The Professional Ideal

The Professional Ideal and the Practices of Global Professional Service
Businesses: Some Ongoing Tensions.
Philosophical Assumptions


David Ardagh
Senior Lecturer in Management

It will be suggested below on Neo-Aristotelian grounds that professions (A) use
cutting edge natural and social science; (B) meet what intellect rules to be human
needs, in a normative sense of need, in an ethical way. It will also be suggested, (C)
that there is a social expectation that they will share their expertise, honouring the
specific code of their profession. They enter into an institution, licensed for the
support of their professional practice, within their state. At graduation or induction the
profession’s social commitment is evoked eg for lawyers, that they will uphold the
nation’s justice system, and thereby give back something to their society for their
learning, via service to clients. My concerns in this paper can best be introduced by
asking how the marks of a profession especially those associated with clause (C)
operate in trans-national business (TNC) contexts. The mid-and low-level new
professional employees of a trans-national corporation like Ernst and Young may be
indirectly focussed on meeting individual client and/or firm goals, but they are not
necessarily or directly focussed on or anchored in, any particular person or national
society’s wellbeing, or their normatively conceived needs, and so are at present
morally “free” in a problematic way. In the absence of better specific, enforced fair
trade rules and ethical world governance arrangements and agreements than the
present “developed-nation” favouring WTO rules, such as those suggested by Pogge
(2002), globalised professional service businesses, and to a lesser extent their
professionally qualified employees, are less professional than desirable. The
increasingly monopolistic tendencies of these huge firms can represent a threat to fair
trade and good ethics.
The expectations that professionals will have intellectual excellence, will show virtue
in normative needs-satisfaction, and publicly discharge a social debt, fit well with a
Neo-Aristotelian normative approach. On such an account, the normative warrant for
professions is seen as given in, and/or suspended from, premises about the nature of
human capacities, especially our intellectual ones, and the requirements or “needs” of
these capacities for perfection, relative to their characteristic or differential
object/ends. Such an account is developed in philosophical anthropology (an account
of human nature), and thereafter in ethics, politics, and social philosophy. These three
latter disciplines are all about achieving the truth’s application to the common human
good. Constitutions, and social policies, are seen as means to these goods, including
the institutions which surround and support professions in meeting their needs.
To understand how and why this Neo-Aristotelian philosophical anthropology, here
taken as the basis of ethics, politics and social policy, is necessary in order to
understand the normative sense or status of professions, we need first to describe the
approach itself more precisely, and some of its assumptions about knowledge,
capacity, and virtue. Neo-Aristotelians hold that they can sketch what we might now,
following Taylor(1964), and Husserl(1970),call with Searle (1992) a “folk
psychology” of the apparent, observable, given “phenomena” of human thought and
desire, the explicandum of further social and natural science. For Aristotle, this
account is couched broadly in terms of ordered power or capacity, virtuous
disposition of power, and activity, not details of their material embodiment. For
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example, intellect has understanding as its characteristic activity, awe at the mystery
of being as its affective correlate. Wonder at the success of science begets curiosity as
an inclination, knowledge of truth as perfecting object, intelligibility (noncontradiction)
as a minimal condition; reasoning as a means, and wisdom as
enhancing disposition. Through the capacity of will, all humans inescapably wish for
wellbeing, indeterminately conceived as “living and acting well” (See Aquinas, S.T.
I-IIae 1-5; J.L.Austin 1967). Humans act for the sake of what they take this wellbeing
to be. They desire, intend, and choose from possible wants, ideally using moral
virtues of courage, temperance and justice.i
The human good, from this “ideal life” perspective, depends on the notion of a de
facto hierarchy of human powers of the self, with intellect/reason and will/choice
“ruling” well or badly at the top, and the rest of the powers, (memory, imagination,
perception, movement, and so on) under intellect/will’s “sovereignty,” ruling for the
sake of capacity enhancement of the whole entity.ii Each capacity has a perfecting
end/object. Political and organisational metaphors of rule and self-rule are allowed to
illumine individual personality in ways unfamiliar in contemporary individualistlibertarian
circles.iii
For Aristotle himself, the basic goods and needs have certain marks. They pass a test.
Neo-Aristotelians think there are further more specific marks of well being than the
indeterminate goal of “living or acting well,” not known to all, which help the wise to
pick out the ingredient ends of well being as activity in accord with virtue or excellent
dispositions. These marks, summarised by Aquinas at Summa Theologiae, Pars I-IIae,
Questions 2,4-8;5,3-4 and II-IIae, Q.182, are set out below. Ingredient ends of
wellbeing exhibit:
(a) Superiority: such goods of wellbeing are the highest objects of the highest
human powers, those apprehended and assimilated by our “highest” human
powers, intellect and will. Our powers are hierarchically ordered, under the
“rule” of intellect/will, for well or ill. They are best exercised about their
highest perfecting objects, truth and good respectively, whatever these turn out
to include more determinately according to intellectual enquiry e.g. God,
super-human beings or other humans. Intellect’s knowledge decides what is
truly good, and a human need.
