LESSONS FOR BUSINESS SCHOOLS PREPARING PROFESSIONALS FOR THE DEMANDS OF PRACTICE By – Sudhanshu

LESSONS FOR BUSINESS SCHOOLS

PREPARING PROFESSIONALS FOR THE DEMANDS OF PRACTICE

By – Sudhanshu (Advisor to Red Cross Society – New Zealand and Economist & Professor At Maharaja Agrasen Business School, New Delhi, India )

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In Business Education there are students from varied professions – ?Artists, ?Social Scientists , Engineer, Medical Practitioners, Designers, Architects ?and so on ….. they have to be brought together for their education in Management …

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In this varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the application of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowland, messy, confusing problems defy technical solution. The irony of? this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or society at large, however great their technical interest may be, while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern. The academician and practitioner must choose. Shall they remain on the high ground where they can solve relatively unimportant problems according to prevailing standards of rigor, or shall he descend to the swamp of important problems and non rigorous inquiry?

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This dilemma has two sources: first, the prevailing idea of rigorous professional knowledge, based on technical rationality, and second, awareness of ?indeterminate, swampy zones of practice that lie beyond its canons.

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Technical rationality is an epistemology of practice derived from positivist philosophy, built into the very foundations of the modern research university as I think…. !!.

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Technical rationality holds that practitioners are instrumental problem solvers who select technical means best suited to particular purposes. Rigorous professional academicians ?solve well-formed instrumental problems by applying theory and technique derived from systematic, preferably scientific knowledge.

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But, as we have come to see with increasing clarity over the last twenty or so years, the problems of real-world practice do not present themselves to practitioners as well-formed structures. Indeed, they tend not to present themselves as problems at all but? ?messy, indeterminate situations. Civil engineers, for example, know how to build roads suited to the conditions of particular sites and specifications. They draw on their knowledge of soil conditions, materials, and construction technologies to define grades, surfaces, and dimensions. When they must decide what road to build, however, or whether to build it at all, their problem is not solvable by the application of technical knowledge, not even by the sophisticated techniques of decision theory. They face a complex and ill-defined melange of topographical, financial, economic, environmental, and political factors. If they are to get a well-formed problem matched to their familiar theories and techniques, they must construct it from the materials of a situation that is, to use John Dewey's term, "problematic." And the problem of problem setting is not well formed.

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When a practitioner sets a problem, he chooses and names the things he will notice. In his road-building situation, the civil engineer may see drainage, soil stability, and ease of maintenance; he may not see the differential effects of the road on the economies of the towns that lie along its route. Through complementary acts of naming and framing, the academician ?selects things for

attention and organizes them, guided by an appreciation of the situation that gives it coherence and sets a direction for action. So problem setting is an ontological process—in my opinion – a ?memorable word, a form of world making.

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Depending on our disciplinary backgrounds, organizational roles, past histories, interests, and political/economic perspectives, we frame problematic situations in different ways. A nutritionist, for example, may convert a vague worry about malnourishment among children in developing countries into the problem of selecting an optimal diet. But agronomists may frame the problem in terms of food production; epidemiologists may frame it in terms of diseases that increase the demand for nutrients or prevent their absorption; demographers tend to see it in terms of a rate of population growth that has outstripped agricultural activity;

engineers, in terms of inadequate food storage and distribution; economists, in terms of insufficient purchasing power or the inequitable distribution of land or wealth. In the field of malnourishment, professional identities and npolitical/economic perspectives determine how people see a problematic situation, and debates about malnourishment revolve around the construction

of a problem to be solved. Debates involve conflicting frames, not easily resolvable—if resolvable at all—by appeal to data. Those who hold conflicting frames pay attention to different facts and make different sense of the facts they notice. It is not by technical problem solving that we convert problematic situations to well formed problems; rather, it is through naming and framing that? technical problem solving becomes possible.

