Self-Serving Professionals

The legacy of serving others is part of the culture of professionalism, but today the culture is some distance from traditional expectations. Consider the stories we have already heard about “professionals” in the finance industry—bankers, credit rating agencies, and advisers of all kinds—who, like apprentices of an absent sorcerer, were caught up in the enterprise of fevered and often indiscriminate production of collateralized debt obligations that led to the Great Recession. When clients, patients, or others in need of advice and support do not fully understand what professionals do, they have to trust that a professional’s knowledge is valuable and necessary and, more important, that the professional is putting their interests first. The primacy of “service” explains why professions have been allowed a much greater degree of self-regulation than other guilds in the marketplace. The influence of America’s religious history shaped the very concept of service leading on to secular forms of “social trusteeship” as professionals assumed an almost paternal role in serving others’ interests. With the antecedents of America’s religious institutions and the “social trustee” model that developed among nineteenth-century professionals, the traditional norms of professionalism have been to “adhere to a service ideal [and] devotion to the client’s interest more than personal or commercial profit … when the two are in conflict.” According to Harold Wilensky, “the service ideal is the pivot around which the moral claim to professional status revolves.”1