Disruption #2: Digital Technology

As I argued, with respect to markets, disruptions are not necessarily destructive: they don’t necessarily destroy professions. But they exert pressures on professions and on professionals who are not always ready, willing, or able to resist those pressures.

In the “good old days,” clients either trusted professionals qua professionals, or they relied on the advice of their friends (who might or might not have good judgment with respect to the professionals and the professional expertise in question). Nowadays an enormous amount of information is readily available online about the competence of specific professionals, including a variety of rating systems. In general, it is more helpful to know what 100 or 1000 individuals think about a specific lawyer or doctor than simply to know what your three best friends have to say. But it is certainly possible to manipulate rating systems—for example, by mobilizing friends (or enemies) of the individual or site in question. It is also possible that large numbers of individuals could be seduced by irrelevant criteria, and still others could create procedures or apps that automatically tilt the scales of judgment.

When people invoke “the wisdom of crowds,” I often wink and respond, “And what of the stupidity of crowds?”. Similarly, when I am curious about the quality of a recently published book, I feel on much firmer ground reading, or speaking to, a few experts on the topic rather than valorizing the number of stars or “likes” the book received on a website. At the same time, if I have access both to experts and to the less discriminating but more numerous crowd, I am better off than if only one source of evaluation is available to me.

In general, cooperation between expert professionals, on the one hand, and experts in the digital media, on the other, can be salutary. Professionals need help in getting their messages out, and nowadays, only a naif would rely largely on the traditional media. Experts in the digital media are essential for transmitting messages and for tracking their impact; but unless these experts actually understand what is important for the professional who wants to fulfill her role completely and competently, they are likely to give feedback that is not helpful and perhaps misleading. As one long-involved in educational reform, I have considerable doubt that experts working for management consultancies can offer advice that is useful for educators; based on my own observations, what McKinsey has to say may be relevant for General Electric or General Motors but is rarely helpful for the public system in Big City, USA.

As a convenient example, let me use the launching of this blog. Without having financial resources to devote to it, I benefited from the advice of individuals with experience in the digital media. These included my assistant Danny Mucinskas, who divided the piece into sections and added illustrations that visibly(!) improved the attractiveness of the presentation. The number of responses received was extremely gratifying to me—because these responses came from individuals who are knowledgeable about the professions and thoughtful about the issues that I raised. But unless an expert on digital media could actually evaluate the feedback, he or she might erroneously conclude that forty or so responses was a tiny number without any conceivable impact. Better 400 or 40,000, whatever their range and their quality.

As a few commentators noted, we are at the earliest stages of understanding—indeed, of conceptualizing—how professionals in one or another domain can work expeditiously with experts in programming, social media, and big data. This terrain is ripe for experimentation. It is possible, as Charles Lang argues, that we may be able to develop algorithms that are more effective than groups of “live” experts; or as Richard Weissbourd suggests, that automated systems may be able to bring to bear diverse perspectives on complicated problems. But I worry about what we should do when there are hundreds of candidate algorithms, and I would not want to put any algorithm in charge of making that judgment call!

Let me take this opportunity to note a new and very important kind of expertise—the ability to ensure that digital communication tools are used in ways that are fair and accessible and that do not compromise privacy or promulgate privileged information. While those individuals who take care of servers and other features of the digital grid may not be officially designated as “professionals,” we depend on them to behave in a highly professional way!

Thanks to commentators Kendall Bronk, Henry Jenkins, Charles Lang, Seana Moran, Jake Seliger, Dennis Thompson, and Richard Weissbourd.

This is the fifth in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.”

Disruption #1: Markets

In characterizing markets as being disruptive in my essay on the future of the professions, I intended to use this term in a neutral or disinterested way. But it is quite possible that in that essay, my own uneasiness about market forces came through. I may have conveyed the impression that markets are necessarily destructive, as opposed to merely being disruptive.

Don’t get me wrong: I am a fan of markets in many places and in many ways. My family and I are and have been the beneficiaries of markets and market forces; so have millions of people in China and other countries. I’m glad that I live in a society and a world where markets exist and are allowed to function smoothly and without undue restriction. But I am by no means a market absolutist.

