As a professionally qualified person I have an interest in
the notion of “the professional”. Indeed, it could be argued that, as both an
accountant and an academic, I am a member of two professions. For the first, I
had to pass examinations and serve a training period: for the second, there was
no structured qualification path but a PhD and appointment as a professor
presumably offer some underpinning to any claims I might make to professional
expertise in teaching and research. It is now possible to acquire a
professional qualification in higher education – fellowship of the Higher Education
Academy - but when I began my academic career all that was available was a form
of certification that one had followed some training in teaching. (When I asked
to do this, I was told that I could not be spared from the classroom to attend
the training sessions and in any case I already had sufficient teaching experience
to make this unnecessary: to which I responded that I would have liked to find
out whether it was always necessary to stand on my head at the start of each
class. I think my line manager was more amused by the image that presented than
impressed by my underlying argument that, in spite of my experience, I might be
doing it all wrong).
I have read some of the sociological literature on the
professions and have taken a close interest in academic research into both of
my professions. I have undertaken some empirical research on the impact on the
accountancy profession of the failure of Arthur Andersen and some on the role
of internal audit, a profession which, I think, is struggling to find its own
separate identity. My continuing work with ICAEW keeps me in touch with many
professional developments. So a new book entitled The Future of the Professions
immediately attracted my interest.
It’s a polemic, from a father and son team, written from the
perspective of a lead author who has clearly for many years challenged the
legal profession to make use of technology – presumably no easy task with a
profession which might be considered more conservative than most. Judging from
his web site, Susskind has combined such challenge with high profile
consultancy activity and has, in the way of many successful consultants, sustained
links with academia and published extensively. His son is a doctoral student at
Oxford.
The central argument of the book – that the professions
should wake up and smell the coffee as far as technology is concerned, as their
future is threatened in ways they seem reluctant to imagine – seems unremarkable
to me, although the authors make much of their experience that many professionals
do not embrace this view. I find this resistance unconvincing from my own experience but
was prepared to be persuaded by evidence and argument: sadly, the book is
disappointing on both counts. The authors’ view that the world would be a
better place if all the expertise locked up in the professions were freely
available seems also, on the face of it, unremarkable, but the steps to be
taken to realise this utopia, which they sketch rather vaguely, may be less of
a priority in a world where other inequalities of resource access might be
deemed more urgent.
But neither evidence nor argument are properly presented here. The
structure of the book looks at first glance to be coherent but the text is repetitive
and constantly refers backwards or forwards to other sections. I also found the
copious footnotes difficult. Legal scholars are very fond of footnotes but I
was once advised by an eminent author that, if something was important enough
to need a footnote, you should reconsider whether it should be in the main text[1].
The book was frustrating in other respects, too. It was full
of broad assertions with no evidence cited to support them. Some examples
(section numbers noted: I can’t cite page numbers as I was reading a Kindle
copy supplied via netgalley.com):
- small businesses do not have the resources to retain accountants (1.7) But the bread and butter of many small and medium sized accounting practices are small businesses. Did the authors talk to any of those running small businesses about their use of professional advisers? There’s also some academic literature on the topic.
- it is apparently an “unavoidable truth that many older professionals find it difficult to embrace the latest tools for communicating” (3.4) Maybe there is evidence in some professions but I would argue that it’s not the case in most universities, where communication by text with students is often standard and teaching rooms don’t contain old technology: you can’t use overhead projector slides if there isn’t a projector!
- “Imagine.. systems that can detect boredom, confusion or frustration amongst a body of students” (4.6) This is not at all difficult for a experienced lecturer. (I suppose you could see the National Student survey scores as a system driving concern about this but not providing a solution…)
- “more people have mobiles than toothbrushes” (4.7) – really?
- “libraries and encyclopaedias have largely been superseded” (4.8). Libraries still exist: indeed, new ones are being built. This is a good example. Libraries certainly look different but they are still a major information source and librarianship is still a profession. I'll concede that encyclopaedias may have gone out of fashion, though.
