Professionals: The vital elites
The publication on 4 September 2024 of the final report into the catastrophic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire highlighted a wider range of issues than any single disaster report before it. It seemed to top-out twenty years’ worth of corporate and institutional malfeasance which have brought the “crisis in trust” to the fore. From Enron (2001) to the decades of the Post Office scandal (which arguably added judicial failure to the mix), these debacles gave impetus to the pervasive modern sense that modern public bodies can’t be relied on to be decent or frank.
This piece argues (with drafting imperfections) that the key deficiency has been a failure of persons individually. But this is a failure born of an erosion of institutional values which were well-established in previous generations, at least as aspirations. My point in everything that follows is that institutions are merely groups of people cooperating to achieve what individuals cannot achieve alone. This isn’t about heroes or saints. It is about fallible people agreeing to develop ethical frameworks which encourage and support decent behaviour amongst people whose career and cash incentives would otherwise be crudely imperative. They are about the formal and informal professionalism that we should be able to expect of anyone anywhere near the management or decision-making of a firm or other institution.
The public seem to relish their disdain for authority. Their grandparents had more sense, really, though the modern cynical observer is half right. Modern elites seem to lack character. As people, they don’t trust themselves and certainly not each other. These failures magnify themselves to produce corporate and institutional failures and sometimes catastrophes.
For years I have been wrestling with ideas about how greed and self-interest could best be reconciled with decency in a capitalist democracy. In 2001, I expressed some of this in my project, The Public Realm, long archived. I decided then that the idea of professionalism best sums up what we have lost and might regain. What follows is an attempt to update that thinking. Recent years provide plenty of fodder for investigation, and plenty of examples to drive a project for reform.
Introduction
Trust in a commercialised world
Professions: Quasi-judicial role
Professions: What we did to the tradition
Professionals as social networkers
Public interrogation and opaque transparency
Combatting NGO campaigners
Signs of the renaissance
Professionals: Elites, not the Establishment
Professions: Protecting profit
Professions: Protecting whistleblowers
Pundits, actors & politicians: No-go for professions?
Professionals: Not activist heroes of altruism
Professions: Risk specialists
There are obvious problems in combining wealth creation and social conscience. Besides, since any power corrupts, similar problems arise wherever there is authority. Indeed, they arise in any sort of institution including not-for-profit state enterprises, or in charities and all the other voluntary bodies. Almost every adult, however lofty or humble their role, sells their talents in a marketplace of some kind. The problem arises when they are asked, or volunteer, to barter their soul as well.
I write what follows as a person who lacks character. I fear my cowardice would stand between me and being much use in a crisis. But now that so many professionals have failed in trustworthiness, it can’t be entirely remiss to try to organise one’s thoughts on the matter.
For a quarter of a century, there seems to have been an institutional, corporate and individual failure of character on an industrial scale. The malaise was given a special focus, but also a trope, when in 1999, the MacPherson Report into the Stephen Lawrence murder put “institutional racism” on the map. From Scotland Yard to Westminster, where were the grown-ups? Where was a proper elite sense of responsibility?
How come that so many people in so many bodies could go unchallenged as they betrayed public trust?
Enron (2001), but many others too, became bywords of bad behaviour. The worst of it was that the accountancy profession, whose job was to be disciplinary, had given the firm’s executives a clean bill of health.
The next few years brought the great banking and financial meltdown of 2008, caused by a failure of elementary economic and financial caution, compounded by a failure of political intervention and journalistic commentary. In 2017, there came the horribly indicative Grenfell Tower fire. The public inquiry and its final report must surely be humiliating to several professional and institutional leaderships, and to individual leaders. Around that time the scale of ten years of injustices suffered by hundreds of sub-postmasters became much clearer. The ensuing public inquiry will presumably show that there was a large failure of professionalism in corporate offices and a peculiar naivety in the legal profession, not excluding the judiciary.
All these failures were only marginally about failures of expertise. They concerned individuals conspiring in herd mentality, groupthink, and a circle-the-wagons mentality. The resulting behaviour, whether it be criminal, life-threatening, or corrosive of trust is importantly the result of failures in individual character. The people concerned weren’t drugged or brainwashed. Re-labelling a few top executives or a few hapless underlings as criminals does not exonerate the rest of the organisation, often from top to bottom.