(b) Perfection: Ingredient goods of wellbeing exercise, perfect and enhance the
immanent capacities of the human agent, especially the “higher” most
distinctively human ones ( of thought and will) as noted above through activity
of virtuous dispositions.
(c) Ultimacy/ Finality: The goods to be graduated are those capable of being
desired for their own sakes not merely as extrinsic means. Some of the good
ends wanted for their own sake are relatively final-capable of being means to
other ends
(d) Relative Permanence: We look for goods which have a cumulative, relatively
permanent and continuous nature which can be left off or gone back to after
access/use without difficulty e.g. a musical (or crafts) facility; they can be
retrieved through memory and improved over time; one wants them to endure
over time.
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(e) Autonomy/self sufficiency: They are goods which express/enhance a person
or group’s human self-sufficiency/autonomy, and decrease unwanted
dependency on luck or scarce external material resources. They presuppose
some degree of leisure.
( f) Delight: Goods which meet (a)-(e) can elicit euphoria, and regularly manifest
enjoyment/deep satisfaction.
In the neo-Aristotelian scheme, object/ends of powers are graduated onto the list of
wellbeing’s ingredient ends mainly via the intellect’s application of the superiority,
perfection, and finality/ ultimacy etc marks (a)-(f). The perfecting object/end of any
capacity qualifies as such a good. Intellect, as noted, has truth and knowledge as its
own enhancing end /object; associated inclinations like wonder and curiosity, and a
virtue to enhance it: theoretical and practical wisdom. Will's ideal object/ end is
wellbeing, and its end is the attainment of constituents of wellbeing, like friendship,
knowledge, and the set of goods listed in the cells within Hs in Fig.1. The moral
virtues govern feeling and action to this end of wellbeing-attainment. Feelings too
have constitutive objects, eg fear's object is that something bad may happen and its
"end" is that this feared evil should not happen. Courage s a virtue rules fear. Good
states of physical capacities can be described, and their attainment enhanced within
limits, by wise action following ethical principles and rules where appropriate.
Inset Figure 1 here
In order to be graduated by the process of rational determination or specification
represented by the column/arrow on the right of Figure 1 into the set of good ends
which are needs, Hs,1-3, candidate ends must exhibit at least an indeterminate
appearance of goodness and wellbeing, Ha, and have at least one of the marks of Hm.
Some specific goods are contra-indicated by the other marks of wellbeing (a)–(f)
above even at this abstract level, Hm. Heroin for example is pleasant ((f)) but
addictive (autonomy destroying, ie not (e)), and decreasingly delightful, (f)).
The rational graduation or determination process is run by intellect. Assuming the
plausibility of this kind of analysis of object/ends of powers, it is possible to argue for
an equation of the absence of the “perfecting object of power” through privation or
disorder or lack of due sustenance, with one sense of “need.” This is a normative
sense - that in which it means: a want whose fulfilment is necessary for well-being i.e.
a warranted want, rationally warranted because it is the perfecting or enhancing object
of a human power. In this sense one does not ‘need’ just anything one urgently wants
e.g. what is euphoric, exciting and sweet but toxic or addictive. Wants incline to
action: they are greater in number than needs, and they can include playful and
inappropriate ends. For this reason, needs may occasion no action because they are
alas not recognised by a person as subject as necessary for wellbeing.iv
Relevance to the professions: professions meet what intellect rules to be needs
It is critical to this part of the argument to recall that it was Plato, Aristotle and their
followers in the proto-universities – the Academy and Lyceum, and later the
Alexandrian and Stoic schools, who first gave the West a rational account of the basic
distinctions between disciplines now called logic, metaphysics, and physics;
psychology, anthropology, and ethics; between theory and practice; skill and virtue;
between different senses of the same term. These distinctions are indispensable to this
day in characterising what is distinctive about a profession. For example, these
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ancients are the first to articulate clearly the distinction between (a) active discovery
of new knowledge, famously exemplified in the story of Archimedes’ excited
discovery of his “principle” in the bathtub;(b)understanding of
contemplative/speculative/theoretic science expressed in universal laws, and scientific
method, as passive to the facts about the world (true asserted propositions/words “fit’
or correspond to the world); and (c) applying knowledge through self- and/or otheraddressed
imperatives of practical reason, in practice, to individual cases. Here the
object is to make the world fit the word of the command, in active doing and making
things.v
It was also Aristotle who first drew attention to the difference between knowledge and
skill itself, which can be abused, and its good use in virtue. He gave the first coherent
account of the role and limits of individual and political self-rule, of norms in ethics;
and their relation to the role of particular reason/conscience’s judgments, later called
casuistry. He gave the first formal treatment in Western ethics and politics of
distributive, retributive and commutative justice. Distributive justice concerns
provision of benefits and laying of burdens on all citizens, including social
opportunity for need-satisfaction. Retributive justice punishes misdeeds with
sanctions. Reciprocity drives exchange justice. ( Nicomachean Ethics, Books III-VI;
Politics III).Expert ethical/practical judgement in particular cases where rules are
silent, fairness, sanctions for malpractice and reciprocity loom large in the
contemporary discourse about professions.
