Value versus values?
The challenge of ethical professionalism
in times of austerity
Professor Helen Colley
Education and Social Research Institute
Manchester Metropolitan University
Introduction
• Outline of the problem
• Three conceptual frameworks
– Professionalism
– Ethics and professionalism
– Austerity as context of human service professions
today
• Case study: 14-19 career guidance in England
• Challenges for careers work
Outline of the problem
‘The conditions created in the new, restructured work organisation place workers in
an extremely painful psychological situation,
one which throws them out of kilter with values
of high-quality work, their sense of
responsibility, and professional ethics.’
(Dejours, 2009, p.37)
Outline of the problem
This is largely met by managers and policymakers with denial and ‘institutionalised lying’:
‘These obstacles to revealing the truth have
always been present in the workplace, but the
manipulation of threat to silence opposing views
and impose “official” descriptions of work has
become incomparably greater over the last 20
years.’
(Dejours, 2009, p.86)
Outline of the problem
‘The rationality invoked [in these institutional
lies] is, of course, economic reasoning, but we
shall also see that this almost always insinuates
itself into other considerations related to social
rationality, by virtue of principles which are
highly dubious on a moral and practical level.’
(Dejours, 2009, p.100)
Outline of the problem
• Neo-liberal policies are driven by an economic
rationale.
• This is imposed on human services and their
traditional social and moral values
• …and intensified by austerity measures
• This creates severe ethical tensions for
practitioners
• ‘Value’ conflicts with ‘values’
• How is this playing out in human service
occupations and (specifically) in careers work?
Three conceptual frameworks
• Professionalism
– Julia Evetts
• Ethics and professionalism
– Sarah Banks
• Austerity as context of human service
professions today
– David Harvey
Professionalism
Occupational:
• Theoretical foundation
• Knowledge and skills
• Discretionary decisionmaking
• Moral commitment
• Control of the work
• Self-regulation and
client trust
• Collegial relations
• ‘From within’
(Evetts, 2011)
Professionalism
Occupational:
• Theoretical foundation
• Knowledge and skills
• Discretionary decisionmaking
• Moral commitment
• Control of the work
• Self-regulation and
client trust
• Collegial relations
• ‘From within’
Organisational:
• Ideological basis
• Disciplinary mechanism
• Limited autonomy
• Identity and conduct
prescribed
• Accountability via audit
• Market regulation
• Managerial + political
controls
• ‘From above’
(Evetts, 2011)
Re-framing professionalism
‘Professional service work organizations are
converting into enterprises in terms of identity,
hierarchy and rationality. Possible solutions to
client problems and difficulties are defined by
the organization (rather than the ethical codes
of practice of the professional institution) and
limited by financial constraints…’
(Evetts, 2011, p.16)
Three conceptual frameworks
• Professionalism
– Julia Evetts
• Ethics and professionalism
– Sarah Banks
• Austerity as context of human service
professions today
– David Harvey
Ethics and professionalism
Banks (2009) on three understandings of
professional integrity:
• Conduct
– adherence to codes of practice
• Commitment
– identity-conferring, consistent ‘grounded project’
• Capacity
– dynamic ability to negotiate complex ‘clusters’ of
ethical issues
Ethics and professionalism
Integrity as:
• Beyond uncritical reliance on codes of practice
• Commitment to a set of coherent values
• Capacity to make sense of those values (inc.
their relationship to personal values)
• Coherent accounts of beliefs and actions
• Strength of purpose, ability to implement
these values – crucial to resisting neo-liberal
policies
• Cf. Evetts – having the ability to say ‘no’
Re-framing ethical professionalism
• Problem with ‘professional ethics’
– External codes of practice
– Technically rational models of decision-making
– Ethics education focused on extreme cases
– Divorced from political context
– ‘From above’
(Banks, 2010)
Re-framing ethical professionalism
• Shift to ‘ethics in professional life’
– Ethics embedded in the life as lived
– Moral orientation to encounters with clients
– Ethics in political context, moral struggle
– A lot of (invisible) work – ‘ethics work’
(Banks, 2010)
Three conceptual frameworks
• Professionalism
– Julia Evetts
• Ethics and professionalism
– Sarah Banks
• Austerity as context of human service
professions today
– David Harvey
Re-framing values as value
• Falling rates of profit
• ‘Accumulation by dispossession’
• Social expenditure shifts from care to control
• ‘Clock time’ dominates ‘process time’
• Social reproduction work is commodified further
• Exchange-value dominates use-values
(Harvey, 2003, 2006)
Re-framing values as value
• Intensifies the ‘new managerialism’ in public
services
• Risk of ‘ethical drift’ (Mulvey, 2001)
• ‘Ritual practices’ and ‘creative accounting’
(Cribb, 2009)
Re-framing values as value
‘To devolve decision-making and responsibility
while retaining power over disbursing financial
resources and also power over judging whether
they have been used wisely and, even more
importantly, accountably is a very subtle and
clever way of maintaining control and thus
exercising power while simultaneously being
able to devolve the blame when things go
wrong.’
