Universities, Corporate Universities, and the New Professionals:

Professionalism and the Knowledge Economy

Brenton Faber and Johndan Johnson-Eilola

Clarkson University

The American university has served as a primary service organization, a professional service institution which has made possible the functions of many derivative institutions serving the middle class. The university has exerted a formative influence upon society: as the matrix within which the culture of professionalism matured; as the center to which practitioners trace the theoretical basis of knowledge upon which they establish authority; as the source of a usable history, economics, political science, and sociology for individuals who in the course of rapid movement require instant ideas. (Bledstein, 289).

A paradox: we think it is very possible that technical communication is beginning to attain the status of a mature profession at the very time that the cultural and economic value of professions are on the wane. Shifts in the structure and process of intellectual labor over the last few decades have altered the respective roles of educational institutions, professional organizations, and corporations with respect to education and training. If the recent history and current research on education are any indication, technical communication needs to undertake some dramatic rethinking of how we perceive ourselves, how we educate our students, and how we structure our profession.

In this chapter, we provide a short history of professionalization in U.S. culture, noting the rise in occupational professions during the last century as elite organizations for collecting, protecting, increasing, and distributing knowledge. Following this history, we discuss recent trends in labor and technology that have spurred shifts in the economic and political value of professions, particularly in relation to information-age workers. In this analysis, we note the ways that corporations increasingly provide educational opportunities to their employees that supplant and supercede the opportunities previously situated within educational institutions and professions. In the final sections of the chapter, we map technical communication against these developments, discussing ways that technical communication, as both workplace practice and educational process, can respond in productive ways to the challenges of these new forms and processes for work and education.

The Democratic University System and Professional Aspirations

The university system has been at the heart of the professional’s social and economic rise to prominence in America. In her study of the historical rise of the American university system, Magali Safatti Larson argues that it was not by accident that the American university gained its preeminence at the same time as Americans were busy professionalizing occupationally and socially. As Larson notes, university education was a key strategy of professionalization (154). Through their research, universities developed the knowledge which became fundamental to professional work and professional dominance. The modern university became the “cognitive base” of professional authority and, through their formal associations with universities, professionals were able to institutionalize, control, and standardize the means of knowledge production in their disciplines (17). There are, to be certain, gatekeeping functions within such professional societies, but the explicit (if not always practiced) goal of limiting access to knowledge was in order to carefully control the educational process in ways that produced more effective professionals.

As a center of knowledge creation, universities upheld the qualifications for entry into a professional career, they legitimated standards for professional certification, and they housed subject matter experts who became the gatekeepers to successful professional life. Universities thus produced not only the relevant knowledge for a profession but also the actual practitioners and researchers who would continue to uphold the profession’s monopoly power over its knowledge base.

As social institutions, universities have also been important cultural centers for the professional classes. As social products, Larson argues that universities provided an arena for “common socialization” for the middle classes which enabled “their rise and assertion in the new social order” (153). Universities gave members of the professions a common social experience and a common way to identify themselves as the new social class. Through their course work, universities taught common modes and expectations for professional writing, speaking, and presenting oneself as a professional. This leads Larson to claim that the dominant result of university education was “the conquest and assertion of social status” for members of the middle class (155). Universities not only provided newly-emerging professionals with access to the specialized knowledge they would need to pursue a professional occupation, they also gave these emerging professionals social and cultural lessons in how to function as a member of the newly emergent, and socially and politically important professional class.

Burton Bledstein, makes a similar claim about the relationship of the university to the professional class. In The Culture of Professionalism, Bledstein shows how the rise of the professional class in America was as much a social as an economic and occupational movement. He argues that ultimately, professional work emerged as a desire for social control that grew out of the mid-Victorian quest for perfect control over bodily and emotional urges (80). This dual occupational and social emphasis of professionalism could be seen in nascent professional movements in the late 1800's which emphasized self-improvement and combining one’s personal life with one’s work. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured on the moral and political superiority of the rising middle class, arguing that these workers were the instantiation of American democracy. These “true Americans” were competitive, innovative, assertive, and egotistic and they turned social and technical problems into issues of organization, analytical challenge, and theoretical knowledge (Bledstein, 27). As Bledstein notes, “being middle class referred to the kind of person one was, to the style of life one emulated, not only in vocational pursuits but in recreation, domestic relations, education, politics, war–everything” (30).

