Those who are serious about developing professionalism in OSH need to adopt an individualistic approach, according to IOSH 09 speaker, Linda Evans.
Hand on heart, do you consider occupational safety and health (OSH) to be a profession? Do you genuinely believe it embodies all the necessary characteristics of a profession, and, if not, how could these be developed?
Imagine for a moment that you’ve been given the job of developing an occupation, or a semi-profession into a profession — where would you start? What you need to embark on is the ‘professionalisation’ process. And, as with any project that involves developing something, the starting point is to identify what the profession currently looks like.
The next step is to formulate a vision of what the profession should look like in the future. Once you have a clear picture of your starting point and future destination, the third step is to identify ways of getting from the current position to your envisaged state. The last stage is to implement the professionalisation strategies formulated at the third stage. It sounds simple and straightforward but, of course, it’s not.
One reason why it isn’t easy is that the process involves dealing with individuals. A profession is not a unified homogenous mass but a collection of diverse individuals, each with their own needs, values, preferences, attitudes, ideologies, experience, skills, and intellectual capacity. Each of these individuals work within a unique context that is shaped by the nature of their workplace, and the colleagues who share that workplace. Forget this at your peril if you want to develop a profession. Your professionalisation strategies need to accommodate this diversity of individuals.
Restricted and extended professionals
In the 1970s an academic by the name of Eric Hoyle — now a distinguished emeritus professor of education at the University of Bristol — coined the term ‘professionality’. Hoyle introduced the term to distinguish it from ‘professionalism’. The latter, he wrote, is about the status-related elements of a profession, whereas professionality refers to the skills, knowledge, understandings, and processes that people apply in their day-to-day work.
He formulated two models of schoolteacher professionality, which comprise indicative characteristics: the ‘restricted’ professional and the ‘extended’ professional. The teacher who is a ‘restricted’ professional, for example, will typically: draw upon skills that are derived from experience; be introspective with regard to his/her teaching methods; values his/her autonomy; have a perspective that is limited to the immediate; rarely read professional literature; and see teaching as an intuitive activity.
At the other extreme, the teacher who is an ‘extended’ professional will typically: draw upon skills that are formed from a reconciliation of experience and theory; compare her/his teaching methods with those of colleagues and reports of practice, in the quest for improvement and development; have a perspective that embraces the broader social context of education; frequently read professional literature; and see teaching as a rational activity.
The professionality continuum
The key point in Hoyle’s thinking is that all occupations and professions have ‘restricted’ and ‘extended’ professionals or practitioners — although the ‘descriptors’ of their typical characteristics will inevitably depend on the profession. It is also important to understand that these models are indicative only, and that they represent extremes of a continuum, rather than a black and white, either/or situation.
I find it useful to think in terms of where people are currently situated on the specific professionality continuum relevant to their profession or occupation. Individuals can be assessed by comparing where they are in relation to others, and they can also assess themselves in relation to former and current colleagues.
Professional development is therefore about progressing along the professionality continuum towards the ‘extended’ extreme. Moreover, having a professionality continuum to focus on, with its two extremes represented by different sets of indicative characteristics, is extremely motivating. It provides a specific vision for individual practitioners of where they should be heading, as well as setting professional standards that they should try to attain.
Two pairs of indicative characteristics (see table in magazine version of this article), suggested by two Australian OSH academics with whom I worked last year, illustrate how this might look in the case of health and safety. These are just a start, however, and you may wish to try formulating additional pairs of characteristics. Notice the distinction, in the above examples, between practitioner, used to refer to those at the ‘restricted’ end of the continuum, and professional, representing the ‘extended’ end. This is deliberate, as it could be argued that to be considered a professional, rather than a mere practitioner, involves manifesting such characteristics. However, this does, of course, depend on how one defines a profession and a professional.
Diversity of attitudes
If you have ever complained about poor customer service you will appreciate that the quality of professional practice within any one profession or occupation can be wide-ranging and varied. It does not consistently reflect the level and nature of professionalism intended by those who are concerned with standards, quality of service, image, and, in some cases, profits, i.e. employers, professional associations, etc.
When it comes to job-related attitudes, there are those practitioners who manifestly follow the rules and do things ‘by the book’, and there are those who flout the rules as far as they can get away with it, and place their own interests and preferences before those of customers or clients.
Between these extremes there is usually a wide range of professionality orientations along the restricted-extended continuum. This diversity is inevitable and needs to be incorporated into any attempts at professional development. Indeed, this is precisely the definition of professionalisation: the development of a whole occupational group.
Developing a profession will only ever have limited success if the process is tackled on a uniform scale, where the workforce is viewed as a homogenous whole. Under such an approach, an intended change, once filtered down to individual institutions or practitioners, is likely to be adapted in order to accommodate different agendas, priorities, circumstances, and situations. It will be distorted, squeezed and trimmed in order to fit into the different contexts that represent that profession at work, in situ. The key to successful professionalisation is to recognise and accept individualism.
Eating an elephant
Rather than present the entire workforce with a vision that some of its members may find heavy-handed, unrealisable, or simply flawed, the professionalisation process needs to percolate through an industry’s members, from small and localised units and groups to larger organisations and institutions.
This allows individual practitioners to be introduced to the notion of different professionality orientations, and what these involve. From this standpoint, they can be encouraged to consider where they currently sit on the professionality continuum, and, with access to the necessary support and tools, they can progress towards the ‘extended’ destination. Rather like eating an elephant, you take one bite at a time and, eventually, it gets eaten.
Linda Evans will be talking more expansively on OSH professionalism at the IOSH conference on 18 March.
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