Profession - The Baroness O’Neill

I, too, am delighted to be taking part in this symposium - but I too am unsure how well we can talk about my given subject.   As we have heard from our chairman the word ‘vocation’ clearly now has its difficulties and has been pushed to the margins in many ways.  Now it might at first seem odd to say that similar difficulties surround the word ‘profession’ because this is a word which is being used to fill at least part of the gap left by the demotion of the word’ vocation’,  I suppose in some ways we could see in this development some continuity with Luther’s thoughts about the vocation of a Christian and about the hallowing of work of all sorts: we all have a vocation now - and now we are also all professionals.

Or are we? I saw a van recently with the message on the side ‘Have your carpets professionally cleaned’. I want to start there, because I think it reminds us what happens when a word goes downhill. I think the message meant ‘Wouldn’t you like your carpet to be cleaned by somebody who has some skill or ability at cleaning carpets, perhaps with a machine that is right for the purpose?’ and so on. But we still, I think, recognise a use of the noun ‘profession’ which is considerably narrower than that, where just to have a skill is not to have a profession.

But the professions are very diverse and I think it is quite hard to see what holds them together. What do lawyers, the ministry, architects, doctors, psychoanalysts and academics have in common?  I think the easy and simple thing to say (I also think it’s true – easy and simple things sometimes are true) is that somewhere in the centre of all these activities there is a thought that this is not just a job, that there is some conception of service. This is often encapsulated in the notion of the best interest of the client or the best interest of the patient, or the best interest of the person for whom one is responsible or on whose behalf one is appearing. That notion of best interest is, of course, hard to define, but a nice little operational way of looking at it is that the person who has a profession is not expected – indeed is expected not – to leave the job at five o’clock because that is when working hours end, unless they have handed over in an appropriate way anyone whom they are serving; the professional nurse does not leave the patient unattended simply because the clock strikes.

Now it’s quite hard to see how these ideals of what a profession is (and I have just tried to characterise it in a very lowly way) could be carried through in an era in which many professions are employed professions. One can immediately see that teachers are employed, doctors are employed, nurses are employed. But many other professions are self-employed, to use the legal category: for example engineers, architects, psychoanalysts.    I once went to talk to the Institute of Psychoanalysts and found myself involved in a particularly reflective and instructive discussion with a group who would certainly think of themselves as a profession but have peculiar difficulties in having professional structures – so I now need to talk a little bit about professional structures.

It is common to say ‘Well, the things that professions do and professional bodies in particular do, is to control the quality of the performance’. So I suspect that the real reason why the man who cleans your carpets, or offers to clean your carpets, is not a professional is that as a matter of fact you or I or anyone else could set ourselves up as carpet cleaners. There is no particular qualification, though it would help to buy one of those bits of kit. So quality at entry is traditionally one of the things required by a profession.  Just as the guilds used to control entry of the journeymen fully into the guild, so we think that the professions control the quality of the entrant. But they haven’t always very successfully controlled the continuing quality of performance of their members through life. I’ll come back to that little problem. Nor have they always found it so easy to deal with the case of failure by a fellow professional. Very often professional bodies have cast themselves in the role of a professional defence association, so that their role has been to defend the less than adequate performance of colleagues rather than to protect the public from it. Some professions are more self-conscious of dividing these roles. Consider the difference between the British Medical Association which carries the defence and also, if you will, the trades union function for what is an employed profession for the most part, and on the other hand the role of the General Medical Council which has much more concern for quality control and dealing with professional failure.