JACD 71-4 - American College of Dentists

Leadership
60
Professions Defined
A profession is a community of individuals
who advance the personal interests of
individual clients in a trusting relationship.
There are five components in this
definition, as identified in Table 1.
Professionals form a community
of individual practitioners who must
simultaneously meet standards set by
their customers, themselves, and their
professional peers. It is obvious that
dentists work to advance their patients’
and their own interests at the same
time. Sometimes, they are altruistic and
sometimes they do pro bono work to
enhance their reputation or the image
of the profession. The public expects
professionals to charge sufficiently high
fees in general so that no single interaction
with a patient or client is dominated
by financial interests.
Professionals work for each other in
the sense that the good that each does
individually shines on behalf of the
profession as a whole and vice versa.
Professionals tend not to work for companies,
organizations, bureaucracies,
and others who offer employment for a
salary. Although there are employed
professionals, there are no examples
where professional employees enjoy a
higher status than self-employed professionals
performing the same work.
Professionals have individual clients.
They do custom work. True, a lawyer
may represent a Fortune 500 company
Table 1. The Five Characteristics of a Professional
that employs thousands, but he or she
must represent that company in a
unique fashion. This makes the high
emphasis on diagnosis a seminal feature
of the professions and is part of the
reason it is undercompensated. In any
profession, those who treat a generalized
or group clientele have lowered status
and professions that deal with mass
interactions—such as teachers or
journalists—tend to rank lower on the
hierarchy of professions.
Professionals also deal in private and
personal matters. We go to the lawyer
when our finances or legal status is
threatened. We go to the physician
when our health is compromised. When
our soul is hurting we seek the advice of
clergy. In all cases, we are trying to recover
a full sense of who we are. We expect to be
treated with dignity and confidentiality,
because we are not acquiring something,
we are being changed. The same is true
to a lesser extent with accountants,
teachers, or other advisors. It is certainly
not the case with police officers or
beauticians.
Professionals work as agents to
advance the interests of their patients
and clients. They do not offer a menu of
transactions; the whole patient or client
is the professional’s concern. This is a
different kind of economic transaction
from buying a cell phone or having
one’s toilet repaired. The professional is
paid for doing the best he or she can
according to the conventions of the
Community of practitioners who simultaneously work for themselves, customers, and peers
Help patients and clients who are individuals making their own personal choices
Serve private and personal needs of customers seeking wholeness
Work as agents, on behalf of customers instead of transacting services
Function in a relationship of trust
profession. Professionals are not paid for
results (some lawyers at the very lowest
end of that professional scale to the
contrary); they are paid for prudent
advice and action.
Although it is true that professions
create monopolies, they are not restricted
by market transactions in the same sense
that the sewer company has a monopoly.
They are monopolies on who can serve
as an agent for various actions on behalf
of their clients. There is no product that
is exchanged and the rules of supply and
demand are inappropriate in the sense
that the demand for health, justice, spiritual
well-being, and other benefits
provided by professionals is essentially
open-ended. It is wrong to assume that
the economics of goods and services
apply to the relationship between professionals
and their clients. The assumed
antithesis between commercialism and
professionalism is bogus.
The fundamental relationship
between professionals and their clients
is one of trust. This one factor may well
serve as the most useful index for
identifying professionals and for ranking
professions in a hierarchy. (See Table 2
for the results of the most recent Gallup
survey on trust in professions.) Because
the nature of professional services is
both personal, individual, and beyond
the client’s ability to evaluate, the relationship
between professional and client
is inherently asymmetric. A patient, for
example, is not an individual who has
2005 Volume 71, Number 4