I do not argue that these individuals should have put their hand in the fire or martyred themselves. Indeed, it is part of my argument about professions and professionalism that there are – or ought to be – networks of decency within which people who fear they are drifting into ethical danger should be able to confer, consul and build networks of defiance and integrity.
I take great comfort from the fact that the Victorians addressed the issue of character and capitalism, but also character and institutions. Professions, to put it pompously, are structures which instruct, support, and discipline individuals as they seek to make money or build careers within their firms or institutions, but within an ethical framework consonant with their idea of what their personal character should be.
I don’t argue that professionals have to be activist or saintly. It will suffice, I think, if they insist merely that their firm or institution declare its ethical ambitions, which may be more about being frank than noble. The honouring of limited ethical ambition is more desirable and deliverable than saving the planet, or building community beefburger by beefburger.
Professions are about putting experience and expertise at the service of society, including capitalist and power-brokering activity. The subtlety and peculiarity of the professions is that they depend on the notion of individual character, and thus hinge on ideas of duty, honour, and reputations. They work in a world of compromise but depend on building on the kernel of character in each of their members.
All this assumes that any person who leads others, or has expertise, or authority, ought to be aware and proud of their responsibility to society in general. That, finally, is a matter of their character, and is essentially personal. The point of professions is that they institutionalise that good stuff: they promote it, inculcate it, require it, and patrol it. And yet we should, I think, cultivate the idea that professionalism can be found outside formal professional institutions. The personal responsibility of elite persons (that is, experts and leaders) cannot be sub-contracted. But it can be codified within individual firms or industries, and within person’s own view of themselves.
Many of the issues are rightly laid at the door of capitalist corporations which seem to have no moral compass. However, the voluntary sector – including churches and charities – have seemed also to be blighted by groupthink whose failings are sometimes over-corrected by a dangerous willingness to take at face value any charge by self-declared victims. Not charities and not businesses, the BBC and the political parties have their own scandals. The common factor seems to be a taste for cover-up and defensiveness, which are only manifestations of a lack of character in individuals.
The failures behind the Grenfell Tower disaster make more of these points than any other recent event, and even more than the Post Office disaster. But they were both manifestations of rather similar inadequacies which were manifold, man-made, and multi-faceted. There is plenty of blame to go round. Perhaps in both there was conspiratorial and even criminal behaviour. There were political, technical, commercial and regulatory failures. In the Grenfell case, local councils, ministries, politicians, firms, the higher echelons of the fire-fighting world, regulators, Quangoes of several sorts – these and others will probably wish they had been more expert, vigilant, and transparent. The old-fashioned language is good enough: they may wish they had behaved better. Several will probably and crucially also be found to have passed various bucks, and to have turned loopholes into foxholes. The Post Office scandal showed multiple corporate failures, but weren’t swathes of the legal world – including the judiciary – feeble in not spotting an epidemic of prosecutions?
Some of these failures will perhaps be classified as institutionally biased. That is: an institution allows an attitude insidiously to inform or even govern its behaviour toward some class of person. But use of the term can also sometimes become a cover for real failure by actual persons. Its first celebrated use (in the Macpherson Report on the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence) was taken as a criticism of the whole of the Metropolitan Police, corporately. But don’t such approaches come with a side order of deflection? Perhaps keen to avoid scapegoating, they obscure real failures of motivation, character and behaviour by actual individuals.
I dislike witch-hunts against individuals (whether mighty or lowly), which are often mis-directed by being, variously, perverse, convenient or arbitrary. Too often the naming of names “outs” and punishes people rather low in the chain of command, or well shy of the commanding heights, simply because the smoking gun seemed most obviously to be in their hands. And yet, the more one can shelter under the failures of one’s bosses, and of one’s institution, the more one may be tempted to drift with a bad tide.
It’s complicated. I am inclined to think that a vital point of formal professionalism is to protect expert individuals from their own failings and those of their paymasters (usually, their employers). In effect, the professional person should feel that their profession provides an ethical framework which protects them from their personal and institutional temptations and weaknesses. Indeed, professions usefully promise to punish their members’ failures.
