this particular instance, deviate from his regular swing and choose to bunt. Dewey's is a straightforward view of imagination which affords exceeding sedimented activity and meaning without leaving human nature behind (Boisvert, 1998). Remember, also, according to Dewey change is imminent, if not constant, so without the ability to envisage and experiment with new modes of addressing variation, humans are stuck in “experience narrowed by standardized meanings” (Fesmire, 2003, p. 65), and, in this analysis, something less than competently human.

Imagination may be that more intangible, elusive aspect of competence which, in many cases, makes it easier to identify in its absence. Dewey's (1986a) own example made the point: “If a railway system had a continuous succession of derailments in which many persons were injured, everyone would recognize the absence of competence and of foresight in the system itself” (p. 155). Attentiveness and taking action to resolve problematic situations must be present for a thing—whether a railway system or a brigade band or a tollbooth attendant—to function according to its design and mandate. Where imagination is absent, so too is competence. And, I suspect that, like a light bulb which people tend not to notice until it burns out, competence hovers undetected over the perception of situations until incompetence appears.

In sum, Dewey provides a theoretical structure which suggests that, if functional coordination is at once the road/destination of competence and habits are its vehicle, then imagination is the fuel. This clearly sets the stage for inquiry into the place of competence in an understanding of occupation, but, first, other perspectives are needed to understand how competence is developed/embodied and, given the postmodern situation, in what ways power structures determine its existence. For these insights, social practice theory as informed by Lev Vygostky and Pierre Bourdieu is next considered.

Lev Vygotsky's Theory of Development

Vygotsky was a contemporary of Dewey's but worked under vastly different circumstances amid the Communist Revolution and Stalin's subsequent leadership in Russia, where Descartes’ work had not influenced thought in the same it had Western philosophy (Robbins, 2001). Like Dewey, Vygotsky started as an educator fascinated by learning and moved on to advanced scholarship in order to make sense of both what he saw in the classroom and what other theorists were saying about development. Vygotsky was, in his short life, an incredibly prolific writer whose psychology-philosophy covered a wide array of subjects; that said, his theories on the processes of learning, which focused on the cultural-historical construction of thought and language, best serve this emerging perspective on competence.

Cultural-historical stance

In the Vygostkian view, any attempt to explain competence without first understanding phylogeny, ontogeny, cultural history, and microgenesis from a genetic-developmental stance disables its definition and interpretation (Robbins, 2001). This implies two critical points. First, competence is a function of human history—as a species, as individuals, and as participants in social groups—which people embody and change based on the needs of the moment/situation. Competence is not spontaneous, random, or manufactured in the course of one lifetime, but inherited, taught, and acquired.

Human development does not obey biological laws like animal development does, it obeys socio-historical laws. Biological development refers to adaptation to nature by means of the hereditary features of the species and by means of experience of each individual. A human being has no innate form of behavior in the environment. His development takes place by the “acquisition of historically made forms and modes of activity. (Obuchova, 1994, p. 45)

As such, the cultural aspect of Vygotsky's theory is embedded in how society organizes the kinds of tasks humans face and the kinds of tools, both mental and physical, they can access to master those tasks (Luria, 1979). Second, a cultural-historical perspective assumes inquiry of anything, including competence, occurs amid the process of change and the best scholars and researchers can offer is explanation of relationship and action, rather than fixed descriptions of objects. I will return to and expand on this notion later in discussing the implications of including competence in our understanding of occupation.

