Profession: Brief History and Epistemology of a Challenging Word for Construction Management

Introduction

Construction Management (CM) as a baccalaureate degree has experienced sustained growth in number of students and industry recognition during the last decades. There is plenty of statistical and anecdotal evidence to the success of this young discipline: CM graduates usually have many job opportunities, and offer for faculty positions frequently exceeds the pool of qualified candidates. PCL Construction Enterprises Inc., a large construction contractor, offers a typical example: It hires about one third of its new recruits from CM programs, and plans to expand this proportion to about half of the total in the next few years (Roe, 2002).

Despite its success in terms of expansion, industry acceptance and compliance with academic standards, CM has had much difficulty in getting recognition as a professional occupation. Many CM faculty members have heard the occasional mumbling from colleagues at other programs that CM “belongs” in trade schools, as opposed to being a bona fide university-level career. Even ACCE in its Document 103 tries to assure that CM programs are not discriminated (ACCE, 2006). Why is such a negative perception still so stubbornly present, even with all the advances of this young profession? It is proposed here that some questionable central assumptions, implicit or otherwise, in the academic world have created these negative attitudes toward CM as a valid professional endeavor.

Objective

This article presents the historical evolution of the word profession, and analyzes how the implicit academic epistemology carried over from the nineteenth century has a negative impact on practice-based professions, compared to those dealing with basic science, and particularly for the academic field of Construction Management. Furthermore, it discusses the potential of applied / action research to alleviate these negative perceptions, and concludes with a reflective summary of its findings.

Profession: A Difficult Word

Merriam – Webster defines profession as “a : a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation b : a principal calling, vocation, or employment c : the whole body of persons engaged in a calling.” (Merriam – Webster, 2006). But, where in this definition is the line separating profession as a learned, academically-oriented degree from profession as a regular occupation? The best way to establish this rather tenuous difference may be identifying what qualities must be found in a professional practitioner, and then defining a profession as what a professional does. Hoyle & John (1995) summarize the characteristics of a professional as “the possession and use of expert or specialist knowledge, the exercise of autonomous thought and judgment, and a responsibility to clients and wider society through voluntaristic [sic] commitment to a set of principles.”

By the standards mentioned in the last paragraphs, CM is a profession: It requires specialized knowledge, and as anyone with construction experience can attest, CM professionals tend to be, if anything, very autonomous. The area that may bring concern to a casual observer is that of responsibility to clients and society through commitment to a set of principles. In the author’s experience, small construction company owners frequently perform day-to-day project management tasks along with their upper management responsibilities. This dual role could result in conflicts of interest: The professional principles and duties expected from their role as CM may run against the need to maximize profits expected by investors. A layperson may question whether the owner of the company doing their kitchen remodeling will try to save a bit of glue or a couple of nails to make more money. Even in such small projects, the author’s experience is that the vast majority of small contractors conform to professional standards: The role as CM professional overcomes the role as owner. In larger companies, a CM is even freer to abide to professional standards. Creating a safe working environment and providing lasting quality in a built environment are professional traits expected from any CM. If CM fulfills the conditions to be considered a profession, what other issues are at play for its reluctant acceptance in academia? The history and epistemology of professions discussed below offer insight into this paradox.

Evolution of Professions

The word profession as understood in the Middle Ages had little in common with its modern definition, as discussed by Davis (1997). A profession was the name of a commitment formally professed by a person to become a member of a religious order, and a professional was the person who has professed the commitment. Early universities drew most of their faculty from religious orders, and these teachers eventually were called professors.

Eventually, the terms professor and professional were extended to refer to any avowal of a calling. It was at that point that professions were subdivided into learned professions and common professions. The former category was reserved for theology, law, and medicine, which were learned at universities; the latter was used for all other practices, which were learned through an apprenticeship. Later on, the concept of liberal professions was introduced. These were professions for noblemen who in theory did not really need to work for a living: they were liberated from the need to work, but wanted to learn the profession anyway. The first liberal profession was the military career.

Eventually, the distinction between liberal and common professions was hardly noticeable, and especially after the French revolution, a new semantically distinction was created, now between professions and trades. While a trade was a “mere money – making calling” a profession was supposed to be intrinsically a “gentleman’s calling,” willing to hold a higher ethical standard.

Construction position structures followed a course parallel to the evolution of professions presented above. Construction guilds were as exclusivist as university academics. Freemasons, who had their origins in the construction trades, “tended to attract people who were relatively well-to-do, who were more cosmopolitan than average, who were higher status than others.” (Braiker, 2004). Construction guild members did not exhibit any urge to be called professionals, and developed their own systems of apprenticeship, which survive in various forms until today. Eventually, the traditional role of the Master Builder was eroded by the need for specialization brought by the more complex projects of the last two centuries, and resulted in the current management positions and structures (Robson and Bashford, 1995).

