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- Robert F. Cochran Jr, Professionalism in the Postmodern Age: It's Death, Attempts at Resuscitation, and Alternative Sources of Virtue.There is a new emphasis on professionalism within legal education and the organized bar. Lawyers are being called on to go beyond the incentives of the market and beyond the requirements of the professional rules - to seek justice, to be more honest and tolerant, to be less adversarial and selfish, and to give more of their time and resources to the poor. The moral basis for this call to services is lawyers' status as professionals. This focus on professionalism comes at a time when the reputation of the legal profession has fallen to new depths. This article examines whether in this postmodern world the traditional concepts of professionalism can be resuscitated or whether a new moral ground is needed. The traditional professional ideals were built on a deeply rooted moral foundation that was widely shared among the bar. In the 1960s and 70s, however, the elitist foundations of professionalism began to crumble. Increased diversity in the profession and postmodern thoughts that there was no moral truth undercut the possibility of a pervasive professional ethic. The result of these postmodern teachings have left each lawyer to create his or her own meaning of “professionalism.” The modern concept of professionalism is both too weak and too dangerous to yield the responsible exercise of professional power. Instead, the key to renewed virtue in lawyers is to look within the diversity of the profession for moral insight. As the traditional idea of professionalism has failed, lawyers now need to look to their own personal traditions to define virtue. Morality is likely to take hold and to affect one's life when it is drawn not from the ethical considerations of the profession, but from the deepest source of values of that person.
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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.
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| Export citation | Other links: ingentaselect.com tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: ingentaselect.com tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 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.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This article discusses professionalism, civility, and legal ethics.
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| | Scholar | More options ... The professionalism movement has animated medical education and practice; an extensive literature expresses and categorizes many interpretations of the concept (Hafferty 2006a; Hafferty and Levinson 2008). The inception of the current wave of the movement was in the American Board of Internal Medicine's Project Professionalism. In the face of threats from the growth of managed care and public concerns about conflict of interest, the ABIM's "Physician Charter" called for the profession to publically commit to values of patient welfare, social justice, and respect for patient autonomy (Brennan et al. 2002). The concept of professionalism, or the physician as occupying the role of professional, has taken hold in ..
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This essay addresses a moral and cultural challenge facing health care in the People’s Republic of China: the need to create an understanding of medical professionalism that recognizes the new economic realities of China and that can maintain the integrity of the medical profession. It examines the rich Confucian resources for bioethics and health care policy by focusing on the Confucian tradition’s account of how virtue and human flourishing are compatible with the pursuit of profit. It offers the Confucian account of the division of labor and the financial inequalities this produces with special attention to China’s socialist project of creating the profession of barefoot doctors as egalitarian peasant physicians and why this project failed. It then further develops the Confucian acknowledgement of the unequal value of different services and products and how this conflicts with the current system of payment to physicians which has led to the corruption of medical professionalism through illegal supplementary payments. It further gives an account the oblique intentionality of Confucian moral psychology that shows how virtuous persons can pursue benevolent actions while both foreseeing profit and avoiding defining their character by greed. This account of Confucian virtue offers the basis for a medical professionalism that can function morally within a robustly profit-oriented market economy. The paper concludes with a summary of the characteristics of Confucian medical professionalism and of how it places the profit motive within its account of virtue ethics.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The effectiveness of professional sanctions against violations rests upon the severity of sanctions and detection of violations. Here we examine perceptions of professional violation detection in auditing where the professional standards may conflict with the interests of the auditor’s firm. Using a sample of future and experienced auditors, we test the relationship between professional violations and auditors’ perceptions of the likelihood that severely-sanctioned violations will be discovered (a) by the audit profession, and (b) by the auditor’s firm. In our study, an auditor’s belief that professional bodies are likely to detect professionalviolations relates positively to auditor professionalism. However, we find beliefs that the audit firm will detect severely-sanctioned professional violations negatively affect auditor professionalism. In our study, the lowest level of professionalism occurs when auditors believe that their own audit firm, but not the audit profession, will detect a professional violation. We also find that auditors’ internalization of professional standards relates positively to auditor professionalism. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 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.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Professionalism and Ethics in Teaching examines the ethical issues of teaching. After discussing the moral implications of professionalism, David Carr explores the relationship of education theory to teaching practice and the impact of this relationship on professional expertise. He then identifies and examines some central ethical and moral issues in education and teaching. Finally he gives a detailed analysis of a range of issues concerning the role of the teacher and the management of educational issues. Professionalism and Ethics in Teaching presents a thought-provoking and stimulating study of the moral dimensions of the teaching professions.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 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.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 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.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Robert F. Cochran Jr, Professionalism in the postmodern age: It's death, attempts at resuscitation, and alternative sources of virtue
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