These ancients and their followers lived around the time of a scientific explosion in
Greece associated with Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Galen; the discovery of new
knowledge of universal mathematical and natural laws, at first always by an elite few.
This explosion first posed the problem of its practical social transmission of
knowledge in sense (a) and (b) above from the discovering elite to the public, the
teaching and learning of discovered knowledge as public property. It did so alas in a
time of almost continuous civil and external war and social upheaval. It seems likely,
for example, that the self-governing group of doctors, whose identity was later
consolidated by the Hippocratic oath, was an embryonic form of profession. It also
seems likely that professions were in part a deliberately formed device to respond to
and solve the practical “transmission of knowledge” problem ethically/justly, taking
these other distinctions,(theory/practice, skill/virtue, etc) into account. Neither the
state not the family alone would have seemed suitable as transmitting institutions.
On a teleological “virtue ethics" view, such as theirs, the professions inherit some of
their positive tone qua abstractly targeted at, and pledge to fulfil, certain specific
public goods and human needs of individuals (Koehn,1994;Alexandra and Miller
1999;Oakley and Cocking, 2000). Normatively warranted need-satisfiers, a special
concern of the public and professional sectors, are a subset of the set of ingredient
goods of a worthwhile life of wellbeing, meeting marks Hm (a)–(e) in row Hm of
Figure 1. They are graduated into the set Hs below by the marks noted above.
Enhancing objects of capacity, sought as ultimate and relatively final ends, in pursuit
of the inescapable wish for Ha, easily qualify. These we call needs in the normative
sense, the things we all objectively require for normal threshold (non-maximal) level
of good use/operation of our common human capacities. Only relative to the
specialised maximal perfection of our theoretical intellect do we need higher
education as a “perfective need-satisfier”, but we do need basic education to survive
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to sub-optimal levels of perfection. Perfection is equivocal here as between
enhancement to normal levels of operation and maximal attainment.
We want to remedy defects and disorders of capacity; attain goods without which we
will we will suffer harm, including social and psychological deprivation; and enhance
our understanding. and satisfaction. Basic interpersonal needs are for such more
complex joint presuppositions or social conditions of personal capacity perfection as
security, shelter, food, basic information/education, public health, fair treatment,
social identity and recognition. Such a need is not merely an urgent want or
subjectively self-declared necessity. We need neither heroin not jet-skis in this sense.
Making need-satisfaction socially possible: state oversight of professions
In most modern states, the norms of the public, professional, and private (business and
voluntary associations) sectors would be seen as focused on such goods and
suspended from General Ethics as shown in Figure 2.
Insert Figure 2 here
Since the 18th century advent of modernity, in the West and elsewhere, the main
ethico-political arrangements of states operate within the constitutional institutions of
variants of “ State welfare capitalism”(SWC), as Shaw and Barry (2001) call such a
system. Pressing Aristotle’s own definition of a human against him, one must grant
franchise to women and abolish slavery, and have some form of representative
democracy. The case for this Neo-Aristotelian model will not be argued here. The key
notion is that the state, and organisations in each sector, should strive to articulate the
human good or well-being.
The arrows in Fig 2, like those in Figure 1, represent directions in practical rational
determination. Given the priority of ends to means in defeasible practical reasoning,
the model would explicitly suggest and enshrine the priority of general ethics values
to ethically driven "welfare capitalist” social policy settings. Since the process
balances both ends and means, in what Rawls calls a "reflective equilibrium" between
the ideal /principle and the real/ practice, the vertical arrows of Figure 2 linking boxes
in the diagram point both ways to indicate that the detailed practical organisational
embodiments brought into existence as means to the ‘higher’ more ultimate ends of
ethics and politics, always constrain the ends themselves, as Rawls suggests.