After World War II, the influx of 7.8 million veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill (and accounting for 49% of total college enrollment) (GI Bill, 2006), the role of colleges as catapults in the social ladder, and the aforementioned development of more complex and scientific management techniques resulted in the establishment of CM academic programs in several American Universities. Many of these programs evolved from individual courses in Architecture or Civil Engineering programs, or were offered as a specialty within these two traditional and well established professions (Williamson and Bilbo, 1999). The creation of the Associated Schools of Construction in 1965 and the American Council for Construction Education in 1974 as an accrediting body for CM programs completed the supporting structures required by a modern academic program, now available at over one hundred universities

The strong and independent social entities developed by construction guilds and the belated need for using academia to educate construction managers may have resulted in the misunderstanding and mistrust of many individuals in the academic world. This mistrust is exacerbated by some implicit assumptions held by many in American universities, of what kind of knowledge is appropriate for a college education, as discussed below.

Epistemology of American Universities: The “Veblenian Bargain”

As noted by Schon (1987), academic institutions posses individual epistemologies. By definition, these epistemologies dictate what “legitimate” knowledge is, and how it is claimed to be known and acquired. As he points out, not all these conceptions may be consciously adopted, but they are built into academic structures and practices.

The academic standing of Construction is affected by these concepts and epistemologies. The anecdotal reality that most Construction Management instructors would promptly point out is that Construction Management programs tend to be considered “second class citizens” in their universities. Many CM authors have addressed such concerns, and even ACCE in its document 103 tries to assure that CM programs are not discriminated.

To understand this state of affairs, it is very helpful to look at the history and evolution of the epistemologies at American universities. Schon (1987) points out and that the first American colleges where considered as sanctuaries for free thinkers and liberal arts. However, this British tradition was dramatically changed after the Civil War, when the concept of research university originated in Germany was imported and enthusiastically adopted first by John Hopkins university, and then by other universities. Fallout of this new addition for higher education was a disdain for areas not directly related to science, such as business, art and technical schools.

The extent of disdain for technical schools can be highlighted by Thorstein Veblen’s remarks in his book “The higher learning in America” (Veblen, 1918), an influential work written as a reaction to the proposition of establishing a school of business, nowhere less than at the University of Chicago ( business was considered a technical trade at the time). The following quote is very telling:

“There is nothing to gain by associating any given technical school with any given University establishment; incorporation in any given University does not in any degree facilitate the utilization of the results of the sciences by the technical men nor is it found in practice to further the work of the sciences. (…) [T]he church, the court, the camp, that drawing – room, where these elder and perhaps nobler virtues had their laboratory and playground, have grown weedy and gone to seed.” (Veblen, 1918)

Veblen was one of the most influential intellectuals of his time, and is accredited with many insights in the field of sociology, such as introducing the term “conspicuous consumption” in the lexicon of American sociology. However, he could not stop the inclusion of business, law, medicine and other professions into colleges, but nevertheless created what Schon (1995) calls the “Veblenian bargain.” It established a perceived separation between “schools of higher learning,” true scholarship were found, and “lower schools,” of professions, whose purpose was to prepare individuals for professional practice. Schon summarizes the bargain as follows: “from the higher schools, fundamental and systematic knowledge; from the lower schools, but the practical problems to which such knowledge may be applied.” (Schon, 1995)

It should be noted that Veblen was, by no means, the only intellectual with a strong preference for the German college paradigm. For example, Abraham Flexner published Universities: America, British, German (Flexner, 1930), in which he praised the German system, and expressed outrage at the University of Chicago for having a varsity football team, and at Harvard for allowing a School of Business (Thelin and Wells, 2002). Flexner was an outstanding scholar (and frequent grant recipient) for the Cargenie Foundation’s administrators of his time, and his views probably influenced the foundation’s funding decisions.

The end result of the Veblenian bargain has been aptly described by Schon as follows:

The professions, as a ticket of admission to the university, had to agree to the epistemology built into the university, and to construe professional knowledge as the application of research. And so from this comes the notion of the normative professional curriculum (…): First teach them the relevant basic science, then teach them the relevant applied science, then give them a practicum in which to practice applying that science to the problems of everyday life (Schon, 1995).

