>
>your weary ole credentialing process worked in the industrial
>age, because all that labor required was basically rote (sp?).
>the knowledge base could be measured. it *could* be
>credentialed. and while there are rote tools available for
>coding and hacking, they are basically meaningless.
>information is free. it is knowledge that we value. (love to
>hear how you could credential that!)
absolutely utterly WRONG. as carrol pointed out, the medical profession became extremely powerful without one lick of evidence that their services were preferable to that of midwives or even what they called "quacks". same story in the legal profession.
it has ALWAYS been the case that the credential one receives (a degree) has been meaningless as an indicator of skill. i know that i will NOT be hired on the basis of my fantastic successes as a graduate student or anything i've published. no one will read any of that when i get hired. i have been through countless hiring decision processes and sat on a couple of hiring committees, as well as inducted grad students into our department. i have voted to h ire people who, because i'm at a third tier uni and they at a first tier, have *fewer* publications and presentations (one woman with not one pub, except a co-authoriship in a major team project crunching #s) than i do and NO teaching experience to speak of. this is b/c it doesn't matter what you know but who you know. further, we NEVER read a thing these people wrote with any in depth attention. We relied on all kinds of cues about whether they'd be a good fit: their demeanor, their connections, their intellectual lineage, how well they managed to deal with stress, whether they said the right things or not. i can safely say that my experience was NOT an aberration. and THAT's in the context of academia.
when i interviewed and spent time with managers at NCR they were very clear about that. they hired no one because they thought the degree they had meant something in terms of ability. they hired people because the degree meant that they had gone through a socializing process that would, likely, make them good employees. that went for *everyone* they hired, no matter whether they were in a supposedly "technically" proficient occupations or not: lawyers, administrative assistants, engineers, freshly minted MBAs, whatever. the function of the degree, for them, was about hiring people who would "fit" with the company. (see also _Moral Mazes_, Robert Jackall in it he shows how management rely on what he calls 'alchemy' rather than science in their decision making processes re hiring and everything else)
And, in _Forgive and Remember_ Charles Bosk shows how surgeons are weeded out of the internship process. they are not tossed out on their bums EVER for technical errors--failure to perform the right techniques during surgery. Rather, they are thrown out on the bums and judged most harshly by their peers when they make NORMATIVE errors: errors in judgement about how to behave properly, particularly around superordinates.
no one actually thinks the credential exists in a one-to-one pointer-reader relationship to "skill" or "knowledge" possession. except, perhaps, you ac.