Against Professional Development

Abstract

All professional workers need to be developed. Moreover, there should be no end to this process—the true professional knows that learning is for life. I want to explore how these two propositions have come to be true for academics and other pro-fessional workers at the beginning of the new millennium, and with what effects. In doing so, I seek to provoke debate about 'professional development' as a discursively organised domain whose practices are neither innocent nor neutral. In declaring this to be a paper against professional development, I am signalling my ambivalence about the truth claims made within this discursive domain as much as my interest in how such claims have gained the status of Truth. My rationale does not arise out of any belief in the suf ciency of my own knowledge or that of my professional colleagues. Rather it arises out of my concerns about the sort of knowledge that is coming to count as worthwhile for all professionals, including academics, and the current proliferation of mechanisms for disseminating this knowledge, for better and worse. It is too easy to forget the latter point. Just as the work done to develop Third World communities can often contribute to the deterioration of those same com-munities, so too the knowledge presumed to be relevant to the development of professional workers can undermine worthwhile local and context-sensitive knowl-edge. In the discussion that follows, I use Australian higher education as a case study to draw parallels between Third World development and the development of professional academic workers, using anthropological critiques of Western knowl-edge applications as conceptual tools relevant for this purpose. To ask questions about the sort of knowledge which comes to count as truth in a particular institutional and/or historical setting, and the processes by which this occurs, is to imply a theoretical understanding of the nature of knowledge, power and subjectivity. I therefore acknowledge my debt to Michel Foucault's theorising of power as inseparable from knowledge, inasmuch as knowledge is something that makes us its subjects. According to Foucault (1985), human experience does not occur 'naturally', or through rational or true elds of learning. Instead, experience is historically constituted out of games of truth and error. This is how we come to believe that 'something … can and must be thought' (p. 7). Foucault's interest is in problematisations (the ways 'being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought'), and the practices on the basis of which such problematisations are formed (p. 11). So Fou-cault takes as the object of his analysis the manner in which human activity (e.g. institutional behaviour, sexual activity) is made problematic in 'prescriptive texts', i.e., 'texts that elaborate rules, opinions and advice as to how to behave as one