Professions at Bay

Stirling Professions and Management Conference 1993, Ian Glover, Michael Hughes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351731607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000. This collection of works explores the sources of conflict and change which affect professional occupations, the responses of these occupations to such forces and the possible or likely outcomes of these actions and reactions for the character of British management.

Part I
Introduction

1 The challenge to professions

Ian Glover and Michael Hughes

Introduction

Our aim in this book is to discuss and consider the recent, contemporary and future situation of professions in the UK, More specifically, we are interested in the sources of conflict and change which affect professional occupations, with the responses of such occupations to such forces, and with the possible or likely outcomes for the character of British management.

In this introductory chapter we first describe and discuss the general context of professional occupations in the UK. Then we describe and consider the various challenges which they have recently faced, are facing and are likely to face in the future. These include commercialism, managerialism and developments in higher education. Then we briefly consider the appropriateness and the possible future of professional producer-consumer relationships in different kinds of sectoral and organizational context. We go on to discuss the relevance of professional resources in the twenty-first century before offering brief outlines of each of the subsequent sections and chapters of the book. The next three sections of the book consist of thirteen chapters on independent, public sector and organizational professions. The final discussion and conclusion section consists of one chapter on the relevance of the book's contents to the future of management in the UK.

The general context

In some sectors of the UK's economy professionals virtually are the management, and in others they supply significant proportions, but by no means all, of those who run things. Examples of the former case have included health care, the construction industry, much of local government, and higher education, and most of the major religious denominations. Examples of the latter include most sectors of manufacturing and retailing, management consultancy, banking and central government.

The UK's education system was not designed and developed, as it expanded during the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, to ensure that UK-based commerce and manufacturing attracted and were managed by their fair shares of the most able or socially advantaged members of each generation. Until long after the end of the Second World War many of the most able school leavers were encouraged to set their sights on central government, the armed forces and the independent and learned professions like the law, medicine, the clergy and university research and teaching. Only very slowly and following the demise of the Empire and of its relatively easy markets after 1945, and mainly during the 1960s and 1970s and in the face of growing foreign industrial and commercial competition, did national priorities begin to change. Throughout the nineteenth century and until long into the twentieth there was much of what Western Europeans and North Americans would have regarded as a vacuum in higher education regarding the production of relevantly educated graduates for industry and commerce. It was filled, incompletely but to some useful effect, by the efforts of employers, professional associations and lecturers and teachers employed by local commercial and technical colleges. Accountants, engineers of many kinds and surveyors were amongst their main products. Such people formed the majority of senior and middle managers across many sectors. However the highest and some less elevated managerial positions tended, also, to be reserved for graduates in liberal arts and pure science subjects from the traditional universities.

In the civil service and the armed forces, and in larger commercial and industrial employing organizations with staffing policies which followed theirs, senior jobs tended to be dominated by such people, with professionally qualified specialists 'on tap but not on top', supporting them from below. At the top of the civil service the gentlemanly, amateur, philosopher-king liberal arts or pure science graduates were the 'custodians' (Glover, 1977) the 'generalists' who formed its top Administrative Class. Beneath them were the 'specialists', often members of the more lowly Executive Class, the 'outstretched arm' of their Administrative betters, there to inform and to implement the decision-making of the latter. This approach to the staffing and organization of management has been called the 'metropolitan' one because of its association with major national employing organizations very often based in London and the Home Counties, run by graduates of Oxford, Cambridge and London and other traditional universities (Glover and Kelly, 1987).

However in medium-sized and more provincially-based companies and in local government, the National Health Service (NHS) and in most of the public corporations and industries nationalized by Labour governments between 1945 and 1951, there was a different and in most respects opposed, 'provincial' (Glover and Kelly, 1987) way of staffing and organizing management-level work (also see Burrage, 1973). Here the professional specialists generally were 'the management' and they tended, in the public sector, to be directly responsible only to elected politicians, who tended to be unfamiliar with the details of their work.

