To say that there is a lack of consensus on the essence of professionalization is an understatement. For almost a hundred years, scholars have disagreed about the traits, attributes, processes, temporal sequences, and socio-historical structures that fundamentally define professions. My dissertation draws on an information theoretic framework to provide a novel analysis of the role of professions in society. According to my normative model, professions are trust-creating and trust-preserving institutional structures, which respond to market failures that arise due to information asymmetries in the market for professional services. Given the limitations on market-based and governmental solutions to information asymmetries, I argue that norms should be viewed as a fundamental transaction-cost minimizing professional governance mechanism.
What are the moral obligations of the professional? The implicit morality of the market for professional services involves achieving the end of economic efficiency. Accordingly, professional moral obligations involve a set of deontic constraints that promote Pareto-efficiency in response to information asymmetries. After providing a conceptual framework that outlines the relation between professional and ordinary morality, I argue that social institutional roles sometimes permit, to a limited extent, what would otherwise be forbidden. Given certain institutional structures and safeguards, professional roles can, thus, be sui-generis sources of moral obligation.
The culmination of my arguments about professions and professional morality is a contribution to the business ethics literature. Since the early twentieth century, scholars have argued over whether the managerial role may be theorized using the normative and theoretical trappings of the professions. A survey of the management literature reveals that an adequately nuanced analysis of the professions and the normative nature of professionalization has yet to be put forward. To fill this gap, I provide a normative model of management professionalization that is sensitive to the socially beneficial nature of professional work while avoiding glorified altruistic characterizations. I argue that managers in private economic entities are professionals, properly understood, since in addition to external market-oriented incentives, they typically appeal to internal, trust-creating norms to promote Pareto-efficiency within the firm. Professionalism thus involves following efficiency imperatives despite the prevalent moral hazard problems surrounding the managerial role.Ph
