>For instance, I'd rather have professors select their fellow
>professionals, as opposed to administrators vetoing their choices, even
>though professors' choices can be sometimes bad ones (e.g., your being
>canned). Professional autonomy (= the ideal of self-governance) is better
>than total subjection to the management.
in order to show how the "normative" ideal of what constitutes a "professional" (and other similar issues) is one of the most important places to look for one of the "five faces of oppression"... i want to address Carl's assumption that medicine is based on "science" and the status of a competent physician is now based on something real, rather than on something unreal, like legal competence. further, this discussion below addresses Yoshie's comments above, fleshing them out in terms of the ways in which asymmetries of professional power play themselves out on an everyday level. in general, anyone who has been through the upper middle class professionalizing process will recognize the following, in some manner, and it ought to illuminate things like why Justin was "banished" and why issues of cultural capital matter when it comes to negotiating graduate school and the political character of who succeeds and who fails.
Failure to perform competently as a professional means two different things: failure to apply correctly the body of theoretic knowledge--errors in technique--AND failure to follow the code of conduct on which professional action rests--normative errors. Contra common sense, however, it is normative error that is penalized most heavily (Hi Justin!) when junior members or aspiring professionals fail to attend to the rituals of deference, demeanor and degradation appropriately. In professions such as surgery, where science cannot actually solve anything, it is actually precisely in such professions that mechanisms of social control subordinate technical performance to normative performance. <normative errors are, essentially, failure to kiss ass and failure to become and uphold the ideal of what a professional is supposed to be --the single white male with no responsibilities and, likely, someone to wipe his butt and who has the cultural capital to quickly adapt himself to these rituals of deference, demeanor and degradation.
In Forgive and Remember, a study of elite surgical training, Charles Bosk shows how the everyday level of individual interaction is the recurrent, repeated, incessant occasion for treating technical errors as "no big deal" and a moment for restitutively forgiving an aspiring surgeon. You are supported when you make a technical error.
"At the career level those who make technical
errors are allowed to remain the medical elite
altho they may not be/c surgeons, while those
who make moral errors are banished from the elite
ranks altho they are allowed to be/c surgeons
elsewhere." (Justin, this should hit home eh?)
Bosk asks, so why is this the case? Given the division of labor and specialization, with its emphasis on "cognitive rationality" and scientific, bureaucratized, ostensibly objective measures of technical competence, why is it that technical incompetence does not actually exclude one from the ranks of the elite and that failure to kiss ass and support (no matter how awful) the normative assumptions of a profession will get you banished from the ranks of the elite?
"(W)e would expect impersonal evaluations of technques to have
priority over personal judgments of an individual's moral
performance. how are we to account for the fact that the opposite is
the case?"
Bosk answers this by looking at the ideological nature of the professional-client relationship which is supposed to address the asymmetries of power be/t professionals and their clients.
"The professional agrees to protect the client's best interests.
The physician does not promise to cure. The lawyer does not promise
to win the case. The most that either can promise is to help as best
he can and in a fashion consistent with the highest standards of the
professional community."
IOW, the professional makes symbolic sacrifices in order to, supposedly, match what his client has at stake by a considerable investment of his own.
When a professional screws up, his or her defense is always a moral one. I did everything I could, everything I knew how. Normative errors in the professions--failure to uphold the code of conduct and attitude toward the client are errors which mock these claims. As Bosk writes, more sympathetically, "the very fabric of the client-professional relationship has been breached and subverted>" . This is why even (and perhaps especially in professions where the "science" factor is supposed to be high), the control of technical performance is subordinated to the control of moral performance. This is not a claim that technical errors don't matter. Rather, it's a claim that technical errors are generally an occasion for being sanctioned but welcomed back into the community thru compliance with rituals of deference, demeanor and degradation.
These rituals are important mechanisms for signalling who does and does not belong. <If you observe carefully, you can see them in operation at LOB-talk! :) > "Forgiveness and punishment of breaches are two mechanisms for establishing group membership or the boundaries of the professional group. The first is an inclusion mechanism; the second, one of exclusion."
Technical offense are forgiven. The process of forgiveness and, especially, public displays acknowledging ones technical error, themselves operate as a deterrence to further technical error. On the one hand, the person who is forgiven is now obligated to those who forgive, typically his "superiors" in the profession --during the socialization process, especially. In order to repay this obligation, the person who made a technical error makes a display of being appropriately subdued by his mistake.
Forgiveness is a form of reintegrative shaming. When a superior forgives, you are grateful and the superior's more powerful role be/c transparent for s/he HAS the power to forgive. Bosk speaks of the "hair shirt" ritual that is part of the Mortality and Morbidity Conference. Here you see a ritual of "self-criticism, confession, and forgiveness that are all part of this ceremony allow the offender to reenter the group. The 'hair shirt' ritual promotes group solidarity."
In contrast, reaction to normative errors--the failure to fulfill the idealized role of how a professional should act toward others, often enough toward his or her superiors--is severe and intolerant.
The person who breaches even the most seemingly inane code of conduct such as how they stand or posture themselves in the presence of a supervising surgeon occasions swift, sometimes seemingly arbitrary punishment which stresses thorough degradation that, in its most severe form, banishes the person from the group.
"When he makes a normative error, the subordinate shows that he does
not acknowledge his subordination to the group and its standards.
Under such conditions, the superordinate forcefully reminds him of
this subordination. The anger that is shown on such occasions derives
from the manner in which the suborindate has mocked the community and
its values."
"(T)he group is merciless in the face of moral error since an
individual is prideful, contemptuous of the group's authority, and
offers no assurance of future improvement. The authorities of the
group must punish the offender in since there is nothing that suggests
the desire or resources for self improvement. Moral errors disqualify
one from civil treatment by the group. One is expected to learn
quickly what is forbidden from the fierce response it evokes. When the
behavior is not extinguished in the individual, the individual is
extinguished from the group.
<...>
"License, the granting of great personal autonomy, the giving of the
right of the individuality to the professional himself, is awarded
only after training is complete.<...>But the crucial point is once
such a transformation is complete, a professional self is seen as
inviolable. Corporate responsibility is discharged thru the
socialization and education of recruits.
adapted from Charles Bosk, _Forgive and Remember: Managing medical failure"