As the horizontal arrows suggest, public sector decision-making in a modern
democracy ideally seeks the opportunity for the achievement of the necessary level of
common good by all citizens to a threshold level, and largely sets the legal and other
boundaries within which professions, businesses, and NGOs operate. It has in some
ways a broader legislative mandate allowing it to be directive of these latter in key
respects. The state partly determines professional authority, funds infrastructure, and
sites like courts and hospitals.(Daniel 1990) One reason “profession” still has in
certain uses some abstract positive evaluative force is that SWC is supposedly
targeted on public goods and needs satisfaction. Public, professional and private
sectors are distinguished by the goods they are focused upon; by reference to the
breadth and nobility of their ends and purposes; the scope and target of their delivery,
their funding base, and the specific mode and degree of moral necessity of their
practice. The private sector is largely the sphere of the ethically permissible, and is
generally less subject to ethical scrutiny, especially the business sector.
Neo- Aristotelian Criteria for the Professions and their Implications
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To sum up this approach in broad terms a professional:
(A) has love of, knowledge of, and faith in submission to, science and its methods, in
a specific field, which they pass on across generations. Intellect “rules”, but
knowledge is thought of as itself an object of wonder, and fertilised by ever new
discoveries, known at first to an elite, but conceived as a human discovery to be
passed on and applied practically and ethically for public good..
(B) hopes to apply the knowledge, conscious of its limits, to meet some human need
or normatively warranted want in a skilled and virtuous way. This means she
exercises self-governing virtue ( peer-attested cognitive and practical expertise,
moral integrity, and impartial service in relation to an individual and/or social
need), applied via a code in practically wise particular judgement. They hope to
empower clients to meet their own needs.
(C) This activity of the practitioner presupposes some social grant of positional
authority/autonomy in an organised social system. Some monopolising of
function in a hybrid sector is needed to assure social transmission of expertise
across generations, and some social funding, particularly for fair systemic
service- provision to the indigent.
Discarding uses of ‘professional’ where it means simply doing something full time,
for a living/money; or doing it very skilfully, and so “professionally,” there is a sense,
captured by this Neo-Aristotelian approach, but increasing overlooked, in which a
professional ideally is one who can be described by (A) –(C) above. I would claim
that the marks listed below partly culled from the contemporary literature apply to and
are verified by paradigm cases of professionals/professions such as medicine and law,
and a sub-set of these should set the standard for “graduation” as a profession. The
letters a,b,c etc after a number indicate the points are informally related to the sense of
the heading number, eg 9c. In the first 16 cases, (A),(B) or (C) are put before the code
to indicate relevance of that consideration.
1. Professionals are called to meet a specific, profession-defining, normatively defined
need of the client. Examples are health, justice, and verification for doctors, lawyers,
and accountants respectively. In acquiring the skills and virtues, professionals take up
a specific calling, career or vocation-the provision of a specific means of satisfying a
specific public good or human need understood normatively in Neo-Aristotelian terms
as wants which are morally warranted, not merely urgent wants. (See also 9c below
(B);Code Need
2. Professionals apply an ever-growing body or store of systematic, specialised
theoretical/empirically tested knowledge and associated norms to cases involving
contact with individuals; or to organisational cases via their officers. As argued above
from ancient days, a spirituality of intellectual following of scientific method, and
letting the evidence speak for itself exists. (A);Code:SpTK
3a. Given 2, professions require for entry an extensive multi-year mandatory training
period. Besides theory, this involves apprenticeship, a transition from the status of
novice to that of master.3b.There is a taxonomy of types of case/syndrome, principles
and precedents, and one imitates the master’s diagnosis, prognosis and therapy, using
the distinctive mode of practical reasoning called casuistry applied to judgements in
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particular cases. Despite growing useful computer software support, no deductive
algorithm for a diagnosis/prescription exists. 3c.Normally diagnosis is guided by
client identification/report of an issue/problem.vi 3d.The length of the training and
need for client trust makes it sensible to think of it as fitting a vocation or career.