Intermentality

Flowing from a cultural-historical starting point, Vygotksy's theory of development turned the learning theories of his time on their head. If the social world shapes an already-primed-by-history person, then development is a process by and in which humans grow into the activity and intellectual life of those around them (Wink & Putney, 2002). For Vygostsky, the individual experiences the collective before and in concert with the emerging personal, which stands in contrast to the behaviorist internal-to-external directionality of stimulus-response development. In this sense, thinking comes through relations between people engaged in joint sociocultural activity and becomes an aspect of internal functioning, that is, part of a person's consciousness (Jane & Robbins, 2007). To wit, my son did not take up baseball randomly or in a socio-cultural vacuum; his parents are both athletic and value physical fitness, team sports, and being outdoors. He has grown up with major-league baseball on TV, local minor league games as a form of family leisure, and shopping online for baseball gear as a way to relax at the end of a long day of school and practice. Mind, cognition, memory, and, for this discussion, competence are understood not as attributes or properties of the individual, but as functions that may be carried out intermentally or intramentally (Wink & Putney, 2002, p. 62). As learners, then, humans are transactive agents wrapped up in a process with caregivers or teachers, rather than individuals with a given set of innate or predisposed capacities ready to be evaluated. Competence is not a measurable trait or a lucky roll of the genetic die, but part of the social milieu where mimesis, exploratory activity, and opportunities to move beyond current abilities abound. Vygostsky was not as interested in achievement as he was potential; he valued collaboration and teamwork over bare independence in trying to understand a person's ability. For him, competence could best be discovered in supportive contexts that summoned development rather than required it (Jarvis, Holford, & Griffin, 1998).

Fossilization

Development is so thoroughly dependent upon and embedded in the social context in which it occurs that, for Vygotsky, culture influenced not only what humans think and do but how (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). Equipped with an internalized cultural logic built by and with cultural tools, the most potent of which is language, people can learn to control their behavior and attention using higher mental functions and not live at the mercy of every passing stimulus (Bodrova & Leong, 2007). Use of these socially-produced resources is what Vygotsky called semiotic mediation, which, in turning an object or behavior into a sign for some mental event (e.g., mnemonics), allows people to think and act more effectively and expansively (Shotter, 1993). The notion that one can learn through practice to superintend one's thoughts, emotions, and the manner in which one enters into the flow of action adds a specifically agentic quality to the conceptualization of competence. Humans are not reflexive slaves of environmental conditions, but, as they are being shaped by a situation, can shape both self and the context.

Vygotsky called the result of wielding these signs, symbols, and tools of agency over time fossilization (Holland et al., 1998), which proceeds not as neatly in reality as in print. The concept serves well to summarize the main points of Vygotsky's theory and introduce a final component of competence for the ground-map. The idea of fossilization is that, in early learning, humans use cultural tools (e.g. words, objects, symbols) to mediate action and, as these means of mediation are internalized, words become inner thought, symbols ignite the imagination and a person no longer needs the external form as a guide. Experience and repetition increase fluency with the tool to a point where steps and parts and symbols mesh into an undifferentiated synchronous gestalt, production of activity falls from awareness, and all that is left is action itself. A person simply does without thinking how she or he does it. My son swings at a pitch without thinking himself through when to start the motion sequence, where to bring the bat through space, or which direction to step after he makes contact; the whole of hitting has been fossilized. Like Dewey's notion of habit, fossilization does not equal competence, but it does suggest some aspect of prolonged, socially-embedded practice is inherent in competence development.

Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Power

Bourdieu (1930–2002), a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher, worked both on empirical research and theory development in the second half of the twentieth century. His was:

… an activist science, impervious to ideological bias yet attuned to the burning sociopolitical issues of its day and responsive to the ethical dilemmas these entail. And they translate the grand questions of classical philosophy and social theory into precise empirical experiments pursued with the full array of methods supplied by the scientific tradition and fearlessly applied to the sociologist himself. (Wacquant, 1998, p. 1)

He was an avid student of culture, critic of institutions, and re-worker/confronter of existing theories who, according to Swartz (1997), made either disciples or enemies with his pummeling, argumentative style. Like Dewey and Vygotsky, Bourdieu's theoretical production is too vast to cover here, but selected aspects have potential to establish competence in the lexicon of occupational science in a reasoned fashion. These include his concepts of habitus, field, and capital, the last of which Bourdieu considered competence a particular iteration. In addition, and unlike the previously surveyed theorists, Bourdieu provided direct analysis of the idea of competence which illuminates the ways it may be seen as a form of power.

