About Professional Standards:

Colleges and universities are complex organizations. Like other complex organizations, they are inevitably and of necessity bureaucratic; they rely on hierarchy, impersonality, expertise, rules, and routinization (policies and procedures) for effective functioning. Complex organizations are coordinated systems for marshalling diverse human efforts in powerful ways to accomplish goals of a modern society. In this work, organizations employ experts from diverse fields to contribute their formal knowledge and skills in making plans, decisions, and procedures to effect the work of the organization.

Diverse experts whose labor is coordinated by a modern university come with (or soon develop) special training and expertise—they are professionals. Extensive education and training is the key attribute of professionals: years have been devoted to developing a valuable capacity to perform specialized work in and for a modern society. Professionals inhabit the instructional arm of a university (from accounting to zoology) as well as the wide domain of support services (from budgeting through nursing to plant maintenance).

A key and critical hallmark of the training that professionals undergo is that they are trained with particular views toward reality that characterize the professional group to which they belong: they have become socialized and acculturated to a particular way of thinking and doing. That way of thinking often encompasses a specialized language (jargon), particular understandings (beliefs, assumptions, attitudes), and ethical structures (ways of behaving). It is because of this specialized knowledge base and accompanying ideology that the services of the professionals are first sought by the organization.

In this regard, two difficulties may arise:

First, in many organizations, the special intellectual tools of the various professions are not well understood by organizational colleagues from alternative professions. The lack of understanding across professional boundaries within the organization may occasion profound clashes that may, if not well managed, sour interpersonal relations and generate internal power struggles. Colleagues loosing sight of the value of the intellectual diversity that was originally sought in staffing the university begin to credit differences of opinion to character flaws and personal agendas as internal wars destroy the effectiveness of the organization.

Second, in many organizations, the special intellectual tools of the various professions may become dull over time if the organization does not exercise care in cultivating the relationship between its professionals and their respective external professional communities. The risk is that professionals can, as tenure lengthens in an organization, loose contact with their professional identity with the consequence that their views may become overly acculturated and congruent with the employing organization. Having once been professionals, they may become excessively enmeshed in the organization and come to think primarily of “the way we do things here” rather than of “the way my profession does things.” The attitude widely spread may begin to spell decline of the organization as entropy sets in.

It is to help guard against these two enemies of organizational effectiveness that all units are asked to explicit posit their core professional beliefs, values, and attitudes inside the Strategic Planner: the way professionals are trained to think is the reason that they are employed. The organization needs to be reminded that professionals are doing their job and fulfilling their proper role when they hold the organization up to the current standards of their respective professions.

Accordingly, each unit is encouraged to search through its own relevant professional literature and determine the key guiding beliefs and assumptions that under gird their profession and to list them on the appropriate page of the planner.

Sources:

Martin Finkelstein (1984): The American Academic Profession: A Synthesis of Social Scientific Inquiry Since World War II, Ohio State University Press.

Alvin W. Gouldner (1958), Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles, Administrative Science Quarterly.

Charles Perrow (1972), Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, Scott, Foresman Co.

Donald A. Schon, (1983), The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Basic Books.

Henry Sims, et.al. (1986), The Thinking Organization: Dynamics of Organizational Social Cognition, Jossey-Bass.