My point in stressing the role of professional blame is to give us a lever, or a vantage point, from which to discuss blame, with as little scapegoating and witch-hunting as possible.
After any human disaster we need to consider whether there was enough expert and energetic ethical advice and behaviour. This is what professions exist to provide. Individual professionals have a large personal responsibility, for sure. But their failures are often or usually in important part institutional. When a person with initials after their name is not up to scratch, the body which allowed them to put them there is in the frame, too.
Professions exist to produce knowledgeable and experienced elites who are mandated – required and empowered – to put the wider public interest above the private or corporate or institutional interest of their employer. They do so in the real world in which (in the capitalist set-up) profits have to be made and (in the public sector) budgets kept to. Risks have to assessed, and costed. Compromises have to be made, and challenged and defended. But ultimately, the professionals always know they must allow themselves to be pushed only so far by expediency; indeed, they are obliged to press forward and, if need be, suffer for their professional standards. And the professional institutions exist to police those standards; to require members to adhere to them; and to defend their members when they cross those who employ them.
Thus, when there is a failure, we should be able to identify which professional – if any – did not properly stand as a guardian of good technical and ethical behaviour. But when we identify that individual we can temper our disdain with the realisation that his or her professional body should have been policing its standards better.
And yet…. As much as professions are institutions, their members have to take the message personally. Anyone in any leadership role needs to hold themselves to a higher standard than is convenient. Power corrupts, and all that.
I am circling round to a tricky concept. This is that within the social networks which attend professional organisations there is the sort of environment within which professionals should be able to discuss a problem about which they have tentative suspicions rather than definite evidence. An obvious case is the epidemic of apparent criminality amongst sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses. It was bad enough when accountants waved corporate malfeasance through (Enron), or when every sort of commentator seemed to believe that economic stability had become a fact of life (banking crisis, 2008), or when buildings inspectorates waved-through flammable adding (Grenfell, 2017). But for every branch of lawyer to miss a rising tide of prosecutions amongst Post Office staff is surprising. Indeed, one shouldn’t be waiting for an inquiry to work out what went on: if the lawyering misjudgements are actually explainable, with hindsight, so be it. But if there were failings in the behind-the-scenes professional ethical networks, formal and informal, then that is very bad news.
Trust in a commercial, outsourced world
The problem of locating trust is particularly acute in a world of privatised and outsourced public services, the Archipelago State, and “professional” politicians and “professional” campaigners. Western societies have become rich and democratic. We define ourselves more as consumers than as citizens. We have recognised the vigour of markets, but we have unglued government.
Many public services – in public transport and GP practices, for instance – have been privatised, so that shareholders or partners are now an important factor in services which are not merely supposed to be universally available, but are also supposed to represent something especially “pro bono publico” in their ethos. In some cases, as we see in the building regulators who seem to have failed Grenfell’s tenants, a construction standards body was not only hived off by government, it was made to be commercial. That kind of risk multiplier demands that everyone concerned be doubly professional in their attitude. It may even be that the Post Office being at arm’s length from the state enfeebled its accountability.
That is all likely to become tougher as we shift welfare provision away from its socialist model. More of our lives will be in the hands of non-governmental institutions and firms, and less in the hands of politicians. That process of outsourcing brings new risks. If it is hard to make politicians quake before their voters’ ire, it is often even harder to chase down responsibility in a fractured system whose decency depends on the vigiliance of regulators (themselves devolved and probably under-funded, and maybe under-powered).
Politicians do still regulate a huge amount of activity but do much of it through myriad agencies whose connection with Whitehall and Westminster is opaque. We need to see that “government” has become something quite new. For instance: over half the British home civil service now works in agencies of the state which are decentralised, granted a degree of independence and “branded” as self-contained. These are Quangoes – Quasi-Non-Governmental Organisations. Their moniker lets us see that even formal parts of the “government” are now hovering close to a state which makes them like Non-Governmental Organisations.
