Professionalism for the Built Environment

Simon Foxell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317479741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, this new book provides thought provoking commentary on the nature of the relationship between society, the prevailing economic system and professionalism in the built environment. It addresses the changing responsibilities of professionals and in particular their obligation to act in the wider public interest. It is both an introduction to and an examination of professionalism and professional bodies in the sector, including a view of the future of professionalism and the organisations serving it.

Simon Foxell outlines the history of professionalism in the sector, comparing and contrasting the development of the three major historic professions working in the construction industry: civil engineering, architecture and surveying. He examines how their systems have developed over time, up to the current period dominated by large professional services firms, and looks at some options for the future, whilst asking difficult questions about ethics, training, education, public trust and expectation from within and outside the industry.

The book concludes with a six-point plan to help, if not ensure, that the professions remain an effective and essential part of both society and the economy; a part that allows the system to operate smoothly and easily, but also fairly and to the benefit of all.

Essential reading for built environment professionals and students doing the professional studies elements of their training or in the process of applying for chartership or registration. The issues and lessons are applicable across all building professions.

1

Profession

Wir haben nicht nur einen Beruf, sondern der Beruf hat auch uns.

(Not only do we have a profession, but a profession has us.)

(Eduard Spranger, Psychologie des Jugendalters, 1927, p251)

New arrivals have come to knock on the door of their chosen institution to request admittance. It has been a long journey to reach this place and time; requiring years of study, effort and determination; and now – bearing skills, knowledge and hard-won experience – turning back is not an option. They primarily want to be welcomed in, and, if that is allowed and agreed, it is likely to be for the duration of their lives. It will require submission to a set of rules – some relatively opaque, others almost invisible – that currently appear to have an uncertain future. Do these eager and deserving postulants know what to expect behind the impressive doors? Their chosen profession appears the very essence of stability, but it too has been on a journey to meet them at this particular moment and the doors, along with the pillars that frame them, may just be for show. What do the new recruits really know of the profession they want to join and the commitment they are about to make?

The long-established construction discipline they want to join, despite its appearance and talk, is itself not a stand-alone entity, but an element in a much greater system of professions that exists across the UK and the world; a system they will also be signing up to become a part of. The system of professions comes with its own extended history and with an essential, if problematic and ever dynamic, relationship to society. It is a system, which will adopt them as much as they adopt it. For they are about to enter a compact, not so much with their institution as with wider society, their clients and employers; to behave in a certain way, to maintain expertise and provide a range of skills and services; and, in return, win status, opportunities and, to an extent, a living. The nature of the compact or deal isn’t necessarily very clear, but it has been arrived at after centuries of trial, error, push and shove; a process that will carry on shifting the underlying terms of their working lives for the foreseeable future and well beyond.

The professional system has developed over both time and geography in response to the need to foster and provide insight, expertise and knowhow in specialist types of work that rely on intellect, judgement and, critically, good faith. Such services are difficult to describe clearly, certainly in advance, and hence difficult to price, especially when the knowledge is in an area that is beyond a commissioning party’s own comprehension. Society requires solutions that provide effective answers to immediate challenges while ensuring that wider and longer-term views are taken, the level of risk is minimized and those with privileged and unchallengeable knowledge do not take advantage of their position. The best if not the only way to deliver such solutions has proved over time to be through a system of trust. The challenge has been to build and maintain that trust while being able to nurture and guarantee the proficiency to tackle fresh problems.

The solution reached in many parts of the world has been for society and government to accept and recognize self-regulating associations of experts who have an interest in maintaining quality and who will peer review and police one another’s activities to ensure high standards are maintained. To achieve this those associations need to control access to their group and maintain the authority to eject members who do not meet, or continue to meet, their collective standards of both work and behaviour. In return they expect a monopoly over the provision of their particular service in a geographic area and can be expected to fight off any competitors they see as infringing it.

This solution forms the foundation for the professional system and, because it is effectively a compact between those with expertise and the ruling and administrative system of a society, it can be prone to political influence, interference and expediency. For example, during the US Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), the recognition of professional standing was abruptly cancelled, and anyone was allowed to practice, resulting in huge damage and mistrust (Sarfatti Larson 2013 [1977]). Alternatively, if professionals are given too much licence, there is a real danger of self-aggrandisement and abdication of responsibility. It is easy for professionals to become a self-serving elite. Those who get too close to power assume a ruling position in society is theirs by right, or alternatively, they lose their essential independence and ability to self-regulate. The compact needs to be frequently reviewed and kept in good shape with each side respecting the role of the other as it is renegotiated for fresh circumstances and times. Professionalism needs to be externally based, maintaining separation from government, clients and individual practice and as a result gaining perspective.

The form of the compact varies significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but in Britain it originally and deliberately placed the professions just outside the competitive capitalist system, in so far as that was possible. This was grounded in the belief that the temptation of additional earnings should not have an influence on critical judgements and decisions on behalf of society. The independent application of expertise and knowledge should not be, or perceived to be, compromised by financial factors. In the construction sector a degree of separation was sought between commerce and professionalism, leading to fixed fee scales to avoid competition by price and any financial involvement with manufacture, building or development in order to protect professional independence and save it from moral jeopardy. This approach, of ‘people with power based on their expertise, neither knights nor peasants but able to front the middle to tell both what to do’ (Pye 2014, p154), has been excised in recent decades, both in the UK and elsewhere, and today built environment professionals are exhorted to be as entrepreneurial and business-minded as possible. This has unquestionably redefined the relationship between the professional and society, but the consequences have been little discussed, other than to bemoan the downgraded influence of the professions, and there has been scarcely any attempt to consciously recast or re-invent the professional compact for modern times and circumstances.

