Sensuous Learning for Practical Judgment in Professional Practice

Volume 1: Arts-based Methods

Elena P. Antonacopoulou,Steven S. Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319988634
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Strategia di business
• Index: Business

The first volume of this ground-breaking book critically examines how and why arts-based methods such as choir conducting workshops and dialogue improvisation can make a difference in improving professional practice. Taking a 'human-centred' approach, it delivers an insightful account of what these approaches do differently to achieve a new mode of learning – 'sensuous learning' – that cultivates professional judgment to serve the common good, simultaneously supporting personal and collective growth. The chapters present cutting edge examples of multiplewaysarts-based methods underpin learning arenas for expanding leadership and improving professional practice. The reflexivity cultivated through these learning arenas has the unique potential to improve professional practice, not merely by enhancing competence but also by cultivating character and conscience, which is central in making judgments that serve the common good. These benefits are relevant for professional practitioners sharpening the skills and behaviours needed in organisations, including creativity, diversity, imagination, and improvisation.

© The Author(s) 2019

Elena P. Antonacopoulou and Steven S. Taylor (eds.)Sensuous Learning for Practical Judgment in Professional PracticePalgrave Studies in Business, Arts and Humanitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98863-4_2

Begin Abstract

Sensuous Learning: What It Is and Why It Matters in Addressing the Ineptitude in Professional Practice

Elena P. Antonacopoulou¹

(1)

University of Liverpool Management School (ULMS), Liverpool, UK

Elena P. Antonacopoulou

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

This chapter introduces the fundamental motivation of why to develop Sensuous Learning, what it means, and why it matters in restoring trust in professions and professionals. This trust has been compromised by the ineptitude that professional practices often reflect in the ways they are performed. Ineptitude is the condition where professionals do not demonstrate their public accountability and responsibility in serving the common good. Sensuous Learning is, therefore, presented as a new learning theory whose impact is especially orientated in cultivating character and conscience and not only competence in professional practice. The focus on character and conscience is central to elevating reflexivity as a critical capacity supporting practical judgement in professional practice. Reflexivity is critical in addressing professional ineptitude, because it promotes a way of making sense of the world and responding to dilemmas and paradoxes in everyday life by engaging not only cognitions and emotions. Instead, reflexivity promotes an emplacement in aligning the embodiment and enactment in the sensemaking that shapes professional practices. This means that emplacement attends to the choices made which are often sensuous in nature. Thus, it promotes a new intelligence beyond cognitive and emotional intelligence (IQ and EQ). Emplacement as a way of coming to our senses, reflects a CORE intelligence (CQ). Reference to CORE encapsulates Centeredness, Oneness, Reflex and Energy as critical dimensions in the ways professional practices are conducted. They collectively form CQ which restores freedom of choice in the practical judgements reflecting a fresh perspective on what professionalism is. Introducing CQ as a foundation for rethinking professionalism embeds sensuousness— sensibility , sensitivity, and sentience —as integral to the sensemaking that informs practical judgements in professional practice. Sensuous Learning aligns cognitions, emotions, and intuitive insights by fostering critique such that the complex— symplegma —of emerging sensations exposes the CORE of professionalism that inspires a Code of Chivalry (character and conscience) in professional practice.

Ineptitude in Professional Practice: Professionalism Revisited

Professional ineptitude must neither be confused with incompetence, nor defensive mechanisms that prevent the capacity to consistently act with professional ethos. Instead, professional ineptitude is the absence of a character -infused response to the way one choses to act which calls for the engagement of one’s conscience in doing so. Responding to the global challenge of professional ineptitude calls for measures that extend beyond regulation and the use of ethical codes or indeed calls for moral action to underpin professional practice (Blond et al. 2015; Oakley and Cocking 2006). If we are to address professional ineptitude it is imperative to understand the institutional structures (including the knowledge that guides action) that professionals are governed by. In doing so, we can begin to explore the challenge from the very foundations of professionalism itself (Romme 2016).

The word ‘professional’ is indicating a social link constitutive of an identity, and such sociology of professions (Abbott 1988) is taking into account a mix between a professional logic (which is built around the notion of capabilities and knowledge) and an institutional logic (which is related with the genesis, the diffusion, the application, and the transformation of a related body of knowledge). The profession, therefore, becomes both a means of identifying professionals among other practitioners and also serves as a means of identification for an individual with a group through professional membership (Antonacopoulou and Pesqueux 2010).

Rethinking professionalism predisposes revisiting the body of knowledge and ways of knowing that govern professional practice. Professionalism is no longer to be judged on the basis of expertise and competence in performing specialist practices. Professionals are no longer just those with expert knowledge. Instead, in this chapter a case will be made that professionals are those that actively and consistently demonstrate sensibility , sensitivity , and sentience all aspects of sensuousness embedded in practising reflexivity in everyday professional practice, especially when addressing tensions and dilemmas integral to their practice.

The latter it will be argued, provides the scope to develop a fresh conceptualisation of professionalism founded on phronesis (practical judgement) as a mode of knowing that places the common good as central to the ethos of professionalism. Redefining professionalism in these terms, demands more than critical reflection in professional practice, inviting instead, a return to reflexivity which is elaborated in this chapter. This will form the foundation for explicating how might reflexivity become a professional capacity for phronesis (Antonacopoulou 2017) that can be developed through Sensuous Learning.

Practising Phronesis: A Critical Mode of Knowing and Sensemaking in Professional Practice

The Aristotelian notion of phronesis (see interpretations by McIntyre 1985; Eikeland 2009), attests to the power of exercising choice, making practical judgements, and taking action. This means that the essence of phronesis is not just the knowledge that guides the actions taken, but also the everyday experiences where action is taken and decisions about action are made, all of which combine to form the character of man. Hence, phronesis is a way of acting, thinking, knowing, and living, which reflect the character of man described as phronimos (Noel 1999) or homo-phroneticus (Antonacopoulou 2012). Homo-phroneticus (unlike homo-economicus or homo-sociologicus—Reckwitz 2002) acts non-instrumentally in pursuit of the ultimate common good, by paying attention to things that others may overlook.

Phronesis is the stance one takes in relation to any given situation that calls for standing up for what one stands for (Antonacopoulou 2016). It is about personal conviction, values, principles, and the choices one makes about how to conduct work and personal life (Antonacopoulou 2017). Therefore, phronesis presents a relational mode of knowing that is founded on virtues and standards of excellence that are pursued on the way to perfection. In other words, phronesis is about the knowledge that defines the standards professional practitioners seek to reach as they strive to conduct their practice better and better in response to a range of forces that influence their choices. This is consistent with Shotter and Tsoukas’ (2014a, b) illustration of how practitioners contemplate and rigorously assess how to act to avoid kneejerk reactions that can be damaging to themselves and others.

This orientation towards phronesis sensitises us to the critical decision to act in particular ways and the imperative role of reflexive critique in reviewing, reflecting, and critiquing actions and the meanings attached to these but also their appropriateness in serving the common good (Antonacopoulou 2010a). Among the issues that phronesis enriches our understanding of, is the role of virtues in the ethos of professional practice and offers a foundation for rethinking how professionalism is to be assessed particularly as it brings closer to focus the role of character and conscience.

Phronesis understood as a reflection of some deeper engagement with everyday life and the dilemmas that shape professional practice, highlights the meanings attributed to lived experiences, as sensemaking engages both cognitions and emotions in constructing such meanings (Weick 2010; Maitlis and Christiansen 2014). Sensemaking is integral to phronesis not only because, it highlights the ways in which learning and changing enable social actors and organisa...