There are some firms which illustrate the problem and possibilities with real poignancy. The state has outsourced many firms such as Capita which enter the new market in government bureaucracy, once regarded as too inherently quasi-judicial for vulgar commercialisation. Other firms run prisons, once regarded as places whose potential for violence required hands-on state operation. Yet others run care services, some of them residential, for vulnerable youngsters, disabled people or the incapacitated elderly.
Firms already are, or probably soon will, take over more and more of government’s chores, and especially those chores which make it unpopular. Taxes, fines, wages-slips – all these and more will go the way of water and rail and energy: their operation will be given to companies in the hopes that “delivery” can be improved by the profit motive, and well-regulated by the Archipelago State. This approach may well press further into the provision of police, prisons, health and education and residential care. Presumably, in time, it will work its way into the military. These out-sourcings are mandated and funded by government, but they take firms into essentially sensitive, muscular and necessarily brutal places, where discipline and high standards are as necessary as they are hard to test and maintain.
There are particular difficulties with marrying healthcare and education to the market. They both involve rationing a necessarily scarce resource to which all of us have a potentially unlimited claim, unrelated to our ability to pay.
For as long as the state owned and intimately controlled the welfare state even more firmly in its maw than it now does , it had to suffer the blame for its failings. As we evolve systems which increasingly involve private providers who are paid by insurance, co-payment or state-mandated taxation, and as we consumer-voters become more demanding, who then will be the gatekeepers? When most of us are customers of independent private health and education services, we will need to be more capable, not less, of trusting professionals and professional bodies to play an even bigger role in rationing health, education and welfare than they do now. Theirs will become jobs even more requiring disinterestedness, courage and skill than they always did.
In societies like ours in which less and less is clearly provided or controlled by identifiable governmental bodies, we will find that we are interrogating decisions by doctors, teachers, engineers and others. They will find that they need special skills and, in the end, special support. They will need professional “formation” (to use an old word) and professional backup. In short, stalwart and ethical professions and professionalism will serve their members, and the rest of us, well.
Professions : Quasi-judicial role
Professions always were quasi-judicial: they could and still can seriously damage their members’ careers. In our time, the taste for evident transparency and accountability will increasingly mean that the public will simply get stroppier. There will be fewer acquiesent supplicants in benefits offices or hospitals, or quite well-disciplined and polite customers or clients. And fewer who sullenly but silently accept their place in police stations, or prisons. People who know their rights, and assert them vigorously and loudly will need careful handling, face to face, by staff who will quite often have to be firm as well as courteous. Policemen, pilots, and firemen, for instance, share this obviously quasi-judicial role: they know and enforce the law. You are obviously under their command in certain situations. In the future, increasing numbers of public-facing staff will need a professionalism which bolsters their confidence, not least in themselves but also in structures – not necessarily formal – which will back them up when they summon up a certain toughness of attitude.
Professions: What we did to the tradition
What has happened to the idea of professionalism which has so diminished it? Obviously, something has happened that made ideas like character, duty, honour, and reputation seem almost fantastic. Perhaps they went down the same drain that swallowed authority and deference. Worse, they became the domain of street gangsters, who alone sought “rep” and, like mafia bosses, insisted on “respect”. These aren’t explanations. I blame the 1960s social revolution, of course.
Mrs Thatcher’s lower-middle-class, corner shopkeeper’s chippiness didn’t help. She was determined that “trade” should no longer be a term of disdain, but tripped herself up by disliking the professions as the antithesis of what she liked. She had a point. She is said to have disliked the professions because she saw them as trade unionists in white collars. And indeed, medicine (including nursing) and law, perhaps even accountancy, had developed into self-serving closed shops which were judge and jury in matters that ought to have been in full sunlight in the public domain. The teachers, meanwhile, had a trade union which was not only a closed shop but an institutionalised engine of leftiness to boot. Besides, professional institutions may sometimes shield individuals from their personal responsibility, perhaps by allowing for a certain gaming of the rules.
Professionals were all seen as technicians performing technical services, but less as people mandated to make ethical judgments. That drift probably occurred after successive professional failures energised the tendency to legislate everything that moved. We neutered the professionals, first in our imaginations and then in practice. We preferred regulating and suing them to listening to them. and in return they took out insurance against being sued.
