Professionalism and professional ethics

Abstract

Many factors, historical and otherwise, have shaped the professions as we know them to-day and the process is still dynamic and continuing. This essay is concerned in the main with analysing the nature and function of professional ethics and its relations with professionalism Professionalism is a distinctive way of preparing for and carrying out certain kinds of work, but such a simple description implies a host of complex social processes and relations between social groups which it is one of our tasks to explore. In particular, professionalism and professional ethics can be approached in two ways (i) through an analysis of the various forms of organization of professional work and the ethical observances and prescriptions associated therewith, and ii) by examining the interaction of the species of professional culture with other social movements and trends Because the professions (or at least those of them which are more or less firmly established and recognized as such) are strongly institutionalized and relatively stable, the first approach is not particularly difficult, but it is nevertheless an essential preliminary to the second, for it would not be possible to understand the transactions a profession has with its environment without some appreciation of the continuing themes (the values and attitudes) which have been inculcated in the members of a profession and which constitute its "professionalism Autonomy, expertise and responsibility, for example, are amongst the characteristics which have been held by various writers to exemplify professionalism, and if this is true then we can hardly understand the relations between a profession and other aspects of society until we have some insight into the significance of "autonomy", for example 1 for professionalism. Show more