Habitus

According to Bourdieu (1977), “the body is an instrument which records its own uses” (p. 660). This collection or carnal memory of experiences brings the past into the present and unifies everyday life through “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53). As children, especially, humans acquire dispositions and certain competencies (those “structured structures”) through social interactions (Swartz, 2002) very much like Vygostsky's intermentality process. These internalized schemas of thought and action are not impervious once developed, though; people improvise on these dispositions when they meet with some combination of circumstances that differ from those in which the habitus were formed (Holland et al., 1998). “More than orienting us to our lifeworlds, habitus is something that we use. … that serves as the basis for all types of action, from speech to the creative arts” (Cutchin, Aldrich, Bailliard, & Coppola, 2008, p. 160). In this way, habitus is also a “structuring structure” that provides a platform for innovation in the face of life's challenges and, at the same time, adds to the collective competence of future generations. Habitus blends the objective framework of society and the subjective place of agents within it (Bourdieu, 2000), which is in concert with the views of Dewey and Vygotsky. Where Bourdieu extended the formulation of competence, however, was in his reliance on disposition rather than repetition as the cornerstone of quality. Repetition may be important in acquiring a disposition, but, in terms of showing what one is capable of, “habitus holds latent potential that shapes action not by its frequency of use but by its reliability when evoked” (Swartz, 2002, p. 63S). Competence is evidenced by its emergence when it is needed, not by unsolicited or decontextualized demonstration when it is not required.

Field

Habitus derives from the fields in which it was/is produced, and action is the result of a person's composite dispositions intersecting with the dynamics and structures of the fields that person encounters (Swartz, 1997). Which is to say, people are shaped by the contexts they inhabit, and action is a product of that shaping. This adds little to what we have already gleaned from Dewey and Vygostsky, except that Bourdieu used the notion of field in the athletic rather than agrarian sense, and, as such conceived it as a forum of struggle and competition for dominance.

Following Wacquant's (1998) analysis, any given field has three definitional characteristics. First, fields structure and impose positions on the people within them; they require a certain accumulation of status and adherence to the mores and rules enforced by the situation of that time and place. Second, an ongoing struggle over the existing distribution and assignment of resources, power, rank, and even descriptions of what constitutes a player take place on a field. Finally, fields operate with a necessary degree of autonomy from other fields; they protect themselves from outside influences by judging themselves and squashing efforts to introduce external forms of evaluation, usually by those in dominated or excluded positions. Bourdieu (1993) called the field “a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning independent of those of politics and the economy” (p. 162), organized around status and influence.

Several consequences follow the introduction of the notions of positionality, struggle, and autonomy into a consideration of competence. Namely, the emergence of competence will depend on engagement in and determination by a given social milieu; actors will at once need to opt or be drawn in to the field of practice and demonstrate some manifestation of prowess once inserted. In this way, some measure of placement and distinction is added to the descriptor of quality. In Bourdieu's frame, it is not enough or even conceivable to be competently dominated, subjugated, or inferior; competence implies at least a trajectory toward, if not acquisition of, a higher social position. “Competence is an attribute of status or a power socially granted to an authority, rather than a technical capacity” (Bourdieu, 1980, p. 69). Both awareness of the field's rules and facility in negotiating them are implied here, which leads to Bourdieu's notion of practical mastery. A certain natural smoothness of action and comportment, what Bettie (2003) called “performativity”, accompanies the effective doer such that others in the field witness in the action a “practical mastery of the logic or of the imminent necessity of a game - a mastery acquired by experience of the game, and one which works outside conscious control and discourse” (Jenkins, 1992, p. 42). Competence imbues action with expertise, a feel for the game, as it were, and serves to reposition the actor within the field according to the reliability of its expression. What is more, as competence increases, so too does the ability to manipulate the categories and conventions of the field—to shape the very context from which the competence emerges—and thereby increase chances for surviving and thriving (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008).