We can correct some of this, because professionalism never did die, but was only put at a discount. The future of professions is written in their history.
Medieval Europe was in large part made modern by educated men (doctors, merchants, lawyers) who believed that a self-regulated good behaviour was essential to private profit and public well-being. If we look back at the medieval guilds and professions only as self-serving vested interests, that is only because that is what is most visible about them. We have forgotten that the ancient fraternities of a London or Venice were not only closed shops, but social and religious bodies too, and often charitable as well as prestigious. They were of a piece with the effort – not solely or mostly a matter of state activity – by which schools and hospitals were founded and funded. In working class and middle class form, they underpinned the mutual and co-operative movements which might have developed into mass provision of education and health had state socialism not intervened.
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Professionals as social networkers
I am keen to emphasise that as much as professional institutions offer formal environments for their quasi-judicial and certification roles, they might be as useful as opportunities for informal networking. Isn’t it possible that a handful of spirited and savvy lawyers might have chatted over canapes and wine about their observation that an awful lot of small, local, Post Offices and their Horizon software were coming to court? Might not the most junior barrister have tipped-off the most senior judge in one of the Inns of Court? This wouldn’t be whistle-blowing. What informal networks were at hand in the building regulations world, and why didn’t weaknesses in the control of cladding get gossiped about, and the case get raised to the station of actionability?
One can see various problems, of course. In the Horizon of the cladding matters, by the time there were sufficient cases to make a case, and because by then multiple costly mistakes had been made, it would have been no small matter to aim to blow the whistle.
This is the sort of thought that makes it so necessary for professionals to learn that they are operating in a goldfish bowl. It may be under a cloth in the corner of the room for now, but it’s there and one day most cock-ups and conspiracies see the light of day. It is, actually, more convenient in the long-run to have listened to the dictates of conscience in the day-to-day.
Public interrogation and opaque transparency
The modern mantra is that public consultation (Crowd Wisdom, the Cloud, vox pops) are essential sources of authority and trust. Professionals need not deny any of that, but should understand that no amount of public acceptance would make a stupid or unethical decision a good one. The professional has to stand by a view of the public interest which is evidence-based long before it is merely popular. This is profoundly difficult in the overheated world of keyboard warriors, who hunt like sharks or wolves, picking on every imagined weakness, and creating a nervous, circle-the-wagons, paranoid response in public-facing bodies, whose public face must be virginally vacuous, but above all bland, virtuous, full of passion and supposed empathy.
Professionals now join politicians in being scrutinised in a process which is more aggressive, intrusive and never-ending. The professional and amateur NGO campaigners and the mainstream media journalists are now joined by an angry, buzzing swarm of “social” media assailants. The upshot, over many years, but intensifying daily, is a Teflon-smooth response from their case-hardened targets, many of them in formal professions, or operating as informal professionals. Under attack, the modern manager, politician, or professional knows (or is taught by a media trainer) how to seem to respond with openness, composed or cheerful unflappability, and effortless but nicely human displays of performative empathy. This amounts to a stand-off in which the public is left not very much the wiser.
The need to be defensible in one’s dealings with the public can produce structured deceitfulness rather than frankness. Managers realise that their own probity is not what matters provided their operations are signed-off by the NGOs which have won public trust the easy way. Obviously, this risks bringing both parties into disrepute, but it may work for a while. Part of that strategy may be the adoption of tick-box rectitude: provided a firm or institution can demonstrate that it requires management and staff to go through various rituals and motions, it may be that everyone need not ask themselves the harder, necessary questions.
Combatting the (professional) campaigners
The NGOs insist that it is they who alone can police the politicians, the firms, the regulators. They insist that only they have no vested interest, and are therefore the true regulators of inequality, pollution, injustice. But the NGOs mostly have their own agendas, which will tend to be more romantic or more radical than the view of the majority of people in whose name they claim to speak. We may enjoy them as providing a useful pepperiness, or a usefully lofty idealism, to the management of affairs, but they are not a big part of the real solution.
The NGOs command the debate and demand controls. As campaigners are heard more and more, and demand more and more regulation, the private sector can respond by fielding professionals and their argument. By ensuring and then promoting the integrity and intelligence of the people who sell us food, accountancy, travel and much more, firms might be able to see off many of the NGOs’ demands.