(A);(B); .Code: TrCaCID;
4a. Since the technical nature of the work and expense precludes every citizen training
and/or ruling intelligently on their own conduct, some degree of social trust in a
ruling expert sub-group, the institutionalised professional body, is necessary, to
administer their grant of authority by society’s representatives. Given features, 1-3,
this authoritative self–governing body, drawn from practitioner ranks, to form an
authoritative peak body self-administers a grant of authority/licence/right to
practitioners. 4b The inducted practitioners thereafter become authoritative
/autonomous experts. Once inducted, professionals are credited with authority to
speak on relevant social matters of importance.(Windt et al.(1989)). There is indirect
social government cooperation and oversight of numbers admitted and duty
compliance. ( C);Code: Selfad/Auth
5. The grant of authority or licence is conditional on a public test of expertise /exam of
some sort. Because few have personal potential for costly training, professionals
mentioned at 4d do their own peer assessment. (A);( C);Code: Exam
6. Professions have power to limit the number of trainees. Unlicensed competition is
discouraged, and government through 4c above may come in to assure this, through
immigration policy. Professions are ‘democratic brother/sister-hoods” socially
approved as quasi-monopolies or quasi-guilds/solidarities.vii The charges against
them of being closed shops designed to drive up costs can be met to the extent that
there is a case for limiting the accessibility of costly professional training on a
personal capacity/suitability/social cost basis. Permission to engage in the
professional practice in the relevant system (which will vary by reference to variable
national settings) is seen as the right/duty of the public to receive the knowledge given
in 1 above by a public grant of authority, 4a. ( C);Code: App/Monop
7. Practitioners retire and die, taking their knowledge to the grave. The grant confers
the social gift of the systematic body of socially conserved tradition/ knowledge
/skills in 1 above, which is targeted on attaining an ultimate human good, one to be
passed down. (Latin-traditio). One is expected to share the gift made possible by
specialisation, and ethical inter-generational succession planning. (A);(C);Code: Trad
8. A code of ethics and conduct for all individual practitioners/role incumbents is
promulgated by the licensing body in 4 for members. By reference to point 3d, a
profession is a vocation, involving social trust and care of normatively defined needs,
not only a money/wealth creation device. Koehn agrees that such codes form the basis
of an informal expectation/contract, but holds that contract is posterior to the
trustworthiness of the professional pledge of service reflected in the code. Contracts
often betoken lack of trust. The intent of codes is to segregate professionals from
commercial inducements to corrupt practice, and from conflicts of interest, eroding of
trust. (A);(B);(C);Code: EthCode
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9a. Professions have Codes of conduct, suspended from the code of ethics, specify
certain privileges and duties (of eg. of confidentiality (lawyers), or truthful disclosure
(accountants) in a sector/domain/context. Informed consent is always vital and
expertise must be applied to all in the client base, even to unsavoury clients at least if
accepted as clients. 9b Professionals must maintain disclosure or silence to select
inquirers (often listed by an authoritative body mediating the conducting of the
contract or grant of authority from society/the state to the patient/client). 9c.The rules
and subjects of such privilege of disclosure/silence are crafted by and within the
system relative to, and with an eye on, the patient or client’s welfare, not that of the
provider.viii 9d.A grant of authority to practice is often given (point 4-6) following an
oath of professional altruism. 9e.There is often an ordination /induction ceremony and
sometimes a form of attire/uniform worn either on (doctor/barrister) or even both on
and off the job e.g soldier/priest, signifying a duty/right to do what others must/ may
not. Where there is a uniform, there is often also a line and staff command structure as
9in church, police or military contexts. This arguably rules out professional discretion
for all but senior clerics and superior officers. (B) (C);Code: Spec/Pledge.
10. Codes in 8-9 provide group identity/culture through gazetted enforcement of a
range of sanctions including de-registering/or financial or other punishment for
malpractice. Professionals are deemed culpable for poor performance or not showing
the expertise required. Violations of the no–harm principle and of reciprocity and
interchange justice attract retributive justice. A professional can be sued. (C)Code:
Expel
11.Given points1and 2, 4and5, continuing education in the expertise is mandatory.
(A) Code :Contin/ed
12. They provide service on the basis of unequal knowledge by the client, thus
requiring trust and a fiduciary relationship, with some paternalistic features in tension
with the idea of client autonomy. Suddenly severely sick patients with eg heart attacks
or strokes depend on their doctors, and cannot always "shop" as consumers of care as
they would for clothes. Clients often consult professionals at a stage of strong
vulnerability, including to the professional herself. The client must trust the
professional as point 8 noted. The relation is one of inequality in this sense, although
the client must be honest about their condition. (B);Code: Fiduciary
13. Professional detachment/disinterest of a peculiar kind from the individual
client/patient is needed, combined with proper attention to their lives as a whole.
