Competence, qualification and action theory

Abstract

Competence is a widely used concept to describe capabilities – mostly of employees – to perform in a certain way in organisations. Although a long and ongoing debate about measuring and developing competence exists, the concept itself is only partly founded on theory. It sometimes seems that ‘competence’ is used as a material construct, which refers to real objects like arms or heads. Rather, it is a social construct, only viable if it grounds on a common understanding of what it should stand for. And this common understanding seems to be still missing, after a debate that lasted at least since the 1980s. What could be helpful is a theoretical framework that goes beyond what is already discussed by Chomsky, White and others. This chapter formulates such a framework. Therefore, it starts with a short overview of the theory discussion on competence in the past and discusses the relationship between competence and qualification. Next it explains why the close relationship between competence and performance is one of the problems, not only to measure competence but, moreover, to get to a decent understanding of competence itself. That will lead to thoughts about how to get to a theoretically founded explanation of the construct of competence. The most used way is to define a desired performance and afterwards derive a relating competence. The chapter will show why this is problematic and offers an alternative for explaining competence which is founded on action theories by analysing the relationship between action, performance, situation and competence.