Campaigners are paradoxical. They are trusted, but are not much challenged on the basis of the truthfulness or fairness of what they say. They are not expected to be expert or experienced or even entirely honest – they are merely required to be “authentic” – passionate, idealistic and fearless. The public would be within their rights to insist that NGO claims be held to the same high bar we have a right to expect of the people they criticise. The NGOs could do with some professionalism.
Of course, the “professional” world has played into the NGOs’ hands. State-mandated professional regulators in so many sectors – energy, water, media, transport – have all had difficulty in regulating their industries and institutions. The truth is that regulators have quite narrow or at any rate constrained roles. They are piggy-in-the-middle between governments that don’t want to do the regulating themselves but can’t operate the businesses or institutions either, and the operators who have to survive and if possible thrive in the real world.
It would help, and possibly to a large extent, if all the players in these cat-and-mouse games were to be braver in the defence of the public good, but also in speaking uncomfortable truths. I doubt that a vast food industry properly informed by professionalism would be content to sell health-damaging tat to their customers without being quite bold in describing it as dross. Contrariwise, it might be a good thing if the water regulator boldly stated that water firms do indeed need to raise and reward capital on an epic scale to modernise their sewage treatment systems. And it is not nothing that the media – especially many of the high-end outlets – pretty cheerfully go with the fashionable flow in many issues. Their audiences – educated or populist – like an outrage, and it requires real character – professionalism – in the media to risk speaking power to the people as well as to power.
Signs of renaissance
The professions, then, have plenty of work to do. Luckily, they are already waiting in the wings, renaissance-ready. A few years ago, I happened to come across two interesting outposts of the phenomenon.
Case #1
I once spoke at a conference of food scientists who belong to a professional body which debates improvements in food safety and quality from a technical point of view. This body has many of the elements of a profession reborn: one joins and contributes as an individual; all activity is voluntary and unpaid; technical experts employed by firms are members on equal terms with academics; firms contribute money not clout; the membership is international; everyone counts real evidence and real experience as the currency of debate.
Case #2
I was once at a biannual conference of waste disposal experts (from firms, consultancies and government bodies) who meet to present and debate a series of evidence- and experience-led papers whose closely-printed volumes take up about a yard of shelf-space each time. Again, membership is personal; debate is fierce; expertise very highly-regarded. What impresses about these two bodies is that their ethos mixes self-interest with public service.
Both experiences bore the mark of professionalism: men and women seek to enhance their reputation with people who can be useful to them, and they do so by deploying and displaying skill in a pro bono way. The participants didn’t dislike profit, but see profitability as a matter of practical necessity – of viability – not as the only necessary goal. They do good by seeing and expressing the public dimension in their trade. Members do not advance themselves by being kind or generous in a general way, but by being excellent in a public-spirited way.
Professionals : Elites, not the Establishment
Some unfashionable words will have to be reframed if the professional spirit is to thrive. Elitism is amongst them. Professions will be valuable to the rest of us when we cheerfully endorse the proposition that expertise, experience and courage are essential to excellence. We cannot enshrine excellence without accepting that it is a property which has to be worked at, and takes time, and brain and energy and commitment too. It can be made more common. It can be dangerous if it is not socialised.
A profession, really, is a body which turns skill and courage into something which is publicly valuable; it makes excellence something which is more likely to be useful. Once we have reinstated professions in our public life, and have placed professionalism at the heart of what talented people do, we will see that we have gone a long way to provide the counterweight to the outsourcing, Archipelago State culture.
A vigorous profession of railway and water engineers should have informed the public about the health and environmental risks of decades of under-investment and under-management of the nationwide and privatised rail and water systems. If farmers and grocers had had a higher sense of their professionalism, we might have improved the national diet and the countryside. These improvements would not have required a nanny state or hyper-active NGO campaigners or a right-on media. Better still, it wouldn’t have needed a wise public. It would merely have required that serious providers and operators refuse to put their hands and minds to sub-standard work. This is not the business of being super-virtuous, really. It is more a matter of being able to take pride in one’s work.