(Allman, 2010)
Case study – careers advisers in
Connexions
• Funded by Economic and Social Research
Council 2008-10
• Initial survey on ‘state of the profession’ in
Connexions (Lewin & Colley 2011)
• Narrative ‘career history’ interviews
• 17 current PAs, 9 ex-PAs (total of 11 services)
• Current PAs also kept time-use diaries
• Background interviews with senior managers
and national stakeholders.
Re-framing careers work in Connexions
• Moved into new Connexions service in 2001
• From specialist to generic infrastructure
• From specialist to generic occupational role
• From universal to targeted service (NEET)
• Severely under-resourced from the start
• Chaotic re-structuring in 2008
• Severely hit by current austerity drive
Re-framing careers work
• High caseloads affect quality of work
• Who to help?
• How to help them?
• Choosing the lesser evil – creative accounting
• Doing ‘ethics work’
• Not just typical dilemmas – individuals carry
responsibility for inclusion/exclusion of y.p.
I just felt like I was doing a really poor quality of
job everywhere and actually not being
particularly effective with anybody, and that was
really stressful, and I thought that I’m not going
to continue doing this. It’s not me. (HS, ex-PA)
I spent most of last week with one client who is
homeless and has got lots of issues and no one
seems to want to help him because they’ve tried
before and they say he doesn’t engage and goes
round and round in circles. That was most of my
week. (BM, PA, pg.2 of transcript)
If you can help the majority a bit, it’s better than
helping one person a lot when they might not
even move into something positive. (BM, PA,
pg. 4 of transcript)
I can’t remember which training provider I sent [the
client] along to, but it was whichever one was
recruiting at the time, and I sent him off to the
training provider and that was it. If I had the
choice, I would not do that with him, but you know,
when these e-mails go out, you’re monitored.
You’ll have a monthly supervision, and you were
sort of given – it wasn’t the thumbscrews – but you
were basically grilled on why you didn’t offer this
person this or that or what-have-you. So I felt with
this person I had no choice, and you go home, at
the end of the day, thinking: ‘Why do I bother? This
is not what I trained for’. (BT, ex-PA)
Re-framing ethics:
from care to control
• Few or no resources to resolve social, economic and
educational problems
• Main resources = for tracking & surveillance
• Deeply alienating – ‘working for the Gestapo’
• Ethical dilemmas, emotional stress
• Conflicts with managers, disciplinary silencing
• Crossing boundary out of Connexions – by choice or
otherwise
I found it a little paradoxical that we had to go
and do home visits and sort of play a heavyhanded role, and yet if the [young person] came
into the office, we had nothing, nothing more to
offer, really. That was a difficult situation to be in
because it was like a policing, authoritarian
thing to do to them. (LJ, ex-PA)
It’s pressure all the time to get people signed up
[for training courses], and I’ve got one [client]
now and I can tell he doesn’t really want to do
it, and before I came here [today], I was
supposed to take him to his training provider for
his first induction, and I said, ‘You need to go’.
He said, ‘I can’t. I’ve got to stay at home and
look after my sister’, or something. So I came
away agitated because I couldn’t get the sign on.
But it shouldn’t be like that at all. The young person has
got a situation at home. He can’t deal with it. He’s got
things going on at home. He wants to do his driving
lessons. He’s got to look after his older sister who
apparently is disabled.
So this is the second time he missed his appointment,
and I’m putting pressure on that young person to sign up,
and it almost reminds me of back years ago when a
double glazing salesman rang, saying: ‘Come on! Sign
here, sign here!’ I’m thinking, this isn’t right, this.
I had to back right off and say, ‘Fine, if you’ve got things
on the go. If you want to sign up, fine. If you’re not ready
for it, that’s cool’, and yet I’ll get a bit of background grief
[in supervision] about me not achieving a sign-up. I don’t
think it should be like that, myself. It shouldn’t be like that
at all. It should be person-centred. (SB, PA)
New ICG Code of Ethical Principles (c.2009)
- third principle ‘duty of care – to clients, colleagues,
organisations and self’:
• ‘Members must fulfil their obligations and duties to
their employer, except where to do so would
compromise the best interests of individual clients.’
Supporting guidance for the Code also states:
• ‘Organisations should be operating to principles
congruent to the ICG Code of Ethical Practice. […]
Members should be prepared to challenge [their
organisation’s] policies and procedures if they could be
an infringement of the Code of Ethical Practice.’
Ethics: re-framing or erosion?
• ‘Ethical watchfulness’ of practitioners should
be trusted (Reid, 2004)…
• …but is subjected to disciplinary approach
• Those invisible from front-line work preconstruct practitioners’ roles
• … avoid responsibility for the ethical
consequences
• …and engage in denial and silencing
‘These obstacles to revealing the truth have
always been present in the workplace, but the
manipulation of threat to silence opposing views
and impose “official” descriptions of work has
become incomparably greater over the last 20
years.’
(Dejours, 2009, p.86)
Challenges for ethical professionalism
• How can the careers profession ‘say no’ to
unethical policies (local or national)?
• When should careers professionals comply,
conscientiously object, or adopt ‘principled
infidelity’? (Cribb, 2005)
• How can the careers profession address both
the pressures towards unethical practice…
• …and the denial of ethical problems?
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Helen Colley
h.colley@mmu.ac.uk