Roots of professionalism in Britain

The origins of professionalism in Europe lie in the three ‘learned professions’: the church (including scholars), medicine and the law. The separate social and legal status of these occupations provided the necessary licence for highly trained individuals to work relatively freely outside the restrictive employment norms of the feudal system and ensured a means of control over who could and couldn’t practise a discipline. A parallel system of trade guilds controlled a much wider range of crafts and occupations, including all the building trades and, initially at least, the design and construction oversight roles. The guilds were generally more restrictive and rule-bound than the professions and although they largely faded from sight during the early modern period, only reappearing much later and in a new guise as trade unions, they left behind a substantial legacy of occupational traditions and demarcations for new professional organizations eventually adopt. While the guilds declined the learned professions thrived and gradually integrated their activities with those of the rapidly developing universities that opened across Europe during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods.

In early modern continental Europe the universities supported a wide range of disciplines including mathematics, science and technology, and provided a home and training for a great breadth of specialisms. In contrast, English universities focused narrowly on theology and classical studies, leaving the higher levels of medical education to teaching hospitals and legal training to the Inns of Court. Other disciplines relied almost entirely on apprenticeships with most skills and knowledge either handed down from a master or learnt on the job. This separation, with the resultant lack of both an academic base and state imposed administrative support for professional disciplines during their formative periods, created a distinct professional ethos in England and Wales – Scotland adopted a more European approach. The new professions, as each emerged, needed to be largely self-sufficient and independent, both academically and politically. Perversely, and for both good and bad, it also gave them a more amateur, do-it-yourself quality than their continental equivalents, making them reliant on an active and participatory membership in order to thrive. The relative self-sufficiency of English and Commonwealth professionalism continues to be distinctively different from the state-sanctioned system prevalent elsewhere in Europe.

In the 18th century, with ever growing technical expertise, an expanding workforce and an increasingly connected world, specialist workers along with many enthusiastic amateurs intent on increasing their knowledge and engaging with their peers and colleagues, met in newly founded clubs and societies. This was as true for the well-connected founders of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), established in London in 1725 as the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce; the members of the Bath and West Society (1777), founded to promote and improve agriculture; and the group of Midlands’ industrialists, natural philosophers and inveterate inventors who met monthly as the Lunar Society of Birmingham (1775–1813). Generally such organizations would establish themselves long before seeking official or royal approval. Only in rare cases, usually when national security was at stake, would bodies be instigated directly by the State (e.g. the Royal Observatory in 1647 or the Ordnance Survey in 1747).

Professional formation

With less prominence, similar meetings began to be organized across Britain amongst various proto-professional groups and, often separately, between their apprentices and trainees. In March 1771 a group of 13 senior engineers, including John Smeaton (1724–92) and Robert Mylne (1734–1811), started meeting in the King’s Head Tavern in Holborn, London following the regular sessions of Parliamentary Committees dealing with legislation for the new roads, navigations and canals they were involved with.¹ Architects, having first gathered as sub-groups within a number of artist societies and fraternities as well as the Royal Academy of Arts (1768), struck out on their own with the ‘Architects’ Club’ in October 1791 and, from then on, met weekly at the Thatched House Tavern in St James, London. Members included James Wyatt (1746–1813), Henry Holland (1745–1806), George Dance junior (1741–1825) and Samuel Pepys Cockerell (1753–1827) (Kaye 1960, pp57–8). The founders of the City Company of Surveyors having been excluded from the Architects’ Club for their unwelcome commercial links, established the ‘Surveyors’ Club’ only a few months later in 1792 (Thompson 1968 pp71–2).

Initially these societies were dining clubs, but by early in the next century the expectations and needs of their members had expanded. A strong demand had developed for ways to represent and protect the interests of the various different groups, for forums in which technical information could be shared and prepared for publication and for a more structured and improved system of education for new recruits. Above all there was a demand for means of establishing social respectability and helping the public to distinguish the skilled and educated from their lesser competitors and the interlopers who were believed to be damaging their social standing and threatening their livelihoods. It was a call for something we would recognize as a professional body. A period of institution building had begun.

For the groups of friends, colleagues and rivals who met in coffee houses and rented meeting rooms in the rough and ready period prior to establishing more formal associations, there was little doubt that they were already professionals or that they had a discipline to call their own. They wanted to meet to exchange ideas and share their enthusiasms, but not necessarily to found worthy institutions. No longer were they the long bearded seniors familiar with the corridors of Parliament, but impatient young men who wanted to make a difference and build themselves the professional home that they saw as essential to support and facilitate their future career. The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) was formed by a group of young engineers, one still an articled pupil, with an average age of 25, but they were also realistic and worldly-wise enough to know that they needed a figurehead of much greater reputation and years than themselves, and in 1820 persuaded the revered, 63 year old Thomas Telford to accept the post of President. It was a post he occupied for another 14 years, until his death in 1834 (Watson 1988, p9).

The founding of the Institute of British Architects was messier, comprising the merging and fracturing of several rival architectural groups, including the Society of British Architects. A new journal, the Architectural Magazine reported on their first meeting in The Freemason’s Tavern in Covent Garden, London in January 1834 (Loudon 1834, p89). Under the heading ‘Domestic Notices’ it noted:

Architectural Societies. – Endeavours seem to be making among the architects and surveyors of London and its vicinity to establish Architectural Societies. A number of architects have met occasionally, for mutual improvement in...