- eBay displays “ a latent demand for trade that was not in evidence in the past”. Really ? Trade in second hand goods is not new. What about car boot sales? eBay makes such trade easier it easier but this assertion is like claiming that Amazon revealed new evidence of a desire to buy books – Amazon made it easier but the trade already existed.
- It is “widely recognised that there is insufficient funding available to run high quality ….universities if …professors operate in the traditional way.” (5.3) It is unclear what the authors mean by “the traditional way”. In my thirty years of teaching in UK HE I have witnessed tremendous innovation and experimentation in approaches to learning and teaching. The effectiveness of innovation has been hampered by political interference and resource constraints, two aspects of the environment in which many professionals work which the authors do not address in their analysis.
I might have been more comfortable with this broad brush
approach had the book’s argument been more rigorously presented. The authors’
claim to “theorising” amounted to little more than picking out some disconnected
ideas from a very wide range of commentators and linking them to their own
speculations. They set up straw men – the possible counters to their arguments
– and demolished them, rather than supporting their arguments and letting them
stand as convincing. The book is neither a rigorous exposition of an argument
nor a readable discussion for lay people. The authors’ confusion about their
audience is reflected in the invitation to the reader to skip chapter 7 if more
interested in practical application. This suggests that chapter 7 is less
germane to the argument so why not include it as an appendix instead?
Many examples were casually referred to and they talk about "case studies" but none are presented or explained in
any detail. For example, the Khan Academy is frequently mentioned as
an illustration of the use of technology to provide free expertise but I wanted
to know more about how it is used: do teachers use it as a supplementary
resource? How do they view it relative to their expertise? How do students
using it fare in assessment? And how do the answers to such questions
illustrate the authors’ arguments?
What about open access publishing? Dissecting that model
would have been a useful exercise as it raises many of the issues they set out
– the influence of available technology and its potential to support or
undermine the academic profession. It also raises the issue of power, both
financial and political, which is ignored in their approach to analysis of the
professions. The role of professional associations is also ignored, as is
regulation, which could have been considered in their discussion of trust.
Reference was also made to people they have talked to and
their own research but no further detail was provided. I reached the end
expecting to find an appendix summarising the research they say they have
undertaken but was disappointed so I turned to Google to find out more about
the authors. I found out a little more in this presentation but nothing about
the research methods they used. They
claim to cover eight professions and to have conducted 100 interviews but there
is no detail about how the sample was designed, what questions were asked in
interviews or how this data was analysed.
The authors choose not to define the term “profession” which
allows them to range very widely but superficially as their understanding of
some professional areas seems scant.
They also seem to view professional activity in an oddly constrained
way. Although they discuss the training of future professionals, they do not
address how professionals expand the boundaries of their professional knowledge
to address new issues. Arguing that this professional knowledge should be made
more widely available through decomposition and disaggregation seems to assume
that it has a static nature: professional activity is far more dynamic than
this approach seems to acknowledge and is not always one way. Certainly in
university teaching, particularly at postgraduate level, there are great
opportunities to draw on the knowledge of students and to incorporate this into
one’s teaching.
The audience members who apparently suggested that the Susskind
analysis of the legal profession could be usefully extended to other
professions, and thus prompted the book, may have done the authors a
disservice. Professional activity is far too varied for such an exercise to be
carried out at anything other than a superficial and thus unconvincing level so
it is no surprise that they appear to have evinced a reaction among
professionals which confirms the impression of conservatism that they started
with. Digging deeper might have revealed evidence of professional activity
adapting and using technology in ways they have not understood.
I was left feeling very dissatisfied. Reading the book felt
like reading a draft of a student dissertation in which the germ of a good idea
had been submerged by wide ranging but unfocused reading and where the research
design had not been properly addressed.
[1] So
here’s one…“The Footnote” is
an excellent book by Anthony Grafton on the history of the footnote. https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Footnote.html?id=VO2aFrQF24kC