Because formal professions have institutional structure, they have to be careful not to become a self-regarding and self-protecting cadre. Equally, they have to be sure they are not becoming part of a network of similarly empowered bodies. They will foster relations with governments, regulators, and corporations and institutions, but they can’t afford to be in a comfort zone alignment with all these other power-players in society. That way lies the possibility that there will be truth in the left-wing’s contentions that there is The Establishment, and that it stands against the Working Class.
Professions: protecting profit
As we set enterprise to work on provision of public services we will have the answer to the conundrum: how to reconcile profit with the public good? This is the ancient problem which professions addressed. Engineers were trusted to build infrastructure which didn’t collapse, and doctors could generally be trusted to desire their patients’ health. In many spheres, we will come to see the firm as the means of profitably putting a profession at work for the public good. Put this another way: professionals will be the main asset which shareholders and customers will expect to see in a viable firm. In terms of corporate governance, the visible professionalism of a cadre of employees will be the way the outside world senses that the pursuit of private profit does not over-rule public good, or undermine long-term profitability.
Professions: protecting whistleblowers
Employees seeing and exposing corruptions and inadequacies large and small within their firms, and between their firms and politicians, should know that they have backup from their professional body when they argue against bad practice. In the public sphere, civil servants always were especially aware of their professional status. It was of a special sort, because they had, and may need to reassert, a sense of a quasi-judicial dignity and values, usually against political interference. Of course, the better professions work in protecting whistleblowers, the less will there be a need for whistleblowers.
Journalists, actors and politicians – special cases?
Many journalists (I am thinking, especially, of pundits and pamphleteers – the latter often in think-tanks) never have seriously conceived of themselves as professionals. Perhaps this was because they were not subject to a specific educational regime and also because they do not constitute a stable population of people exclusively seeking a particular career. (Unfortunately, that is less true than once it was.) They were proud self-promoters, who professed no certified expertise. Actors are a rather similar case. There is something absurd or otiose in the idea of their being in a profession, not least because no-one supposes there is no certified proof of acting talent and a complete absence of security in the “profession”, a word we use of actors mostly out of deference because we sense it is the polite thing to do.
None of these people had to be trusted. They were persuasive, moving or funny, or whatever, as they say their own or other peoples’ words. We did not mind what they said, however fanciful or absurd it might be. I think we were relaxed about their utterances because we thought they could be safely absorbed and easily tested within the public arena of dispute, in competing prints, or within the family, public house or coffee bar.
Even news journalists have never felt the need to be considered professionals. In general, we buy a newspaper, or even switch on the more regulated TV or radio news channels, on the basis that we trust either their owners or their senior editors, or both. Indeed, both writers and readers have a cultural tradition of being suspicious of state-ordained or state-controlled media outlets. It is now commonplace for aspirant journalists to get a degree in media studies or some such. But it is not yet quite mandatory to enter the trade by that route.
These non-professionals teach us what professions have to be or do to deserve the formal use of the word. Professionals can do us harm if they are inept, and we are in no position to second guess them until it is too late.
Some of that may well be true of politcians. At first sight it’s mildly offensive to imagine a profession of politics. We are already rightly worried – or ought to be – that there are people who make a career of politics, and see little difference between being an elected parliamentarian, a party aparachik, a lobbyist or a journalist. They cycle through these roles, and think of them as rather alike. Such a person is a commodity dealer, and the commodity concerned is public opinion. Politicians have understood that they are performers and salesmen, and they need to be trusted. They have learned that much, but have not yet worked out how to demonstrate that they are worth trusting. They would like to elevate themselves above hack status. But they would presumably resist being put under an educational, certification and disciplinary regime obligatorily imposed by an institutional profession.
Being a politician needs an professionalism, but can’t really have the formal variety since the contract between voter and representative (itself informal) can’t be regimented. Joe Bloggs has the right to send a fellow Joe Bloggs to Parliament, be the latter never so ignorant, unlettered, prejudiced or a chancer.
We mourn the absence of specific expertise and wide experience which the new kind of politician often displays. Where the politician has a record of public service, some will wonder if it wasn’t acquired in the sort of local party hack service we suspect is writ large in Westminster.