Peculiar satisfaction attends mediating ultimate goods to persons, but does not require
liking them, or absolute attachment to them. (B);Code: Detachment
14a. The goods which paradigmatic professionals mediate are matters in which access
to the good by the client is a matter of distributive social or economic justice, not their
personal desert, and not ability to pay. As Figure 2 suggested, tax funded Medicare
and Legal Aid reflect this. The need of the client is continuous and their right to need
satisfiers is a standing one recognised for the system to work.14b Goods are
authorised for delivery as a right to any applicant who is a citizen without
discrimination and ideally without excessive monetary charge. ( C) Code: Distjus
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15. Right to appear/advocate/practice on behalf of all including the needy within an
institutionalised system. The clearest case is a public hospital doctor or lawyer
appearing for a client in court. The state provides a “floor” for minimal care of the
indigent eg Legal Aid or Medicare ( C);Code: PubCitclaim
16. There is always a strong possibility that they will be in conflict with their
managers in an employing organisation and with the organs of state welfare
capitalism (SWC), eg over poor funding of quality services, especially in for profit
organisations. They may be ordered to “dumb-down” their expertise through over
specialisation merely for the sake of increased profitable thru-put. Whistle blowers are
often professionals working in large public corporations. Other problems surround
intellectual property in science, often co-developed by professionals, but controlled by
bureaucrats or business managers. (A);(B)Code: Whistleblower
17. A variable fee for service structure is common, but not essential and where present
is not driven only by market price but provided on an autonomously crafted and
variable schedule, often taking ability to pay into account, not a one size fits all
Bundy clock/billable hours basis. Tax funds for Medicare and Legal Aid are common
SWC responses to this point. Remuneration is usually substantial. Code: Variable
fee/Floor
18. As pledged to uphold and balance claims in “the public interest” in each of
several sensesix there is an expectation of noblesse oblige, provision for pro bono
service and on call requirements. Code: Pro Bono
19. Professionals initially apply their diagnostic/remedial helping knowledge to a
client/patient by appointment on a one-to-one basis in a designated public facility or
private chamber/clinic usually with a shingle for identification and support staff
suitable for the role. Code: Shingle
20. Under the implicit social contract, they enjoy high social status as professionals
qua being engaged in non-manual work; autonomy in the setting of their work
conditions, and they are usually well remunerated. Their autonomy is being eroded as
they become employees of larger, multinational organisations. Few are unionised, but
their class status is contested. Code : Status
Given the earlier analysis of socio-politically mediated need-satisfaction as a key
component in a profession, based on the Neo-Aristotelian account, and the
conjunction of three master features (A)-(C) above, professionalising a practice would
require most of these features to be put in place. As the spreadsheet entry below for
medicine and law shows, every one of these marks fits the paradigm cases of
medicine and law, and no analysis can proceed that does not capture these as
uncontested candidates and describe them. While some could be broken down into
sub-points which would expand the list to 30+ (e.g 2a-c; 3a-b;4a-d, 14a-d; 9a.-e),
some might be subsumed under others, and this would shorten the list.Many of these
marks cluster logically under the overarching themes of (A)-(C). Many are
presupposed or informally entailed by each other eg 2-3; 4-11, 14-16. Nobody would
want to trust a surgeon, as 8 suggests, who had not met a test of expertise of some sort
as 5 requires, and kept up with continuing education (mark11). Some seem to be
“quasi-essential” to professional status, or at least of greater importance than others, if
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we stick to medicine and law as paradigms. The core set is 1-11, but I suggest 10-16
are hard to subtract given 1-11. This would mean the typical practice seeking to be
recognised as a profession (“professionalisation”), must meet 1-11 and should meet 1-
16.x. Marks 1-16 as a cluster captures the essence here, and gives a set of jointly
necessary and sufficient conditions for a normative account.
Applications:
(a) Business is not yet a Profession.
Armed with the list of criteria, we can eliminate some practices as presently
qualifying for professional status. Business, as a general type of practice, has noble
goals such as providing quality goods and services, including professional services;
and meaningful and financially rewarding employment; provision of wealth in the
form of profit, wages, and tax revenue, which can as means sustain the marks of
happiness; and stimulation of creativity, investment and training. Some specific
businesses meet specific normative needs and have some professional features. But
there is no institutional body enforcing a code with gazetted expulsion for
malpractice. In general, business practice, and especially big business organisations,
such as TNCs, presently appear to lack most “professional” marks.Many professional
marks are not even true of small to medium businesses. Even provision of good
products, services and work is not a differentiating mark of business, as public sector,
non-profit, and voluntary associations as well as self employed persons and private
professionals do so also, but not for profit. The market “itself” is not an employer.
Professional status has been claimed for business by distinguished authors such as
Solomon. (See eg R.Solomon (1993), Chapter 15, especially p.137).Solomon states
that business meets my 2 and 3 above, stored theoretical, complex knowledge and
application to human and social problems; the idea of tradition ( mark 7) passed on to
novices formally, included in my 3a; it establishes criteria for admission, my 4d/5;
and imbues an altruistic spirit, 9c.That is a total of roughly 8 out of a possible 30.But
the numbers are only indicative. It is the omission of essential or central marks that is
surprising eg. the absence of focus on normatively warranted needs, a grant of
authority, peer evaluation; a pledge of trust; enforced codes of conduct; gazetted
sanctions, and expulsions, their role in maintaining a fair social system so on. At least,
1-11 and plausibly 1-16 are essential in this sort of normative account. Most
businesses do not meet 5- the exam mark, or 6- the monopoly condition; nor 9a-b re
mandated codes of conduct;10-gazetted expulsion; 11-mandated continuing
education; 14-15 on distributive justice systems floor provision; or 16 re a duty of
whistle-blowing. If only a few marks-perhaps 2, 3a, 4d,, 7, some weak version of
codes (8/9), and 17 are plausibly met by business as an entrepreneurial practice, or by
businesses and business people themselves at first blush, without the direction and
help of professionals like accountants, lawyers and so on, then business as a practice,
business organisations, and business practitioners are not professions/professionals.
