This document summarizes Ian Shaw's presentation titled "The Academization of the Professions" given on July 3, 2012. It discusses how professional practice poses challenges to disciplinary work rather than being simply based on it. It also notes the inevitable but risky nature of emphasizing professional distinctives. Shaw argues for a relation between fields that is like adjacent open systems with intellectual reciprocity based on egalitarian respect.

1. ‘The Academization
of the Professions’
Ian Shaw, University of York
Research Institute for Health and Social Change, 3 July
2012

2. • Professional practice poses challenges back to
disciplinary work, rather than simply being „based‟ on it.
• Emphasis on professional distinctives is both inevitable
and risky.
• The merits of a relation between our various fields that is
something like adjacent „open systems‟, marked by
intellectual reciprocity based on egalitarian respect.
Positions

3. • „strange intoxication‟
• „Calculation‟
• An idea
Science

4. (1) Empirical work on UK research council decisions;
(2) A case study of the emergence of sociology and social
work in Chicago;
(3) Research on the bearing inquiry by professional
practitioners has on professional and discipline identity.
(4) Current research on the nature of research networks in
social work.
Brooding

5. • How do disciplines and professions within the academy
emerge?
• How does the relationship between teaching and research
shape professions within the academy?
• Are conventional ways of seeing the research/practice
relationship appropriate for professions within the
academy?
• Should universities – and those in professional fields in
particular – seek to change the world?
Four questions

6. • Chicago social work and
sociology
• Misleading sense of
history
• Telescoping and
stereoscoping
• „it is...often not easy to
distinguish between the
„sociologists‟ and the
rest...the two groups were
so intertwined that it
might be more
appropriate to regard
them as one‟
(Platt, 1996).
Professions in the
academy

7. • “Accounts written from within sociology...generally treat
both other disciplines and groups outside the academy as
part of the background. They are seen as instrumental to
the main aims of sociologists or as introducing distortion
into the natural or appropriate course of pure sociological
development” (Platt)
Histories from within

8. • „Every young man
who feels called to
scholarship has to
realize clearly that the
task before him has a
double aspect. He
must qualify not only
as a scholar but also
as a teacher‟ (Weber)
• Kuhn on textbooks Texts imply that
„from the beginning
of the scientific
enterprise …scientists
have striven for the
particular objectives
that are embodied in
today‟s paradigms‟
Teaching and Research

9. • External professional demands for
employment skills and „actable‟ evidence
make the problem more persistent
Professional
expectations

10. • He believes he recalls a
time when „teaching
curbed the esoteric
tendencies of
research, while research
disrupted the
routinizing tendencies
of teaching‟
Fuller’s earth
• Fuller‟s prescription the task of education as
to release the specialist
insights of research „in
to larger social
settings, and not to
reinforce their original
theoretical packaging
by treating students as
if they were potential
recruits to specialist
ranks‟

11. • research priority over practice (rationalism)
• practice priority over research (romantic conservatism)
Practice and Research

12. • Omitted from these portraits of research is any suggestion
that researchers‟ motives may extend beyond the good
and worthy; that scientists are not strangers to
aggrandizement or status seeking; that the research
process itself can be subjective and biased, sometimes
fatally so; or that researchers may have a personal, as
well as a professional, stake in persuading practitioners to
value their work. There is little recognition that scientific
technology has limits or that what researchers have
labored to produce may not be particularly usable. (Kirk
and Reid)
‘practitioner-blame’

13. • „the process of attempting to “know” about the social
world already is an intervention in that world which may
come to shape its constitution‟
Norma Romm

14. 1. Practice is to some extent shaped by changes in
government policy and a considerable amount of research is
paid for by national governments so as to help them to
achieve policy objectives. In this situation, can we
distinguish between policy and practice, and if so how?
2. Practice is increasingly inter-professional and multidisciplinary. What does it mean to talk about a specifically
social work practice domain in an increasingly interprofessional and multidisciplinary context?
Trevillion

15. 3. The practice context may look very different to practitioners,
service users, carers and managers. Is there a way of describing
the influence of practice on research that does justice to all these
different perspectives?
4. In order to examine the influence of the practice context on
research there is a need to model the relationship between the
two. How do we go about building a model based on the idea that
research is an emergent property of practice?
5. Practice means different things at different levels of social
reality. How do we incorporate the concept of „different levels of
practice‟ in our emergent model?
Trevillion - 2

16. • An unhelpful – because again narrowly conceived –
conception of the relationship between research and
practice. The „application of research knowledge‟
approach has a number of problems but the central one
for our purposes is that it renders the „method‟ of social
work invisible.
• An unduly deferential conception of the relationship
between social science and social work.
Sociological social work

17. • I draw on a process of „translating‟ and „reinhabiting‟
qualitative sociological methods. In doing so I want to
decolonize the subordinate relationship of social work to
social science, and hence liberate social work by placing
it in an egalitarian and reciprocal relationship with
sociology and cognate social science disciplines.
Evaluating in practice

18. Weber again –
• „Politics is out of place in the lecture-room… The prophet
and the demagogue do not belong on the academic
platform‟
• „The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his
students to recognize “inconvenient” facts – I mean facts
that are inconvenient for their party opinions‟ and „for my
own opinion no less than for others‟
Professions, the Academy
and the World

19. Greene
Cronbach et al
• Absent an
engaged, accountable position
like scientific citizenship, I fear
that qualitative evaluation will
be relegated to the sidelines of
important debates about
pressing public issues... No
longer can we shroud our
citizen-selves behind our
scientific subjectivities. We
must become scientific
citizens.
• The political process is
accustomed to vigorous
advocacy… (and) is not
going to be swept off its
feet by an ill-considered
assertion even from an
evaluator.
Evaluation writers

20. Rossi
Stake
• „in the short term, good
social research will often
be greeted as a betrayal of
one or other side of a
particular controversy‟ His
chastened conclusion is
that „no good applied
social research goes
unpunished‟.
• I feel our stance should
be to resist advocacy, to
minimize
advocacy, even though it
is ever present, to help to
recognize worthy and
unworthy advocacies but
to resist joining them.
Evaluation writers - 2

21. • „If our predecessors set out to change the world we have
too often ended up conserving it. Fighting for a place in
the academic sun, sociology developed its own
specialized knowledge…‟
• „antagonistic interdependence among four types of
knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public‟
Public Sociology: Michael
Burawoy

22. • „in which the sociologist works in close connection with a
visible, thick, active, local and often counterpublic‟
• „Between the organic public sociologist and a public is a
dialogue, a process of mutual education‟ (p.8).
Organic public sociology

23. • „Each type of sociology has its own legitimation:
professional sociology justifies itself on the basis of
scientific norms, policy sociology on the basis of its
effectiveness, public sociology on the basis of its
relevance and critical sociology has to supply moral
visions‟
Legitimating sociology

24. •
•
•
•
insularity and irrelevance for professional sociology,
sectarianism of critical sociology,
contractual distortions within policy sociology,
hostages to the pursuit of acceptability and popularity, or
risk of speaking down to its publics, of public sociology.
Pathological forms