{"id":28873,"date":"2015-11-17T01:00:22","date_gmt":"2015-11-17T06:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28873"},"modified":"2015-11-06T21:11:43","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T02:11:43","slug":"qotd-the-meaning-of-the-word-professional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/17\/qotd-the-meaning-of-the-word-professional\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The meaning of the word “professional”"},"content":{"rendered":"

We fell into a debate on the meaning of the word \u201cprofessional,\u201d which was promptly decided by rank. \u201cProfessional\u201d turned out to mean an operation that proceeds smoothly; that is impersonal; that is free of temporal distractions and unnecessary costs; and in which everyone does what he\u2019s told without thinking. (This last is called \u201cteamwork.\u201d) It is product-oriented, and the important thing is that the product should preserve market share, while remaining profitable. Let the philosophers decide whether it were any good. The product should rather be, in itself, smooth and mechanically predictable: anything warmly human in the packaging to be carefully faked by the experts in a professional advertising agency. Costs and benefits should be enumerable, and transparent to management at every stage. \u201cQuality,\u201d by contrast, \u201cis purely subjective\u201d \u2014 a question of fashion, for those specialists in hype.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a business, not an art form,\u201d I was told. (To be fair, this boss would himself have preferred to be an artist; but the art form would have been acting, and so he played his r\u00f4le.)<\/p>\n

Now, ethics do come into this. A company that is flourishing will have clear \u201cpolicies.\u201d A lot of money could be lost if the company were caught cheating, on taxes or whatever; and secrets, as we know, can only be kept between two people if one of them is dead. Therefore, various \u201coptions\u201d that might further streamline a profitable operation must be rejected on sight, as adding unconscionably to risk. But ethics cannot extend to any background worldview, that is agnostic on the fundamental human virtues, and thus essentially exploitative and sleazy.<\/p>\n

As I have long observed, ethics are for people who have no morals.<\/p>\n

I think \u201cprofessionalism\u201d came in, to the marketplace, about when craft standards were going out. It was discovered that a mass market had come into being, as a consequence of the technological innovations of some Industrial Revolution. Products were no longer made for specific buyers, but for demographic groups to purchase \u201coff the shelf.\u201d Souls could now be counted in the Gogolian manner, as \u201cconsumers\u201d in terms of heads, eye-balls, little feet, &c. Broad-franchise representative democracy was a parallel development, and finally, the principles of marketing could be applied across the board. Far from consideration as an immortal soul, the individual could now be denominated as a capricious cypher: a one or else a zero at the \u201ccashpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Warren, “On managing”, Essays in Idleness<\/em><\/a>, 2014-11-22.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We fell into a debate on the meaning of the word \u201cprofessional,\u201d which was promptly decided by rank. \u201cProfessional\u201d turned out to mean an operation that proceeds smoothly; that is impersonal; that is free of temporal distractions and unnecessary costs; and in which everyone does what he\u2019s told without thinking. (This last is called \u201cteamwork.\u201d) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,41],"tags":[271,261,424],"class_list":["post-28873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-quotations","tag-ethics","tag-management","tag-morality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7vH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28873"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28874,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28873\/revisions\/28874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}