Leveraging Prestige with Experience and Practical Components

The Veblenian bargain has had important consequences to the perceived academic merit of CM and other practice-based professions, such as business, medicine and law. But, while the latter older professions fought their way into academic recognition (and indeed today it seems unbelievable that they ever were held as lower academic endeavors), CM has not finished its own struggle. This section discusses the opportunities offered by the integration of professional practice components into undergraduate and graduate construction education.

Many undergraduate CM programs have incorporated some form of internship, which are highly valued by employers as well as by students (Roe, 2002). The direct and positive influence of such experiences is so apparent that they are mentioned only in this paragraph.

The real potential for a breakthrough in the perceived prestige and status for construction education is at the graduate level. As the many job announcements on the ASC website show (ASC, 2005), there is a clear and potentially critical demand for new CM faculty. In practical terms, this situation translates into a need to develop a doctorate in construction. ASC has explored the potential for a CM doctorate by forming a Construction Doctoral Education Task Force (Williamson, 2005). Despite the need for a CM doctoral degree, harmonizing academic and professional demands has proven to be a most challenging proposition. Experienced construction professionals provide most valuable, even essential, insight into many CM areas. On the other hand, these individuals may be reluctant to undertake a classical, heavily research-oriented curriculum to obtain a doctoral degree.

A suitable alternative to the classical, Veblenian approach of doctoral research mimicking fundamental science is offered by applied, or action, research. Hauck and Chen (1998) write that “[t]he goal of applied research is to expand the understanding of ‘what worked.’” It follows the scientific method, but it can be more qualitative in nature and more localized in results: A researcher may study a problem affecting a specific company, and limit its conclusions to the context of the company studied.

Practice is at the heart of Edgar Schon’s “reflective practice” (Schon, 1987). This important approach to professional practice visualizes “a constructionist notion of knowledge, where research and practice coexist in a cyclic or spiral relationship:  practice gives rise to new knowledge, which in turn informs changes in practice, and so on” (Lester, 2004). This approach is in direct opposition to the implicit epistemology of most current curricular instruction, conceived as a directional learning from the person possessing the knowledge, i.e., the instructor, to the person being instructed, i.e., the student.

Applied research leads to more and better doctorates. It has caught the attention of administrators in different parts of the globe and dealing with diverse specialties. The Australian government, for example, has sponsored since 1990 a program called Australian Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) to produce “’industry-ready’ graduates via an integrated industry-based work study programme.” (Harman, 2004). A report by Harman (2004) cites the great motivation and professional success of new PhD graduates, and echoes some of the issues frequently found in construction academia by noting that traditional doctorates “did not prepare students well for jobs outside the academic world. It also denied students access to the skills and experience of many of Australia's best researchers and denied those researchers the stimulus of interaction with students.”

A final point in favor of applied / action research is that it exists and is practiced by professions that are closer to CM than civil engineering and similar specialties that, for historical, political and other reasons have chosen to follow a “pure scientific” approach to their research. This proximity can be appreciated in the remark about the lack of academic acceptance for the profession of management:

Most critics, and a pantheon of Academy of Management presidents (…) point to the gap between theory and practice, arguing the knowledge delivered by the business schools relates poorly to practitioners’ needs. (Spender, 2005)

Or, in the following paragraph, relating management and medicine, replacing either one with “construction management” takes little effort.

The analytical framework for the practice of management profession is similar to medical profession, i.e., both professions emphasise clear identification of problems and objectives; obtaining reliable data relevant to the problem; careful analysis of data through application of knowledge, experience, intuition, and insights; finding alternative solutions; exercising the choice of a decision and its implementation; following up and monitoring feedback, and obtaining results. Besides, both these professions are multi-disciplinary, applied, problem-solving and result oriented. (Ahmad, 2000)

Conclusion

This article has discussed some of the origins for the flawed perception that CM is only marginally appropriate as a bona fide professional career in institutions of higher learning. By following the origin and evolution of the term profession as a tool to develop this analysis, this article has shown how a combination of historical circumstances led to the belated entry of CM as an academic option in many universsities. Moreover, implicit academic epistemology still carries over from the nineteenth century the questionable notion that practice-based professions are somehow inferior to those dealing with basic science. This mixture of history and outdated values conspire to hinder the status that CM should have on campus.

Applied / action research was discussed as a viable alternative to enhance the academic status of CM and create a more attractive and appropriate doctoral degree. With all the opportunities offered by applied research, there are significant challenges to overcome before an applied doctorate can be effectively established. Many of them go back to the unfortunate perception that “professional practice learning is somehow inferior to traditional classroom learning and not at a university standard.” (Barrie, 1999). Such deeply rooted conceptions are difficult to die out, and unfortunately are likely to take time to overcome.

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