The generally accepted strengths of the custodians were the objectivity and impartiality which resulted from their having quite rigorously trained minds, usually in non-relevant subjects, often uncluttered by much detailed knowledge of specialist tasks. Their generally accepted weaknesses were the lack of such knowledge, and an arms'-length stance towards messy practical necessity and reality. The strengths and weaknesses of the professionals tended to be the opposite of these. So professionals, while relatively narrow in outlook, training, abilities and sympathies, were competent within their ambit, and much more practical and 'hands-on' in general than the custodians. Of course many custodians were willing to dirty then hands and many professionals broadened themselves through self-education and experience, but they tended to be thought of as exceptions even if they were not.

The main remedies advocated in the twentieth century, especially in its last third, as cures for the weaknesses implied by this account, have been US-influenced management training and business education and a more general shift in emphasis in higher education from the academic to the vocational. Post-experience management courses have helped to teach the custodian something useful, such as accountancy, marketing and personnel management. The narrow accountant has learnt about marketing and operations management, the marketing specialist about the latter and finance and personnel, the engineer about finance, markets, people, and so on. Business and management studies have been amongst the fastest growing subjects in higher education since the 1940s and most courses leading to professional and other higher-level specialist practical qualifications are nowadays taught in universities to foil-time students, rather than in commercial and technical colleges to part-time ones. Further, specialist professional degree courses tend to be much broader than their counterparts of a generation or two ago. Architects, doctors and engineers learn about money and markets and accountants learn about markets, personnel and operations management, and so on. As we write there is public debate about how top police officers should be equipped with financial and other 'managerial' skills and about whether business expertise should be bought into police forces/services, with some top job holders being employed without any experience of police work.

However equivalent degree or similar courses on the continent of Europe aimed at senior posts in industry, commerce and government, have long been equally or more technocratic. Higher education institutions responsible for engineering, business economics and administrative education in France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Low Countries and elsewhere on the Continent, have long produced broadly educated and commercially and financially and/or technically knowledgeable expert people who are both specialists and generalists. In the case of engineers these people are 'true' technocrats and in the case of graduates in business economics and administration they are broadly-defined ones. What we mean by this is that all such people are powerful because of their mastery of technique, and technocrats in a general sense, and that those amongst them whose main expertise is technical, especially engineers, are the most completely and truly technocratic of all. Such people have tended to be both educated and trained before their university or equivalent studies are complete. Engineers, for example, have generally taken courses lasting for about six years following a much broader secondary education than their UK counterparts have received. The first half of their engineering studies is mainly theoretical, for example in physics, thermodynamics, economics and mathematics, and the second half consists mainly of practical project work under the tutelage of professors with significant to very substantial records of industrial experience and/or achievement (Chisholm, 1975; Hutton and Lawrence, 1981; Lawrence, 1992).

In Japan and elsewhere in the Far East a similarly technocratic philosophy tends to prevail but while the relevant forms of expert labour are also recruited from higher education, where 'theory' is also inculcated, it is trained and developed beyond its theoretical base by employers. These broad and general differences are summarised within the following schema:

Professional-Managerial:

Expert labour is developed partly in full-time education and partly through on the-job experience and post-experience education and training. Expert labour of this type is often subordinated to general management. Examples include the Anglo-Saxon countries, such as the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India.

University-formed Technocratic:

All or most expert labour is produced in full-time higher education (often with employer help) and management is part of technical expertise and not vice-versa. Examples include France, Germany, Sweden, the other Scandinavian and the Benelux countries.

Company-centred Technocratic:

Expert labour is recruited from higher education but is trained and developed beyond its theoretical base by employers. Management tends to be subordinated to or to be part of technical expertise. Examples include Japan and other Far Eastern countries.

Source: Glover and Tracey (1997)

In The Professional-Managerial Class (Glover and Hughes, 1996b, p. 5) the above differences were also partly summarised by outlining two master, contrasting, depictions of ways of constructing and organizing 'management-level and expert "professional" occupations, tasks, qualifications, expertise and divisions of labour' (p. 4), These were 'what Albert (1993) called the Rhine and the Neo-American versions of capitalism, and what Fores, Glover and Rey (1976) call Technik and (later, Business) Management. The former tends to emphasize the value of production, process, the long term, management in specialist activities, and the more positive side of the state's role in economic life. The latter, the neo-American or the (Business) Management model, stresses consumption, outcome, the short-term, management of specialist activities, and the more negative side of the state's role' (Glover and Hughes, 1996b, p. 5).