Indeed, in earlier centuries, markets were balanced or tempered by religious, ideological, or other political architectures (e.g. primogeniture, royalty). On the whole, I think that this tempering is a good thing. The reference in my essay to the year 1980—with the rise of market supremacy or hegemony around the globe, often called “the triumph of neo-liberalism”—was meant to be cautionary. I am sympathetic to the argument put forth by philosopher Michael Sandel: some things (body parts, as a reasonably uncontroversial examples) should not be for sale. And I believe that professions are more likely to maintain and display their virtues when they are, at least to some extent, protected from market forces.

As one instance, I am a skeptic about the role of markets in education, certainly for the education of younger persons and perhaps throughout the formal educational system. Once companies whose motivation is (inevitably) the seeking of profit invade the educational landscape, they are all too prone to confuse proceeds with progress. To be sure, many non-profit educational entities behave as if they were “for-profit” enterprises; but at least they operate by a different set of rules and do not explicitly create monetary incentives for employees. (I don’t approve of university management companies who compensate employees in terms of the profitability of their specific portfolios.) I do not object to charter schools in general but remain unsympathetic to for-profit charter networks and to voucher systems.

Let me emphasize two other points about markets:

First, markets can exert quite healthy influences on professions. While American institutions of higher education are largely non-profit, the market-like competition among them over the decades has on the whole been a good feature (so, too, the competitiveness among arts institutions, science museums, and the like). And certainly within professions, the market competition among hospital chains, or among law firms, has its positive benefits, as does the emergence of competition for specific services, such as the creation of prototype legal documents or variations within the same family of drugs.

Second, in corporate life, there is not an inherent zero sum game between profitability and a high ethical standard—that is, a standard that goes beyond simply remaining within the law. Ben Heineman has made that point eloquently in many articles and in his book High Performance with High Integrity. My colleagues William Damon and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi concur, adding that high ethical/professional standards are good for business in the long run. But the enormous pressures in the United States to achieve short-term profitability, as well as the imaginativeness (and even implicit endorsement) of efforts to cut corners while avoiding frankly illegal behavior leads to this unfortunate conclusion: professionalism in a highly marketized economy is always at risk. All too often, professionalism takes a back seat to profitability at any and all costs.

Thanks to commentators Steven Brint, Anne Colby, Stephen Gardner, Ben Heineman, Norman Ornstein, and Amelia Peterson.

This is the fourth in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” 

What’s Confusing about the Professions?

If what is (or is not) a profession was ever crystal clear, it is certainly not so any more. Nowadays almost any area of expertise can lay claim to being a profession. Not only does Expertise ABC call itself a profession, but this Expertise also lobbies to be recognized as such by degree granting schools, the courts, and the general public.

To make the situation even cloudier, non-professionals may borrow terminology from professions—as when a person who is involved in any kind of planning calls herself an “architect,” or, less formally, “a curator.” And nowadays, almost anyone who purports to know “anything about anything” feels free to label herself a consultant, a coach, or an adviser—official-sounding titles which, alas, all too often signify nothing. These individuals often mimic the paraphernalia of the “real professions”—and may also charge as much as degree-holding professions. After all, if you charge hundreds of dollars an hour, you must know a lot!

There is no “Pooh-Bah of the Professions”—no single voice or court that can declare a candidate profession as legitimate or disqualify it from consideration. Workers militate to be considered professions, and on occasion, as with the barber surgeons of days of yore, an occupation can lose its professional status. I believe that the burden falls an on any aspiring profession to demonstrate that it, and it alone, fulfills the desiderata that I outlined in the original essay and recapitulated in my second response (specifically, high levels of training with certification, fulfilling expectations associated with the role, offering services in a disinterested way, making complex individual decisions, etc.). But I’d add that in the current era—with so many possible routes to certification, many online—identifying a “true” or “genuine” profession is becoming increasingly difficult.

One possible distinction emanates from the essential characteristics once associated with the role of the professional: wisdom, disinterestedness, service.  In earlier times, many professionals stressed these features even as they minimized their  concern with market forces and rewards; nowadays, valorizing these ethical and social qualities may seem quaint, if not anachronistic.  Expertise trumps service. Nonetheless, these attributes remain as ideals—and legitimize the use of the describer “professional”—as in the phrase, “She behaved very professionally.”

My colleague Jal Mehta has kindly allowed me to link this blog to his insightful essay. Mehta delineates four separate challenges to the professions as currently constituted: briefly, Hegel (inner contradictions); Krauss (market determination of nearly every facet of economic and social life); Jackson (deference to the “common man”); and Sennett (craft as opposed to scientific knowledge). Taken together, this quartet of factors constitutes a formidable challenge to anyone who asserts that, for the professions, “business as usual” will suffice.

