How Professionals Think in Action - Essay Example

Usher et. al. (1997: 143) sum up well the crisis he identifies. The model suggests that learning occurs through reflective responses to the problems of the practice itself; reflection in and on practice creates knowledge. To understand we divide the concept into two parts, viz. professional knowledge and reflection in action and secondly, professional context for reflection in action. Considering professional knowledge and reflection in action first we question the rights and freedoms of professionals; who and to what extent license has been given to them to determine who shall be allowed to practice, their mandate for social control, and their autonomy are also to be questioned deeply and their professional claim to extraordinary knowledge in matters of human importance.

Today many professions are facing the crisis of confidence in the professions, leading perhaps to the downfall and also the decline in professional self-image, has resulted in a growing skepticism about professional effectiveness in the larger sense, a skeptical reassessment of the professionals actual contribution to societys well-being through the delivery of competent services based on special knowledge. All the problems are linked and interconnected, environments are turbulent and constantly changing, and the future is indeterminate just in so far as managers can shape it by their actions.

Under these conditions what needs to be done is an important question. It is not only the analytic techniques which have been traditional in operations research, but the active, synthetic skill of "designing a desirable future and inventing ways of bringing it about." (Ackoff, 1979)The unique case calls for an art of practice which "might be taught, if it were constant and known, but it is not constant." This leads to a dilemma faced by the practitioners; these practitioners are therefore frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes and interests.

Thus, emerging are the competing views of professional practice and therefore, competing images of the professional role, the central values of the profession, the relevant knowledge and skills have come into good currency. According to Edgar Schein, there are three components to professional knowledge; which include an underlying discipline or basic science component upon which the practice rests or from which it is developed, an applied science or "engineering" component from which many of the day-to-day diagnostic procedures and problem-solutions are derived and lastly, the skills and the attitudinal component that concerns the actual performance of services to the client, using the underlying basic and applied knowledge.

(24, Schein: Professional Education, 1973)Hence, we see that the researcher's role is distinct from, and usually considered superior to, the role of the practitioner. The perspective of Technical Rationality holds that professional practice is a process of problem solving. These problems of choice or selecting a decision are solved through the selection, from available options and means, and based on which one is the best suited to establish ends. But there is always an increased emphasis on problem solving, and thus problem setting to a large extent is ignored, the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen.

In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as given. The problems must be constructed from the