All of the above points were made at greater length in The Professional-Managerial Class (chapter 1). However they have since been added to and qualified in articles by Glover and Tracey (1997) and Glover, Tracey and Currie (1998). In the latter of these two articles a number of points about the long-term resilience, also hinted at in The Professional-Managerial Class, of the Business Management approach and of the societies responsible for it, especially the UK and the USA, are spelt out more fully. In the first article Glover and Tracey (1997, pp.773, 774) added the category of manager to those of technocrat, custodian and professional, discovered above. Since writing this article it occurred to Glover and Tracey that the category of manager would have benefited from putting the word business in front of it. This is apparent in the following quotation from the paper, which depicts characteristics and typical examples of all four categories:

Regarding our typology of top job holders, we would now add the category of manager to those of technocrat, custodian and professional, so as to cover the whole range of alternative backgrounds (apart from that of the unqualified "practical man" [Barnett, 1972, pp. 95-96; Locke, 1984, 1989])'. A typical "manager" would have a business studies or business degree or an MBA; a typical "technocrat" a Continental engineering Diploma (Dipl.Ing.), or a UK M.Eng., or B.Eng. degree plus a relevant Masters degree, such as an MSc in Technology Management or an MBA; a typical "custodian" an arts or natural or social science degree or degrees. A typical "professional" would be a chartered accountant, architect, chartered engineer, high-level marketing researcher, personnel specialist, surveyor, or of course lawyer or doctor (Glover and Tracey, 1997, pp. 773, 774).

The article goes on to note how many individuals combine elements of two or more of the above in their backgrounds, and to say that 'Management-level people in the UK tend to be professional-managerial but are evolving into a mixture of products of all three ways of producing people - they are becoming more technocratic - with elements of the custodian still around' (op cit. p. 774).

Why, after discussing the UK's professions and professionals in terms which are neither especially unfriendly nor especially pessimistic, are we doing so in a book whose main title, Professions at Bay, suggests that they are under threat? The answer is that while the attributes and characteristics of professionals have been and are in general being underpinned, developed and added to in the UK setting, since the 1960s they have been subjected to a great deal of public criticism and externally induced change, much of which has been openly hostile. Markets which independent fee-taking professionals operate in have been deregulated, subjecting them to often considerably heightened competition. The jobs of some public sector professionals have been lost, and others contracted out or otherwise made less secure during cost-cutting exercises, with public-sector professional work increasingly subjected to tough and even oppressive managerial(ist) control. In the private sector, other organizational professionals have also been operating since the 1960s in more demanding competitive environments, with job losses, job insecurity and tough management control very common.

The sources of public and private criticism of professions have by no means all been part and parcel of the Thatcherite project of deregulation. It is true that the public sector professionals, in the NHS, education, the civil service and local government and so on, were for most of the twentieth century, and certainly since 1945, major beneficiaries of big government, the welfare state and of relatively high levels of public expenditure. It is also true that many independent (or partly so) fee-taking professional occupations, like accountancy, architecture, civil engineering, law, surveying, private medicine, veterinary surgery, and so on, have been both lucrative and open to varying degrees to accusations about rigging markets. Thus cosy public sector employment and monopolistic practices in the private sector have led many right-wing and other critics of professions to focus in a sometimes crude and general way on their presumed economic inefficiency.

However a number of other criticisms, mainly of the 1970s, were equally fundamental but rather different in emphasis. They drew on international comparisons of management and organization and they were also historically informed (Glover, 1978a, 1980, 1985; Child et al, 1983; Locke, 1984, 1989; also see Dingley, 1996). They did not offer blanket criticisms of professions; and they approved strongly of the ethical, social and vocational dedication of many professionals and their occupations, and they believed, too, that notions of professional jurisdiction and expert 'practice' did often function to serve the individual and public or general good. What these writers did do was to make a number of specific points about the origins, nature and role of professional activities in different contexts. As this book does, they distinguished between the independent (traditional, original, fee-taking) professions, and the public sector and organizational ones. The traditionally independent professions such as the law and medicine did, it was felt, still deserve to enjoy most of their original monopoly powers and to be subjects of relatively high expectations regarding their ethics, insofar a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Part I - Introduction
• Part II - Independent Professions
• Part III - Public Sector Professions
• Part IV - Organizational Professions
• Part V - Discussion
• Index