Schmidt, an American physicist who was for nineteen years the editor of the international publication, Physics Today, draws upon his own experiences of professional training and employment in order to chart the reality of subordination that may all too often lie behind the rhetoric of the autonomous scientist, working at their freely chosen lab bench. Schmidt's claim is that his observations apply far beyond the world of physics to any form of professional labour, that is, to any mode of work in which the end product is the manipulation or manufacture of knowledge.
There is of course a sizable social science literature on the ideological role of the professions, and it is both a strength and weakness of this book that the author largely ignores this literature.
In the first chapter, the author describes a change in his habitual daily commute to work, in which he is required suddenly to board a subway train in an upmarket suburb where many executives and professionals live. Schmidt is struck by the thought that “everyone dressed the same, in suits, sitting silently in neat rows and columns, each holding up a large newspaper, absorbing the same information.” On debarking from the train, the author muses that “The people who showed the greatest diversity in their dress, behaviour and thought – the non-professionals – would be asked to do the least creative work, while the most regimented people would be assigned the creative tasks. This seemed just the opposite of what one might expect. And even more disturbingly, it indicated that people who do creative work are not necessarily independent thinkers.”
[To put it another way: those with the most surveilled and regimented minds do the mental labor; those with the most surveilled and regimented bodies do the manual labor. —AC]
Schmidt suggests that ideological discipline is the key to the professions, so that, “whatever the field, the willingness and ability to maintain ‘correct’ [i.e. governmental or corporate] priorities makes the professional.” The author contends that, as a result, professionals in very different fields have more in common with one another in terms of attitudes and values than they do with their non-professional colleagues encountered daily within their own field of work. Schmidt suggests that it may therefore be easier for a professional to move into an entirely new field than for a non-professional to acquire accredited status in an area with which they are already very familiar.
On this analysis, it might be supposed that the professionals and amateurs in a given field of endeavour are very different beasts, and so it proves:
“When hobbyists encounter one another at a social gathering, before long you will find them talking eagerly about the content of their subject of common interest, showing an excitement, enthusiasm wonder and curiosity that is reminiscent of beginning professional students. This rarely happens when professionals talk casually with their colleagues. Unlike the amateurs, professionals don't talk much about the work itself. They often appear detached from their subject, as if they don't derive much satisfaction from it – and yet their gossip is by no means idle, for the politics are central to their work as professionals.”
In regard to the process of professional training, the author describes an iniquitous education system, in which competition for graduate school is intense, and in which selection is achieved by means of aptitude tests that covertly select for the willingness to think unquestioningly (i.e. obediently) within a preset agenda which, in this context, will consist of the exam paper, and later on, in managerially defined workplace goals. In accord with this analysis, Schmidt argues that graduate and particularly post-graduate training is much less about cultivating a spirit of open enquiry, and is in fact closer to the process of indoctrination observed within religious and political cults.
Schmidt suggests that this kind of training process is aided by (and indeed cultivates) a tolerance for boredom and a preoccupation with abstractions or minutiae that are often remote from both the real world concerns and ethical imperatives of many students, and indeed from the interests and commitments that drew them into their chosen field in the first place. Schmidt therefore suggests that training progressively erodes creativity and ethical thinking (especially in regard to wider questions of social justice).
Schmidt's ignores the substantial bodies of critical social analysis and investigation into the workings of the professions, much of which could have served to bolster his case. There is for example, a sizable literature that documents in this context the rise over the last twenty years of managerial power and the erosion of professional autonomy and security – both within the private and public sectors. This literature points to the gradual breaking down of what (at their best) were ethically reflective values and creative practices into what amount to commodified units of ‘skill’, subject to supervisory control – a process that has been aptly summarised by the term ‘McDonaldisation’ (Ritzer, 2002).
Much of this literature also points to the way in which professionals (and particularly managers and therapists) [we must add teachers! —AC] can mediate coercive power without their being aware that they are doing so, and indeed with noble intentions that are completely at odds with the wider effects of their actions (see for example, Smail, 1999 and Wainwright and Calnan, 2002).
* Original article by Paul Moloney. Modified.