Online research in philosophy

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.

Examining legal ethics within the framework of modern practice, this book identifies two important ethical issues that all lawyers confront: the difference between the role of lawyers and the role of judges in pursuing justice, and the conflicting responsibilities lawyers have to their clients and to the legal system more broadly. In addressing these issues, Legal Ethics provides an explanation of the duties and dilemmas common to practicing lawyers in modern legal systems throughout the world. The authors focus their analysis on lawyers in independent practice in modern capitalist constitutional regimes, including the United States, Japan, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the emerging legal systems in China and the former Soviet bloc, to develop connections between the legal profession and political systems based on the rule of law. They find that although ethical tension is inherent in the legal practice of all these societies, the legal profession is essential to stable political institutions.

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.

Engineering societies such as the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) and associated entities have defined engineering and professionalism in such a way as to require the benefit of humanity (NSPE 2009a, Engineering Education Resource Document. NSPE Position Statements. Governmental Relations). This requirement has been an unnecessary and unfortunate add-on. The trend of the profession to favor the idea of requiring the benefit of humanity for professionalism violates an engineer’s rights. It applies political pressure that dissuades from inquiry, approaches to new knowledge and technologies, and the presentation, publication, and use of designs and research findings. Moreover, a more politically neutral definition of engineering and/or professionalism devoid of required service or benefit to mankind does not violate adherence to strong ethical standards.

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 ..

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.

In countries outside the developed world, although writers have written commentaries on specific legal codes, very little attention has been given to legal writing which has focused specifically on the ethics of the legal profession. This book makes a special contribution in that regard providing, as it does, a comparative study of prevailing efforts to enhance ethical standards in a profession potentially in crisis and under much public scrutiny. Countries which have been examined include the UK, the US, Canada, South Africa, and countries in the Pacific, South East Asia and the Caribbean. Valuable guidance and learning are provided on such topical issues as wasted costs orders, conflicts of interests, legal and judicial codes, confidentiality, privilege and the ethics of the criminal process, where the jury system comes in for critical evaluation. This book will be a valuable text on the ethics and status of the profession. It will be of considerable interest to law students, practitioners and legal academics, Bar Associations, Attorneys-General and Directors of Public Prosecutions as well as members of the judiciary.

This Article is a socio-legal analysis of the California State Bar lawyer discipline system. The article draws on legal professions theory, legal ethics, legal history, and cultural analysis, and it is based on archival data, interviews with State Bar actors, and empirical data on the Bar's disciplinary system. The article examines the historical and cultural context of a perceived crisis in California State Bar lawyer discipline in the 1980s and 1990s and concludes that, while the crisis stemmed from demonstrable organizational ineffectiveness in the lawyer discipline system of the State Bar, it also needs to be understood as part of a larger--and recurring--crisis of professionalism in the legal profession.The article also examines the Bar's response to the discipline crisis and argues that, contrary to the bar's harshest critics (and critical professions theory), the reforms initiated by the Bar and imposed by the state legislature improved the lawyer disciplinary system in California. Nevertheless, the article concludes that organizational and structural factors identified in this study limit the effectiveness of any system of lawyer self-regulation.

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.