Capital

So intertwined and co-defining are Bourdieu's constructs of habitus, field, and capital that it is with some difficulty the discussion has proceeded this far without giving attention to capital. The sorting of the three is organizational, and in many ways artificial, to allow clear correlations from each component to be drawn to the idea of competence. In that light, capital now takes center stage. In a prolonged theoretical dance with Marx, where Bourdieu simultaneously connected and distanced himself from his predecessor, capital was a central movement wherein Bourdieu applied the idea of economic interest to non-economic goods and services (Swartz, 1997). Capital is, in Bourdieu's dispensation, any resource in a given field that effectively enables one to profit from participation and competition in it (Wacquant, 1998). For Bourdieu, these resources could be economic, social, cultural, or symbolic, and the unequal distribution of each type is both a source and outcome of competition in the field. Different allocations and combinations of capital are characteristic of distinct types of habitus, such that the composition of one's capital arranges the possibilities for action (Swartz, 2002).

Much, much more could be offered in the way of describing capital, but what emerges as most salient and pressing here is that Bourdieu (1977) saw little difference between capital and competence. In describing a specific form of competence, he laid out the connection as follows: first, a dominant competence functions as capital by establishing distinctiveness from other competences; next, groups (e.g., governments, religions, or certain professions) enacting or possessing the dominant form of competence must be able to standardize it as the only legitimate form in the market or field; and, finally, groups enacting or possessing the dominant form of competence must be able to control opportunities for access and expression of their sanctioned form of competence. Bourdieu (1980) made the case another way in the Logic of Practice when he suggested:

Just as economic wealth cannot function as capital except in relation to an economic field, so competence in all its forms is not constituted as a capital until it is inserted into the objective relations set up between the system of economic production and the system producing the producers. (p. 124)

Here, the relation of different forms of capital constitutes what is acknowledged as competence (Rishcel, Larsen, & Jackson, 2007) in any given field, and comes from knowing which manner and form of action to perform with whom, about what, and to what end. Revisiting my baseball player example may serve to bring these concepts together. First, the sport under consideration is baseball not, say, fencing. In the American context, this matters a great deal: competence as a baseball player carries the potential for considerably greater social, economic, and perhaps even symbolic capital than competence as a fencer. Prowess on the baseball field has been legitimized as a powerful form of capital, even within the microcosm of my son's middle school, where a small percentage of boys who try out make the team. When news of a homerun comes across the intercom in the school's morning announcements, the player who hit it accumulates not just a reputation as a competent baseball player, but the social capital that, in this context, is inextricably embedded in performance. His school team sweatshirt becomes not just a helpful clothing layer on a chilly morning, but a symbol of acquired capital which extends beyond the baseball diamond to the entire field of American middle school life. It is not, in the end, an individual achievement, but a distributed understanding of competence that emerges from strategically playing the game (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008).

Implications

Backed by Dewey's concepts of functional coordination, habit and imagination, Vygotsky's views on cultural-historical development, intermentality and fossilization, and Bourdieu's ideas on habitus, field and capital, additions and adjustments to the existing discourse on competence within occupational science can now proceed. In the same way “an understanding of individual experience is a necessary but insufficient condition for understanding occupation” (Dickie et al., 2006, p. 83), an understanding of occupation is a necessary but insufficient condition for understanding competence. Meaning, these are intimately related but not identical notions where, in the basic formulation, occupation may be seen as what, how, and why things are done and competence may be seen as the quality with which the what, how and why unfold. Even here the distinction may be overstated, because, while competence and occupation are not the same, one might argue that an occupation incompetently performed is, in fact, not that occupation. Occupation needs competence in order to be, by definition, occupation. Competence, then, is the extent to which the coordination of occupation is acceptable, agreeable, and reliable across the organism-in-environment-as-a-whole. It is, in short, a sign of transactional fit. To realize this relational and evolving fit, engagement in occupation requires embodied exposure, experience, habits, dispositions, imagination, wisdom, and agency with and within situations. Competence is socially constructed, resourced, determined and contested and, as such, may serve as a positioning mechanism for not only the actor, but the whole occupational situation. Finally, competence has the potential to confer power and, when manifested over time, may indicate a trajectory of increasing status and shifting occupational opportunities.

