A City of Professions. Jordi Ludevid Anglada
the indisputable fact that the professions provide services with direct ties to first and second generation human rights, such as the right to education (teachers), to health (health professions, doctors), to housing or habitability (architects) or to justice (lawyers, judges), as well as to economic, environmental and cultural sustainability (engineers, economists) (third generation) and to the rights derived from the digital society (fourth generation). Without these services, human rights are unattainable. We must conclude, therefore, that in the 21st century, professional ethics demands that the professions provide their corresponding good or service, «because it is the path to making human rights a reality».21
From the outset and in parallel, as we mentioned in our discussion of Hippocrates and Cicero, the four principles have always accompanied professional practice: beneficence, autonomy, justice and non-maleficence. These principles can sometimes be contradictory. Thus, according to Augusto Hortal,22 the conflict between the principle of autonomy and that of beneficence is always resolved in favour of autonomy, but he considers the principle of non-maleficence (avoidance of harm) as the priority, even before the principle of autonomy.23
Regarding the validity and usefulness of these principles, it is worth noting, for example, that when the US Bioethics Commission was established, it adopted them for its operations. Similarly, the principles of the Jesuits’ so-called 2030 pedagogical revolution, which we will discuss later on, are oriented towards five closely related guiding principles: conscience, competence, compassion, commitment and creativity, which offer a remarkable and curious parallelism to the classical professional principles.
The Art of Professionals
Finally, in the discussion of the 20th century and the professions, it is impossible not to mention the great contributions of the American sociologist Richard Sennett and the American pedagogue and philosopher Donald Schön because of their importance and decisive influence.
At first sight, Sennett’s contribution24 could be described as heterodox, though unavoidable, and really very inspiring in terms of sparking reflection and encouraging a contemporary professional logic, in his case driven by private law, civil society and anthropology. This is why the influence of Sennett’s logic has taken root more easily in some professional environments than in others.
His approach does involve some retreats, avoiding the use of the word profession, a social and political word, more oriented towards public law. Sennett’s reflection is material and civil, anthropological. With his motto «Making is thinking», his contribution ultimately becomes a reference that might be considered «an antidote». Going to the root, it stands a protection and a defence of a job well done in the face of the risks and threats that professionalism is exposed to in today’s economy – both before and after the triumph of the markets, before and after digitalisation, and before and after the subsequent precarisation of labour. The craftsmanship we are offered today is not only associated with manual work; it is also a broad metaphor for professional practice. One can be a craftsman in technology, in medicine, in architecture, in law, etc. Richard Sennett’s craftsman is focused on «a job well done» – in our terms, on aretè, on excellence.
Of particular interest in Sennett’s work is the definition of a workshop: «A productive space in which people deal face-to-face with issues of authority. [...] No one working alone could figure out, however, how to glaze windows or to draw blood. In craftmanship there must be a superior who sets standards and who trains. In the workshop, inequalities of skill and experience become face-to-face issues.»
Workshops, in the past as well as the present, have been and are a factor in education and social cohesion by virtue of their working rituals, whether that means sharing a cup of tea, mentoring, informal workplace counselling, or the face-to-face sharing of information. As Donald Schön asserts,25 «learning all forms of professional artistry depends, at least in part, on conditions similar to those created in the studios and conservatories [...] with access to coaches who initiate students into the «’traditions of the calling’».
The two most relevant ideas in Sennett’s book are, on the one hand, the definition of craftsmanship as work driven by quality and, on the other, the peculiar notion of skill, broad and complex, that the author proposes. Regarding the former, Sennett explains the social dimension of the craft attitude, which generates honest and reliable citizens: «Learning to work well enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens [...][;] good work molds good citizenship».
Crafts also comprise «material culture» and «tacit knowledge» as genuine assets of «social capital», i.e., knowledge and skills that are accumulated and passed on through social interaction, a real bodily know-how of which we are often not entirely aware. In the workshop, moreover, craftspeople have to cultivate social skills in order to coordinate with their peers, act as a team and respect the principle of authority. Sennett argues that «nearly anyone can become a good craftsman», with all the moral, social and aesthetic consequences that this entails.
Sennett also offers a wake-up call regarding what was an incipient digitisation and its limits. How is it possible to misuse such a useful tool? When CAD was introduced into architectural education to implement and complement hand drawing, a young architect at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) observed that «When you draw a plot of land, when you put the contour lines and the trees on it, it sticks in your head. You get to know the place in a way that is impossible with the computer. You get to know a piece of land by drawing it over and over again, not by letting the computer ‘generate it for you’.» This is not nostalgia: this architect’s observation points to what we lose mentally when screen work replaces physical drawing – or, to borrow Juhanni Pallasmaa’s words, «the thinking hand». Like other visual practices, architectural sketches are often images of possibilities. In the process of rendering and refining these sketches by hand, designers are something like tennis players or musicians – i.e., they become deeply involved in the drawing, their thinking about it matures. The terrain «sticks in your head».
Thus, the word craftsmanship designates «an enduring, basic human impulse; the desire to do a job well for its own sake» As Sennett explains, this implies a dedication to learning and developing skills, to growing as a competent worker – a concept that has been conspicuously absence in recent years, in which very little investment has been made in training or educating workers. A job well done, however, takes time. Sennett suggests that 10,000 hours is a reasonable estimate of the time it takes to become a skilled carpenter or musician.
His gaze seems to be directed backwards; it seems to imply an evocation of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, past eras from which, nevertheless, he extracts key concepts for a contemporary reflection (the craftsman, the workshop), and which are then contextualised in the present, with an eye to the future. It may seem innocuous or marginal, but, as we will see in the following pages, it is not. On the contrary, in the internet age, crafts have emerged as a factor of creativity, regeneration, economic promotion and future employability for professionals.
Sennett’s distaste with the socio-economic reality derived from the absolute predominance of the markets leads him to propose an attitude of resistance, something like an antidote to safeguard professionalism in our times, and he positions himself in favour of a strategy to rebuild a future urban social pact and a new economy.
For his part, Donald A. Schön (Boston, 1930-1997), an American philosopher and educator, is considered an absolutely decisive thinker in the development of the theory and practice of reflective professional learning in the late 20th century. Still today, he is a very important inspirational reference for professionalisation and the ongoing pedagogical revolution. Schön perfectly redefines professionals on the basis of the training they need. He considers that «a professional is someone who knows how to handle practical problems in complex environments». In other words, his position is perfectly in line with the traditional conception of the professional as someone focused on practical knowledge rather than scientific knowledge.
He brilliantly argues how professional praxis is characterised by complexity, uncertainty, instability, singularity and the conflict of values. As a consequence, the technical perspective is not the most suited when it comes to managing education in professional practice. On the contrary, «the professions should be understood