Online research in philosophy

The GDC’s recent third edition (interim) of The First Five Years places renewed emphasis on the place of professionalism in the undergraduate dental curriculum. This paper provides a brief analysis of the concepts of ethics, professionalism and fitness to practice, and an examination of the GDC’s First Five Years and Standards for Dental Professionals guidance, as well as providing an insight into the innovative ethics strand of the BDS course at the University of Glasgow. It emerges that GDC guidance is flawed inasmuch as it advocates a virtue-based approach to ethics and professionalism, and fails to distinguish clearly between these two concepts.

Professionalism includes the essential contents of other key notions within the field of business ethics. As a term involving the notion of vocation it may be understood as containing a religious content, since vocation refers to a man's most intimate personal decisions, destiny and providence. Professionalism also connotes respect for law and so includes a reference to commercial law as a guide to right conduct. Professionalsim thus lifts the requirements of law to the level of personal commitment.Like an honest act, professionalism may not be easy to define, but you will know it when you see it. As for professionalism's practitioners, like the practitioners of honesty, their art is learned not by seeking definitions of what they do, but by practicing professionalism. Only if this practice becomes an obsession with the Business Aristocracy can we expect professionalism to seize the soul of lesser businessmen and suffuse the entire business community.

This paper attempts to clarify the meaning of the term ‚professional’ in its current use in our daily lives, mainly by making use of Weber’s discussion of the Protestant work ethic and rationalization. Identifying professionalism primarily as a particular lifestyle, it questions whether professionalism is a virtue to be encouraged or an alienated way of life. Rather than conclusively answering this question in the affirmative or negative, it contends that professionalism is an evolving concept, and endeavors to capture and formulate a favorable understanding of it which would foster less alienating and more fulfilling ways of doing business. It concludes by observing structural similarities between alternative managerial approaches and different conceptualizations of professionalism.

What purpose is served by renovation or redesign of professionalism, and how successful a process is it likely to be? This article addresses these questions by examining the effectiveness as a professional development mechanism of the imposition of changes to policy and/or practice that require modification or renovation of professionalism. The 'new' professionalisms purported to have been fashioned over the last two or three decades across the spectrum of UK education sectors and contexts have been the subject of extensive analysis, and this article avoids going over old ground and revisiting issues that have already been much debated. Nevertheless, the example of UK government education policy during this period is used as a basis for considering the pitfalls associated with mechanisms for modifying professionalism through a reform and standards agenda. The article's analysis incorporates redefinition and examination of the concept and substance of professionalism and offers new perspectives in the form of three distinct conceptions: demanded, prescribed and enacted professionalism. Exploring the existentialist status of 'new' or 'modified' professionalisms and the relationship between professionality, professional culture and professionalism, it examines how professionalism may be interpreted and utilised for the development of education professionals.

The topic of developing professionalism dominated the content of many academic medicine publications and conference agendas during the past decade. Calls to address the development of professionalism among medical students and residents have come from professional societies, accrediting agencies, and a host of educators in the biomedical sciences. The language of the professionalism movement is now a given among those in academic medicine. We raise serious concerns about the professionalism discourse and how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label of "professionalism." In particular, we argue that the professionalism discourse needs to pay more attention to the academic environment in which students are educated, that it should articulate specific positive behaviors, that the theory of professionalism must be constructed from a dialogue with those we are educating, and that this theoretical and practical discourse must aim at a deeper understanding of social justice and the role of medicine within a just society.

This paper uses Beijing Youth Daily , the second biggest local newspaper in Beijing, as a case study to examine Chinese news people's perceptions of their professional roles and unethical practices. The author argues that Chinese journalistic professionalism has developed. Journalists see their most fundamental role as that of disseminator. Their concepts of professional roles and virtues are surprisingly similar to those held by journalists in liberal democratic countries. However, Chinese journalists' partial representation of the party/state and their tolerance towards unethical practices such as paid journalism or “red envelopes” suggest they are more likely to be under pressures from both politics and commerce.

Journalistic practice and professionalism across the globe are characterized by certain universals as well as unique particularities. In most post-colonial societies, the ethical philosophies and professional ethos of journalists reflect the tension between the commitment to integrity and social responsibility, shared by journalists worldwide, and the contextual interpretation and application of these principles. This article examines the ethics and ethos of development journalism as a philosophically, culturally, and historically evolving professional ideology. It surveys the ethical landscape of development journalists and shows how development journalists balance the dialectic of a universalist ethical philosophy and a relativistic professional ethos.

This literature review of professionalism was prepared by San Jose State University graduate student Marianne Allison as a research committee project of the Mass Communication and Society Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The project was prepared under the guidance of Professor Diana Stover Tillinghast. It reviews the literature on two approaches to professionalism in general and of the professionalism of journalists in particular: the ?structural?functionalist approach?; and the ?power approach.?; Traditional and recent discussions of the nature of professionalism in occupational sociology are presented. Studies of the professionalism of journalists both in the United States and cross?culturally are critiqued. The paper suggests several areas of fruitful research, and contains an extensive bibliography.

This essay by the director of Washington & Lee University's applied ethics program for Society and the Professions argues that journalists must begin taking themselves seriously as members of a profession if journalism is to gain the respect it needs to function effectively in society. Journalism, argues the author, may not possess all the classical attributes of professionalism, but it does possess the most important ones. The essay maintains that professionalism in journalism is important for the welfare of both the media audience and the journalist. Journalists are asked to look at journalism through the audience's eyes, to experience the reward of being true and humble servants of other human beings, and to help make people whole?in short, to be professionals, not mere technicians.