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Often, a problematic situation presents itself as a unique case. A physician recognizes a constellation of symptoms that she cannot associate with a known disease. A mechanical engineer encounters a structure for which he cannot, with the tools at his disposal, make a determinate analysis. A teacher of arithmetic,

listening to a child's question, becomes aware of a kind of? confusion and, at the same time, a kind of intuitive understanding, for which she has no readily available response. Because the unique case falls outside the categories of existing theory and technique, the academician ?cannot treat it as an instrumental problem to be solved by applying one of the rules in her store of professional knowledge. The case is not "in the book." If she is to deal with it competently, she must do so by a kind of improvisation, ?inventing and testing in the situation strategies of her own devising.

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Some problematic situations are situations of conflict among values. Medical technologies such as kidney dialysis or tomography have created demands that stretch the nation's willingness to invest in medical services. How should physicians respond to the conflicting requirements of efficiency, equity, and

quality of care? Engineering technologies, powerful and elegant when judged from a narrowly technical perspective, turn out to have unintended and unpredicted side effects that degrade the environment, generate unacceptable risk, or create excessive demands on scarce resources. How, in their actual designing,? should engineers take such factors into account? When agronomists recommend efficient methods of soil cultivation that favour the use of large landholdings, they may undermine the viability of the small family farm on which peasant economies depend. How should their practice reflect their recognition of the risk? In such cases, competent practitioners must not only solve technical problems by selecting the means appropriate to clear and self consistent ends; they must also reconcile, integrate, or choose among conflicting appreciations of a situation so as to construct a coherent problem worth solving.

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Often, situations are problematic in several ways at once. A? hydrologist, employed to advise officials of a water supply system about capital investment and pricing, may find the hydrological system unique. He may also experience uncertainty because he has no satisfactory model of the system. In addition, he may discover that his client is unwilling to listen to his attempts to describe the

situation's uniqueness and uncertainty, insisting on an expert answer that specifies one right way. He will be caught, then, in a thicket of conflicting requirements: a wish to keep his job, a feeling of professional pride in his ability to give usable advice, and a keen sense of his obligation to keep his claims to certainty within the bounds of his actual understanding.

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These indeterminate zones of practice—uncertainty, uniqueness, and value conflict—escape the canons of technical rationality. When a problematic situation is uncertain, technical problem solving depends on the prior construction of a well-formed problem—which is not itself a technical task. When a practitioner recognizes a situation as unique, she cannot handle it solely by applying theories or techniques derived from her store of professional knowledge. And in situations of value conflict, there are no clear and self-consistent ends to guide the technical selection of means.

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It is just these indeterminate zones of practice, however, that practitioners and critical observers of the professions have come to see with increasing clarity over the past two decades as central to professional practice. And the growing awareness of them has figured prominently in recent controversies about the performance of the professions and their proper place in our society.

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When professionals fail to recognize or respond to value conflicts, when they violate their own ethical standards, fall short of self-created expectations for expert performance, or seem blind to public problems they have helped to create, they are increasingly subject to expressions of disapproval and dissatisfaction. Radical critics like Ivan Illich take them to task for misappropriating and monopolizing knowledge, blithely disregarding social injustices, and mystifying their expertise. Professionals themselves argue that it is impossible to meet heightened societal expectations for their performance in an environment that combines increasing turbulence with increasing regulation of professional activity. They emphasize their lack of control over the larger systems for which they are unfairly held responsible. At the same time, they call attention to the mismatch between traditional divisions of labor and the shifting complexities of present-day society. They call for reforms in professional norms and structures.

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In spite of these different emphases, public, radical, and professional critics voice a common complaint: that the most important areas of professional practice now lie beyond the conventional boundaries of professional competence.

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The late Everett Hughes, a pioneering sociologist, once observed that the professions have struck a bargain with society. In return for access to their extraordinary knowledge in matters of great human importance, society has granted them a mandate for social control in their fields of specialization, a high degree of autonomy in their practice, and a license to determine who shall assume the mantle of professional authority. But in the current climate of criticism, controversy, and dissatisfaction, the bargain is coming unstuck. When the professions' claim to extraordinary knowledge, it is so much in question, why should we continue to grant them extraordinary rights and privileges?

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Academicians ?and Practitioners have to work in letter and spirit outlined in this articles to handle ?the two sided problems to work in the interest of business and society.

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Next Part? ………..

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The Crisis of Confidence in Professional Education