Parliaments will need a revived sense of personal dignity and public obligation amongst their elected members – a new quasi-professionalism – as a buffer and guarantee against the opinion-managers and mood-surfers who run party machines, but also against the verbal nastiness which they now routinely face. We seem likely to see portfolio political careers amongst people who are at various times party workers, MPs, journalists and lobbyists. Such a class of political operative will need to develop and demonstrate something very like professional standards even if they will also have to do so informally.
Professionals: Not activist heroes of altruism
We would have little faith in the idea that professionals will do great good if we believed that it will be the personal goodness of the professionals which will make it so. Professionalism will make a comeback because people are vain as well as good or bad. Just as capitalism is brilliant at harnessing greed for the public good, so professionalism is brilliant at harnessing pride. If we properly reinstate the professions, we will be putting a further, an enriching, enticement in front of our most talented people. It will be the trick by which energetic people in all the right places will daily check and ensure that profit is doing its usual good work, and not exerting the baleful influence it is occasionally prone to.
A dimension of altruism is its ambition. Professionals can be cautious about this. Their obligation is much more, “My word is my bond”, than it is: “I am going to change the world for the better”. Campaigners of every sort general are ambitious for change. They will often succeed in making politicians legislate for some improvement or other, very real or quite fantastical as it may be. It may fall to professionals to deploy experience and expertise to calibrate the real-world ease or difficulty of delivering these “reforms”, real or imaginary. The tough bit for professionals arises when their paymasters declare either that the reform can be delivered or that it can’t. The professionals have to decide whether to endorse or denounce their paymasters’ decision. Once they have done so, there are consequences. They must either honourably deliver their paymasters’ declared intention, or honourably decide to leave their paymasters’ employ, or at least be very vocal and clear about their reluctances.
This may all be quite a subtle matter. There are limitless ways in which the world could, arguably, be improved. Corporations and institutions and their employed professional will be a large part of whatever gets done. Professionals certainly have an obligation to be thoughtful about the standards they individually must hold to. Bridges shouldn’t fall down; buildings should be defensible against fire; food, water and air shouldn’t poison people. But what kind of obligation do professionals have to drive or adhere to ambitious programmes for change? Should Net Zero be acheived in 10, 20, or 30 years? Should rivers be swimmable within a half a day of downpours, or after a day?
My general feeling is that professionals will be at their most useful as mechanics more than messiahs. They can, professionally, assess the technical difficulty of delivering this or that goal within this or that budget. The goals and the budget will not usually be theirs to decide. Matching the goals and the budget may well be within their purview. What is clear, I think, is that the professionals have an obligation to form opinions and be clear and vocal, in public, as to mismatches between declared goals and available budgets. That’s where the courage comes in.
This is as much as to say that professionals have an obligation to value public honesty. They must police their own behaviour, and the behaviour of their paymaster. They can’t shelter behind the duplicity or disingenuousness of politicians who legislate what can’t be achieved, or of paymaster organisations who declare they are going to deliver what they actually believe to be impossible or damaging. Expertise and honesty are the professionals’ obligations. But it is character which they have to cultivate in order to deliver them.
The essential theme of what I have been trying to work out about professionalism is this. Professionals are not required to be dreamers or visionaries. They don’t necessarily mind if their paymaster organisations “stick to the knitting”. They don’t necessarily mind if their organisations do not seek to save the world, or the planet, or the community around them. But they must profoundly mind if their paymasters are signed up to deliver this or that desirable social goal or technical standard, but manifestly then ignore other less public necessities or even, actually, have no intention to deliver what they say they will.
Professionals: Risk specialists
People formed institutional professions when the work they did might cause damage. Institutionalised, the good players might be able to differentiate themselves – and their business model – from careless cut-price cowboy operators. They may also have done so the better to avoid being regulated. But all the professionalism – all the expertise and experience – in the world cannot rid society or the planet of the risks posed by quite routine, let alone adventurous, human activity. The best they can achieve is the intelligent calibration of the risks their members take, and making sure that they are advertised to the paymaster.
My 2001 pamphlet, Risk: The Human Adventure may be of use.
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