Professions in organizations, professional work in education

Abstract

Professions are occupational arrangements for dealing with human problems. Professional ‘people work’ requires a certain interactive closeness; face‐to‐face communication is prominent in professional–client relations. This also seems the case in the educational system. But in education, organization provides the raison d’être of this profession. This organizational infrastructure enables and delimits educational interaction. The school bureaucracy is criticized by the profession; the profession has an outspoken interest in reforming its organizational infrastructure again, again and again. This article provides a theoretical analysis of teaching, which elucidates this relation between profession, organization and work.

Notes

1. This usage of the concept of profession was widespread. The Census of Great Britain of 1851, for example—the first to use a nomenclature of occupations—divided the population into 17 different (and hierarchically ordered) classes. The third class in this nomenclature was the professional class, made up of ‘the members of the three learned professions’; that is, ‘clergymen or ministers, lawyers, and medical men’ (Census of great Britain, 1851, p. lxxxvi). Remarkably, students in the faculties of theology, law and medicine were included as full members of the professions (Vanderstraeten, 2006b).

2. Of the older literature on the professions, the publications of Everett Hughes therefore deserve renewed attention. By switching from a focus on the structural aspects of professions to a focus on groups with common work, Hughes foreshadowed some of the new literature on the professions—albeit that the arguments in his publications remain somewhat speculative. See especially Part 3: Work and Self of Hughes’ collection of articles entitled The Sociological Eye (Hughes, 1971). See also Dingwall (1983) and Meyer and Jepperson (2000).

3. In the eyes of the public, mastery of the subject matter often also seems to suffice in order to be a successful teacher. Expertise in the methodology of teaching is usually not perceived as a basic requirement. At the same time, teachers mostly cannot explicitly demonstrate this professional expertise in the interaction with students. Their didactic skills need to remain hidden as a kind of manipulation expertise (Herbst, 1989; Welker, 1992). Whether or not this expertise is available thus at first sight also does not seem to make a difference.

4. Moreover, schools conceal the uncertainties and problems that exist at their activity level by limiting close inspection of teaching activities. They separate the level of ongoing activities from that of administration or management; ‘strict coupling’ is replaced by ‘loose coupling’ (Weick, 1979; Orton & Weick, 1990). The educational bureaucracy establishes explicit control on the allocation of students, rooms, lesson periods, curricular units, and so forth, but not on the details of the daily interaction between teachers and students.

5. The traditional model of the professional as independent fee‐taking practitioner puts stress on the individual performance of this person. In the case of ‘ascriptive professionals’, the role of the practitioners is the direct result of their active membership and assigned position in an organization of people work (Harries‐Jenkins, 1970; Boëne, 2003). The distinction between both models modifies one of the pattern variables formulated by Talcott Parsons; namely, quality/performance or ascription/achievement (see also Parsons, 1951).

6. Ernst Christian Trapp, for example, who was the first professor of education ever, wrote in 1780 in his Versuch einer Pädagogik:

From schoolteachers, one can least of all expect that they make improvements in the educational system … Someone who is tired of instructing, sanctioning and punishing an entire day thanks God when he finally can sit back, mop his brow, get a breath of fresh air and entirely free himself from thinking. When he has to think, it is about the lectures of the next day. How can he develop thoughts on the improvement of the educational system? (Trapp, 1977, p. 27)

Trapp’s observations are symptomatic of the spirit of the late eighteenth century. For further discussion of this theme, see Vanderstraeten and Biesta (2006).