Professionals Making Judgments: Some Issues and Contributions

This book has advocated the concept of judgment as being central to the understanding of professionalism and professional work. The implicit assumption is that managerialism as a system of governance that relies on ideals of transparency and formal descriptions of practices can never fully substitute professional judgment. The real life world encountering professionals are too messy and unpredictable to be fully captured and effectively inscribed into manuals and documents. At best, managerial practices can support and reinforce professional judgment, but professional authority and jurisdictions always extend outside of managerial practices. In this final chapter, such arguments will be spelled out in greater detail and will be supported by both theoretical frameworks and empirical studies. More specifically, the chapter aims to discuss how the three studies contribute to the research on professionalism and what the implications are for organization theory. When examining the studies, literature addressing professional work, especially in the science and technology studies tradition, will be reviewed. This literature suggests that professional work cannot be fully captured by performance metrics and similar quanta because professional work always includes the capacity to cope with ambiguities and “weak signals” that is not apprehended by formal representations. This concluding chapter thus finishes by pointing at the need for more research on the professional judgment and the relationship between professional work and managerialism more broadly.