PROFESSION & ORGANIZATIONS

Health Care Organizations and Profession



Health Care Organizations and Profession

Profession and Professionalism

To describe an occupation as a 'profession' may be simply to identify it as a particular kind of occupation, typically one with high status and high rewards, requiring long formal training and delivering a personal service. Or, it might also be, particularly if it is one's own occupation being described, to make claims about the trustworthiness of members of that occupation. The implication of this is that it is safe for clients to leave their fate in professional hands, to trust in 'professional judgement' and to leave decisions to professional discretion. Here, 'professional' connotes expertise and probity simultaneously (Aiken, 2003, pp.55-67).

The notion of professionalism is related, needless to say, with the profession. The profession is a type of business purchased legitimately by a person after a career of study or work, given the skills, knowledge and skills specific to the chosen activity. The attitude of professionalism, to act as a professional means that when exercising this task or actividd, the person functions according to specific parameters set for it as well according to general parameters of conduct and morality. Professionalism can exist however in the case of people who do not have an official legal profession but still show important features of respect, commitment, dedication and seriousness in what they do. Professionalism is without doubt one of the most wanted features in establishing the job, but at the same time can be difficult to measure in quantitative terms. Obviously there are some elements that can be clearly identified as lack of professionalism, such as tardiness, aggressive language and forms of communication or improper handling, lack of commitment to the activity, the appearance is not appropriate, the establishment of affective bonds with colleagues or customers when this is not allowed, and so on.

In this functionalist approach, a number of characteristics or traits of professions were identified as particularly significant for their role in society: namely, the possession of a body of theoretical knowledge; self-regulating practice; authority over clients; and community rather than self-orientation. As a related development, some sociologists saw these core traits as a way of determining which occupations really were professions and, therefore, which ones were not, but which might, for example, be classified as 'semi-professions'. Nursing, for example, was often so described in the 1950s and 1960s, allegedly because it lacked sufficient theoretical knowledge or powers of self-regulation to warrant designation as a profession. The implication was that only by acquiring these could such occupations become professions (Nicolini, 2008, pp.245-263).

The concepts of profession and professionalization have, then, provided powerful if sometimes unfocused lenses through which sociologists have examined medicine as an occupation. The more historically grounded accounts of medical professionalization produced in the 1970s and 1980s have given a rich picture of how this one group gained power and status (although, with hindsight, the critical stance taken towards medicine may have been somewhat overdrawn). The concepts of profession and professionalization may have been less helpful in ...