In drawing this connection between occupation and competence, several questions and implications follow. The issue of quality-in-doing leads the list. If occupational scientists settle on occupations as objects rather than processes, as packages of activity rather than action itself, then scholars can use data to build static, value-free, generic, consumable descriptions of occupations. If, on the other hand, the analysis takes in the whole, evolving transactional unit, then it will need to reckon with how effectively occupation is coordinated.³ In this case, occupational scientists would need to conduct research which inseparably explores both the constitution of the agent and the makeup of the particular situation within which she or he operates, as well as the particular conditions under which they come to encounter and impinge upon each other (Wacquant, 1998) in order to develop a thorough understanding of the occupation/competence dynamic. Occupational science would need to make explicit what is implicit by turning inquiry of occupation to not only what is done, but also to what is communicated in doing. What story does the situation tell about a person's perceived and observed effectiveness in the midst of occupation? Is the person making a difference in the situation, and, if so, how? What tacit, mystified know-how is being articulated in the flow of occupation (Beckett, 2004)? To answer these questions and others like them, occupational science may need to reinvigorate the practice of activity analysis to help extend knowing how an occupation is done to include knowing that, knowing why (Brandom, 2000), and knowing how well.

The relationship of competence to capital also introduces a variety of moral and political considerations for occupational science. In what ways are social mobility and opportunities for/access to occupational engagement limited by ignoring or being oblivious to competence as a function of occupation? Are we omitting salient features of environment and context when we fail to attend to standards of effectiveness, no matter how unspoken, hidden, or unsettling they might be? And, what obligation do we have to inform, transform, advocate for, and rally against those standards? Bending Beckett (2004) in the light of occupation, competence can be regarded as a process—not merely as an outcome—and used to enrich practices by opening the arena of human action to its ethical, or value-laden, nature. Participants in occupation become agents of safe, effective, life-giving, meaningful pursuits, not mere technicians of action, because competence consists as much in people's ability to articulate why they act the way they do as it does in their capacity to act in the first place.⁴

Conclusion

“For accurate communication of the outcomes of competence and attainment, a precision in the use of language will need to be established, approaching that of a science” (Jessup, 1991, p. 134). Given what has been explored here, I believe occupational science is that science. Because their focus is the entire occupational milieu, occupational scientists possess a collection of perspectives, methods, vocabulary, and styles of synthesis that enable deciphering the variety and complexity of competence. Further, occupational science has and continues to build a theoretical foundation, in addition to technical approaches to inquiry, that anchor understanding of transactional fit. Thus equipped, occupational scientists have the capacity to investigate competence both within and outside the study of occupation. Indeed, what might it look like for occupational scientists to begin contributing to the understanding of how competently organizations, employees, or processes operate?

Frequently, what humans find themselves doing is making decisions, or judgments, about what to do next, or, said differently, life is about knowing how to go on in the midst of what is going on (Beckett, 2004). Can the same be said of a whole discipline, like occupational science? Is this body of scholars ready to take up competence as a trajectory of inquiry indicative of its own scientific competence?

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Malcolm P. Cutchin for his guidance in the development of this inquiry.

Notes

1. Some potential reasons being: post-Chomsky era perspectives; the current political incorrectness of judgment in most forms, including the identification of another's competence, aside from one still-acceptable usage—cultural competence—where vigilant attention to the dynamics that result from cultural differences, expansion of cultural knowledge, and adaptation of self and/or services to meet the culturally unique needs of others is highly valued (Betancourt, Green, Carillo, & Ananeh-Firempong, 2003); and, relatedly, the pre-eminent values of autonomy, privacy and self-control in everything, including determination of competence.

2. White saw mastery as an end in itself and action, as such, intrinsically motivating. Competence, in this sense is its own reward and does not require external/social definition or reinforcement.

3. I wonder if the prevalence of terms like “participation” and “engagement” have wooed us into thinking competence does not matter in the mix of occupation; that is, we assume it adequate for the doer to be involved in action, without articulating the underlying know-how or experience of effectiveness in the doing.

4. No doubt, further implications could be conceived by expanding the application of competence beyond the study of occupation to the education and ongoing performance appraisal of occupational scientists and occupational therapy practitioners. Johnson et al. (2012) provided insightful and visionary perspectives in this direction.