Abstract
This book explores the nature of professional judgement from a range of disciplinary and professional perspectives. Its central theme is that the ‘people professions’, such as education, social work, nursing and probation, are essentially ethical or moral enterprises. Hence technical rationality, which privileges knowledge which is objective, generalizable and abstract, is inadequate in capturing the complexities of professional knowledge. The contributions to this edited collection are concerned with exploring alternative theories and practices which reconceptualize the nature of professional knowledge and judgment. In so doing, contributors are particularly influenced by Aristotle’s concept of ‘phronesis’ or practical wisdom, which relates to the ability to make sound judgments.
The book is divided into three parts, with five contributions in each part. Part One tackles some of the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of professional knowledge and wisdom. The first two contributions, by Joseph Dunne and Michael Luntley, provide two different perspectives on professional knowledge. Whilst Dunne emphasizes the distinctive nature of practitioners’ knowledge and experience, Luntley makes a persuasive challenge to the dichotomy between personal and propositional knowledge. He argues that ordinary propositional is quite adequate to encompass the range of tacit and experiential knowledge that professionals engage with, if we understand propositions as involving concepts as well as facts. For Luntley, ‘Expertise is marked, in part, by a rich capacity for attending to the fine discriminations that, once picked up with concepts, can become the subject matter of propositional knowledge’ (p. 40). The other chapters in this section are concerned with evidence based practice, and the teaching of ethics.
Part Two focuses on aspects of the emotional and affective domains in the people professions. The first two chapters are concerned primarily with philosophical and conceptual issues relating to emotions and professional practice. Both authors (David Carr and Kristján Kristjánsson) draw on Aristotle to provide a framework for how the cultivation of moral character can be seen as central to good professional practice. The examples in this chapter do not draw on any examples from probation, but Gregory (2011) has used the concept of phronesis in her work to show how probation officers continued to engage in reflexive practice despite managerial imperatives towards technical rationality. The other chapters in this section deal with the relevance of gender to professional knowledge (Liz Bondi), the need for greater emotional literacy in the workplace (Susie Orbach), and the importance of imagination in professional wisdom (John Swinton).
The final part of the book is entitled ‘Legislation, Regulation and Professional Judgment’ and includes contributions on how regulatory frameworks impact on professions in social work, counselling, ministry and social policy. The contribution which is likely to be of the most direct relevance to practitioners in the probation field is Sue White’s chapter on certainty and uncertainty in social work. She explores the paradox that emerged from ethnographic studies whereby doctors tended to exhibit considerable uncertainty and scepticism about the meaning of scientific test results, but expressed more speed and certainty in judgements about human interactions. Her research in social work settings suggests three possible explanations: the oversimplification of complex theories about human behaviour in social work textbooks; the tendency for initial moral judgments made by practitioners to be reinforced by subsequent group discussions; and institutional pressures to make quick decisions on the basis of limited information. There are clear parallels to decision making processes in probation contexts, where the consequences of precipitous judgments may be equally severe. For White, there needs to be a clearer organizational focus on how and when professionals can be given the space to think.
In their introduction, the editors lament the ‘scandal of academic apartheid’ (p. 1) which characterizes research being undertaken on similar issues in different disciplines. This book is certainly successful in bringing together different perspectives from a range of academic disciplines and professional contexts. It provides an interesting contribution to the growing literature on professional knowledge and will be useful to practitioners undertaking study or further study in the area or who are interested in comparing the current debates across professional contexts. However, the nature of the edited collection means that the opportunities for the individual authors to reflect on and engage with the work of the others in the volume have been limited. This is most evident in Part One, where Luntley argues that the dichotomy between professional knowledge and propositional knowledge is unhelpful, but other contributors in this section treat the dichotomy as unproblematic. It is also the case that the book remains multidisciplinary in approach rather than engaging in a genuinely interdisciplinary dialogue between the different academic and professional perspectives. This book does, however, provide an extremely useful starting point from which to engage in such discussions.