Category: Enaction and the Profession

Our generation of professionals, cutting across professions and places, is caught in the midst of sweeping changes in the way economy, society, technology and development are working and being viewed. With professionals becoming increasingly fully occupied in surviving, coping with or getting on top of new, newer and newest paradigms and processes, the chasm between ‘profession’ (as vocation encompassing ethic, thought, teaching, practice) and ‘practice’ (as occupation or just business) is growing, as is the distance of profession and practice from socio-economic and spatio-physical realities. These trends are most marked in what are known in current development parlance as ‘less developed’ regions, where the vast majority has nothing to do with ‘benefits’ expected to accrue from professions. Professional space seems to have been stripped off citizenship. A corollary to the process of distancing of professions from the realities of our times has been the emergence of ‘para-professionalism’. From para-teachers being invited to teach village schools to administrative heads of donor agencies being invited to expert group meetings in the Planning Commission, from resident welfare associations being allowed to take the lead on local planning and design to ‘NGOs’ being allowed to make or dictate national policies. With growing mainstreaming of ‘alternatives’ to professional expertise, professional space is getting more and more marginalised in development and politics and there is more and more chaos. Even as both competence, purportedly found in the professions, and responsiveness, meant to be a defining characteristic of ‘alternatives’, are equally important, obfuscation of development roles is making, not for synergy, but for conflict. And, as ‘alternatives’ reinforce the paradigms that generated them, ‘conventional’ professional thought is being transformed in ways better defined as drift towards the contemporary, even fashionable, than as logical or robust evolution. Systems of professional trusteeship seem to be failing in ensuring professional competence. Obviously, a lot of serious introspection is in order to revisit, refine, redefine, reinvent professional space so it fits better, makes more sense, works. Profession and Enaction is for exploring this territory – empirically. Through accounts of real experiences and experiments relating to citizenship, chaos, conflict, competence and whatever else features on the rather ravaged professional terrain. To objectively assess where exactly things stand and why and, perhaps, also where they might stand and how. To carefully define the right questions and, perhaps, seek, posit and engage on some answers as well.
 
Empirical accounts relating to citizenship, chaos, conflict, competence and whatever else is appearing and disappearing in professional space as it transforms amidst sweeping changes, to assess where exactly things stand and why and, perhaps, where they might and how... Several professions are charged with the mandate of ensuring quality of habitat development. If things are not going quite right in the real-world space, a good hard look at what is going on in professional space is in order. Many are and many more must be looking and it might help to look together.