And what of the relation between academic disciplines, on the one hand, and professions, on the other? While one commentator on my original post deplored the narrowness of the academy and hailed the public mindedness of the professions, this distinction does not always hold. Some scholars have quite broad conceptions of their disciplines and welcome interdisciplinary work. Analogously, some professionals—as strict constructionists—do not see themselves as agents of broad public needs and concerns.

Thanks to commentators Steven Brint, Henry Jenkins, Jal Mehta, Norman Ornstein, Carol Thompson, and Dennis Thompson.

This is the third in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.”

What’s Good and What’s Bad about the Professions as Currently Constituted?

It is very important to distinguish among the several professions—there’s a risk in painting with too broad a brush across the vast professional landscape. (I’ll deal with some of the pivotal differences in subsequent blogs.) That said, on the whole, contemporary professions still lay claim to mandating high levels of technical training and, in general, to fulfilling the expectations associated with their status and roles. They typically exhibit a high degree of expertise. And through professional organizations (e.g. the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association), they cling assiduously to their special status.

This tenacity may include the adoption of rough tactics designed to prevent any impingement on the power and status of the profession. In this respect, the physician is much better protected than the licensed taxi-driver, who has little recourse against his neighbor who decides to become a driver for Uber. On the other hand, when individuals generally considered to be professionals—like college professors—join a union, they may signal that their professional status does not suffice to secure for them the rights to which they believe they are entitled.

On my initial formulation, an important part of each profession is its claim to provide services in a disinterested way. The question has been raised about how far such disinterestedness does and should extend.

Let me take an example from journalism. Decades ago, Leonard Downie, an editor of The Washington Post, did not exercise his right to vote. He felt that even the appearance of aligning himself with one candidate rather than another undermined the disinterestedness associated with his role. Nowadays, this stance seems quaint to most observers. Yet the question arises whether journalists should feel free to march in favor (or against) particular social or political causes; whether they should be permitted to oscillate between ‘objective’ reporting and personal opinion pieces; and whether they should share their instant views on issues of the day—for example, by tweeting.

I am conservative on this issue. I don’t think one can separate “Jones the reporter” from “Jones the marcher”; and “marcher Jones” dilutes the power and veracity of “reporter Jones.” That said, I don’t mind if my doctor supports a particular political candidate or tweets about a favorite television program, so long as the messages have nothing to do with her medical practice. In other words, the dividing line is the possible overlap between one’s professional role and the particular cause one is espousing.

There will be ambiguous cases: if the doctor’s research is supported by a certain drug company, I need to know this and to be persuaded that her recommendations have nothing to do with that support. And, to return to the journalist, it does not bother me if a political reporter announces that she supports a particular baseball team.

Thanks to commentators Pat Barry, Thomas Ehrlich, Linda Greenhouse (who cites Anthony Lewis), Tom Hoerr, and Jason Kaufman. 

This is the second in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” 

Responding to “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict”

I’ve been very pleased—and, to be frank, happily surprised—by the large number of public and personal responses to my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” Initially, I thought that I would write a single omnibus essay, commenting succinctly on the various points that have been raised. But by virtue of the number and variety of comments, I realized that a single response would either ignore many of the points or dwarf the original essay in length! Instead, I have posted a series of blogs, each directed to a single issue or a closely related set of issues.

Here’s the outline of posts:

Posting #1 What Are Professions, and Where Do They Come From?
Posting #2 What’s Good and What’s Bad about the Professions as Currently Constituted?
Posting #3 What’s Confusing about the Professions?
Posting #4 Disruption #1: Markets
Posting #5 Disruption #2: Digital Technology
Posting #6 Revisiting the Arguments of Richard and Daniel Susskind
Posting #7 Disaggregating the Professions: Comments on the Law
Posting #8 Disaggregating the Professions: General Comments
Posting #9 A Global (as Opposed to American) Perspective
Posting #10 Next Steps, Including Positive Resolutions

Often my postings include direct responses to points made by commentators. In the spirit of a blog (as opposed to a scholarly paper), I do not cite specific comments or references but acknowledge the individuals whose comments were particularly germane to that blog. Apologies if I miss any names.

I welcome additional comments on this series of postings and may address these additional comments in future postings. I hope that, taken together, the original essay, responses, and postings will function as a text on the nature of the professions, their current challenges, and their future course.