Neither is large business corporation management. (See also Ewin (1995) and
Buchanan (1994)) Even top CEOs of large business corporations, who do meet many
of these marks, will not meet some of the key criteria in the 1-16 categories eg 4-11,
and 14-16. Business only meets the crucial mark, normative need satisfaction, 3, to
the degree the specific good or service for sale is ethically qualified as a need, not
merely a permissible want. Mark 3.above, mandatory multi year training, is not
necessarily met by business people as such but must be met by professions.
12
Are professional institutions and peak bodies or organisations, like traditional
chambers/practices, professional? It would seem that these organisations are, but it
will depend on whether we are comparing and discussing business/professional
activity in general; types of businesses/professions, individual organisational entities,
their organised collective activities, financial and otherwise; their managers; or the
“clinical” activities of their professional staff. The sociology of professions literature
makes these distinctions and charts the evolution of new organisational forms, such as
salaried professionals; practices managed by business people, and global firms. The
position of a given person in the authority structure and the practice, and degree of
prominence of the profit motive, will also decide the degree to which one can call a
person a professional, or a practice or clinic professional. But a profession need not be
practised on a business basis, and the professional ideal can be spelled out apart
from the descriptive accounts. Doctors can be salaried public servants, or volunteers,
or work for non-profit NGOs. Peak bodies of professions do not need a profit, and
need not secrete their knowledge.xi.xii
I have summarised the prima facie outcomes of applying marks 1-20 above for a
number of aspiring professional practices in the table below. An “x” in a cell means
the practice meets the mark; a “?” means it is doubtful or false that it does; a few are
marked X/? because ambiguous or changing; and some are marked ‘na”-for not
applicable. There are few candidates among the aspirants who will make the cut at
present even though some are close and could be made closer by social policy.
(b) Professional employees of globalised business firms, especially at middle or
lower levels of responsibility, even those delivering professional services, are
professional only in a secondary sense.
First, if business is not a profession, neither are global hybrid business firms like
Philips-Fox or KPMG. If the argument in (a) above against over-assimilating business
and professions is accepted, it has radical negative implications for all global
professional service business providers.
Second, as noted at 9d in relation to soldiers and clergy, positional authority can be
crucial to professional status. In each of these the scope of authority and autonomy of
the qualified professional will vary, with some in the lower and middle ranks of the
larger entities being out of the leadership group. and having much less professional
autonomy than the solo practitioner. Professionals who work for large global
transnational businesses, as HR consultants, lawyers, accountants, and auditors in
multinational firms like KPMG, as subordinates in a long chain of authority, may
have their autonomy and to a degree their professional status sharply curtailed.
Third, the professional remit under mark 4 and 9a is national. The power and
authority of national peak professional bodies over graduates after they enter practice
in a particular state is significant. But if, as often happens, they go to work for a TNC
and this entails expatriate service, there may be a dilution of control by these
professional bodies, and of loyalty to the original commissioning state, on the part of
the professional. As individuals in the pay of TNCs, once inducted by their national
peak body, they may lose continuing loyalty to their own nations, or respect for the
norms of the state in which their clients operate eg accountants in advocating tax
13
havens and transfer pricing evasions for their clients. There is a problem of choosing
between differing national rules re competition, and conflict of interest.
A key test of graduate performance will be “billable hours,” and success in
minimising for the firm the burden in compliance with external tests imposed by
national governments. In the accounting case there may be a temptation to minimise
or evade corporate tax via transfer pricing and tax havens or in law to “venue shop” in
order to defend the corporation at law without regard to the impact on the authority,
laws and warranted needs of the nation which gave these employees of the business
their professional remit. In one period, 1987-1991, research found that due a number
of factors such as internal corporate transactions, transfer pricing regimes, and loose
tax office guidelines, offering these companies many complex options for self
assessment, many TNC/MNEs, both U.S. and foreign, paid no income tax in the
period.(See Jain, J et alia, (1997); Teather 2004) This tax avoidance or minimisation
activity by MNE professionals must drain the tax base of the states which gave them
their original status and remit as professionals, and/or that of least developed nations.