The university experience separated professional workers from other occupations. At university, elite middle class students learned how to reorient work from the physical delivery of a product to the delivery of a theoretical and knowledge-based service. The university taught emerging professionals to espouse this ethic of service in which dedication to a client’s interests was more important than sheer profit (Bledstein, 87). In this way, professional work emerged as external to market forces and to the cyclical forces of supply and demand. Professionals provided society with necessary and vital services based on theoretical knowledge and technical competence. As a profession solidified its knowledge base and its ability to recruit, educate, and certify practitioners, the university system guaranteed professions monopoly power over both the market for their specific services and the means to attain specialization in those services.

Monopoly professionals did not bid on the open market for clients and their remuneration was not conditioned by market forces of supply and demand. Professionals maintained a high demand for their services by purposely restricting access to professional fields, limiting graduates from programs, and controlling the public’s access to professional knowledge. In fact, professionals forced the government to intervene in the market to ensure that professional services were even available to low income and destitute individuals.

By the 1900's the professions’ position in America was solidified and other occupations began “professionalizing” or simply emulating the professions. Bledstein notes that between 1870 and 1880 over two hundred learned societies were created. These included teachers’ groups, scientists’ organizations, historians, and language instructors. In addition, other occupations such as engineers, business managers, funeral directors, and social workers took-on professional status through connections with specialized university programs, state licensing, examination and certification, and an articulated service ethic (see, for example, Carolyn Marvin’s history of the development of electrical engineering as a profession). The professions had become the way in which the middle class could gain social prestige and economic success in a growing America and the quest for a university education became the first step in this process.

This chapter is concerned with the central role universities have played in the maintenance of the professional class. However, we assert that while universities have historically played a primary role in the reproduction and maintenance of the professional classes, this central function has recently shifted away from historically academic universities and has been adopted by newly emergent corporate universities and other workplace education programs. We argue that this has occurred as a response to three significant factors. First, we discuss the conflicting social space occupied by professional life, by which we mean the ways professionalism grew as a democratic movement yet simultaneously strove to achieve and embrace its own economic and social elitism based on knowledge/power and monopoly control of intellectual resources. Professionalism’s meritocractic and democratic impulses stipulated that anyone should be able to acquire the knowledge needed to move into the professional classes and gain elite economic and social status. Yet, paradoxically, in order to retain their status, these same professionals needed, in turn, to restrict public access to this same body of knowledge.

Second, we argue that as universities democratized in the 1960's and 1970's, they no longer offered the professional class the elite status and cultural assimilation necessary for professional life. This became evident as business leaders, professional gatekeepers, and even academics themselves argued that university education did not cross-over effectively into professional workplace contexts. We argue that these common criticisms of academic education are not based on graduates’ knowledge but instead on their lack of assimilation and sophistication into professional cultures. We also argue that this lack of cultural assimilation is due, in part, to professionals’ desire to create an elite class apart from regular university graduates.

Third, we argue that the nature of professional work itself has changed. In recent years, several once-prominent university-based professions have suffered a decline in occupational and cultural status as market and corporate forces have undermined professionals’ gatekeeping authority and workplace conditions. As a result, we argue that professional occupations that have historically been linked to what we call “product knowledge” are being replaced by professionals specializing in “process knowledge” and a new kind of global professional culture that is outside the experience and resources of most academic programs.

As a result of these factors, we argue that corporations have begun to supplement traditional higher education with their own immersion into and instruction in professional cultures. This immersion and professional cultural schooling is occurring in what are becoming known as “corporate universities.