Fourth, there will be a strong tendency to elide the nationally based anti-competitive
consideration in mark# 6 in a context of still absent enforced and gazetted global legal
and accounting standards, and contradictory national legal norms applying between
adversarial and inquisitorial systems. Such firms and professional staff compete with
their more ethical bound national and regional colleagues in conflict with mark 6
above. The number of mega-firms goes down steadily. Business monopolies should
be socially constrained.
As noted in the third point, despite recent laws to the contrary, there are still abuses
caused by different divisions of the same firm providing both consulting and audit
functions to the same client. Unfair practices still persist. This threatens the social
justice criterion of 14 and its consequent marks 15-16, together with eg the equity/pro
bono/common good considerations of point 18. If new employees lack organisational
voice as 16 requires because employees are under pressures from their masters to help
the firm compete, make money, they may e.g. audit a firm in such a way as to
generate business for their own consulting or accounting division, despite the official
repudiation of such practice.
Fifth, there are problems around marks 7-9 arising from the lack of enforced formal
agreed global political and professional institutions and harmonised convergent
standards. In addition to the shift from loyalty to a quasi-personal organisation like “
the practice,” to the large mega-firm, we now encounter the difficulty that the global
professional ruling body governing a firm like KPMG is not yet fully established at
present. In a post-Gatesian world without a morally satisfactory World Order, and a
fortiori, no World Professional Order, even one as under-funded and emasculated as
the UN, there is no watchdog enforcing emerging international professional standards
and gazetting expulsions and fines for misconduct. Indeed as regards mark 9 there is
in the accounting field eg massive confusion as far as the permissibility of tax
practices, like transfer pricing, and tax havens is concerned. (Despite the impression
the UK Government gives of ethical leadership, some tax havens are in British
colonies). There ought to be many occasions where point 16 regarding
professional/organisational conflict must arise for them. But in fact corporate
collapses suggests it does not.
14
Phillips-Fox and KPMG-type businesses/practices are businesses, not professions.
Their professional status is ambiguous. This is a problem to be faced by professional
in all large business corporations, especially TNCs. Without proper world
governance, their employee professionals become servants of the sometimes amoral
and indifferent masters of the global corporate order. The professional ideal of 1-16 is
denatured. If some formal linkage of national to (still only emergent) “harmonised”
global standards is not worked out very soon, and more credible enforcement, then the
notion of such a “global-professional-business” may have to be questioned as an
ethical oxymoron. For big businesses, profit and market niche are properly the key;
and specialising is profitable from a competitive point of view. Caveat emptor is the
presumption, one which can be overthrown only by proving negligence. In the
paradigm cases of professional practice, in the single practitioner or small to medium
size practice, professional norms are more specific and exacting. Under point 16
above, the issue of over-specialised “dumbing-down’ of professionals by large
business organisations employing professionals was mentioned. The global specialist
tax lawyer, like the doctor in a lucrative mass-medicine erectile dysfunction clinic, is
of course still a lawyer or doctor. But in finding tax havens and loop-holes, is such a
formally trained accountant, or the lawyer/doctor in commodity service role, perhaps
never having to move back to use the expertise referred to in marks 1-2, or the
tradition in 7, or the any continuing education in broader non-specialisation outside
tax or whatever, perhaps less of a professional than the MSF doctor in the normative
sense captured here?
Conclusion
To change the present unfair global trade situation, in which global business
professionals help their shareholders enjoy huge and unconstrained advantages from
often unfair national trade policies of developed nations, and themselves gain over
their national professional brethren, radical ethics-driven reform of the corporate
business form and global business is needed (Pogge 2002). Doing business with
despots, the recognition of corrupt regimes as having rights to own and dispose of
violently seized resources, receive credit, and exploit blatantly unfair trade practices
sanctioned by WTO must be curbed by fairer international political and economic
governance structures, including reduction of intellectual property royalties of
developed nations, and designing new financial structures to enable developing
nations to manufacturer life saving drugs at nearer cost. This will properly tax the
expertise of professionals. Only then will it be possible to argue that employee
professional in KPMG –type organisations are living up to the professional ideal.
We must change the global trade rules, dethrone the absolute sovereignty of
shareholders, and scrap the total subordination of young professionals to business. At
national and corporate level, these initiatives would give a voice to Boards and other
stakeholders, especially communities, employees, public interest groups, and state
regulators, along the lines suggested by Bottomley (2000), Dine (2000), Braithwaite
and Ayres (1992), Monks and Minow,(20040 and Turnbull(2002). At international
level, works by Pogge, (2002) Braithwaite and Drahos (2000), UNDP Millenium
Project, Stiglitz (2003), and Monbiot (2003). These calls for change are expressed in
principles like the international business ethics movement’s CAUX principles and the
Self-Assessment and Improvement Process (SAIP); the OECD principles for multinational enterprises, the UN Draft Code for Multinationals, the UN Global Compact, and the Global Reporting Initiative.