The Communication Professional: Reality or Myth?

Originally titled "The Business Communication Professional: Reality or Myth?" Global
Implications for Business Communications: Theory, Technology, and Practice. 1988
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual and 15th International Convention of the Association for
Business Communication. Sam J. Bruno, editor. Houston, TX: University of Houston,
1988, 279-293.
The Communication Professional:
Reality or Myth?

William J. Buchholz
Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts


When can the communication specialist in business rightly be considered a
professional? What is the difference between a mere practitioner and a true
professional? Before these questions can be answered, the term “professional” must
be clearly defined. Thus, the first half of this paper briefly explores the historical
evolution of the professions in America. The second half then examines the
communication occupations against this historical backdrop and suggests four
conditions necessary to upgrade the practice of communication in business as a
profession. Communication academics and practitioners, through associations like the
PRSA, IABC, STC, and the ABC, must, one, establish the larger perspectives of
communication as a profession; two, concentrate on curricular design; three, provide
occupational guidance; and four, carefully frame clear and concise professional codes
of ethics.
We often talk and write about this profession as though it were clearly defined, as
though we have something arrived at by consensus when we use the phrase
“communication professional.” Further, most of us consider ourselves to be
professionals of a rather high sort. In some way, or in various ways, we believe the
activities we perform add up to the actions and behaviors of “professional” men and
women. “Add up” is perhaps the wrong phrase; it’s too linear; it suggests a carefully
controlled, somewhat rigidly structured, progression in our occupations. In all
likelihood, for the majority of us, so-called “professional” activities cohere rather
loosely about a central theme or concern in our communication careers. What is
formed, if we’re lucky, is a constellation of interests, out of which rises our
“professional” self.
The term “professional,” simply put, is beclouded by overuse, misunderstanding, and
misappropriation. Today, any specialist of anything is regarded as “professional.” We
have autobody repair professionals, cosmetology professionals, landscaping and
lawncare professionals. Professional hair stylists, professional models, professional
sales reps, professional consultants, and professional students abound. Wrestling,
tennis, golf, boxing, hockey, and even jogging all have their pros. If there is any
money to be made in it, somebody is a professional at it. “Professional” has come to
mean so much that it no longer means much of anything.
Curiously enough, these wide-ranging meanings exist side-by-side with the more
narrowly precise religious ascriptions of “professional.” The Oxford English Dictionary,
for example, defines “profession” as “the declaration, promise, or vow made by one

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The Communication Professional: Reality or Myth?

entering a religious order.” The earliest meaning of the word is thus “vocational” in
the purest sense: the high-minded pursuit of a divine goal, focusing on the absolute
verities, literally devoting one’s life to the worship of God and to the service of
mankind. A professional in the original sense would, through public declaration,
actually “profess” or “avow” allegiance to the highest principles of life, both here and
now and, perhaps more importantly, in the hereafter.
This divine sense of “profession” was secularized in nineteenth century America by
Ralph Waldo Emerson (“The American Scholar,” 1841), Henry David Thoreau (“Life
without Principle,” 1863), and Walt Whitman (“Song of Myself,” 1855), among others.
They elevated all honorable pursuits, even the humblest forms of labor, to the level of
“vocation.” The farmer, the tradesman, the mechanic, the sailor, the day laborer, the
blacksmith, the river pilot, the drover—all were seen, in the Romantic vision, as
religiously involved in the calling of their work, transcendent laborers rising serenely
above the lust for monetary gain. Ironically, professionalism, since as early as the
sixteenth century, has meant performing any occupational act precisely for money.
The “true” professional, however, has always regarded money as corrupting and
therefore very dangerous. Thoreau, in fact, warned that “the ways by which you may
get money almost without exception lead downward. . . . You are paid for being
something less than a man” (1973, p. 158). The Romantic vision thus abhors the
debasing tendencies of money, and simultaneously elevates any labor to the status of
divine celebration, a hymn to the universal creative urge.
For over three centuries, then, the meaning of “profession” has enjoyed an
extraordinarily broad range—from the modern-day democratic, yet often curiously
debased and plebeian, notion of anybody doing anything for money, to the divinely
oriented and transcendent vision of labor as “vocation.” The general tendency in
American culture has been to romanticize occupations along the lines of the
Emersonian vision. And central to this transcendental vision is the Puritan work ethic.
The Puritan work ethic characteristically values the tedium and pain associated with
work. Hard work—back-breaking work—truly tests, after all, whether one is worthy of
grace. In the Puritan ideology, only men and women of tested character and faith
could hope to achieve elect status in the hereafter. Americans of whatever persuasion
have by and large accepted the main tenet of this ideology: work is meritorious, a test
which if passed leads ultimately to an earned reward in the hereafter, in the here-
and-now, or perhaps in both. The notion of reward became secularized very early in
our history (the mid-seventeenth century). And Emerson’s mid-nineteenth century
reinvestment of the transcendental aspects of labor certainly helped to glorify the
nobility of all labor, trades, occupations, and professions. Americans were ready to
accept on a broad scale the Puritan/transcendental vision of work as salvation—if not
always of the individual, then certainly of a young country spurring its citizens
westward toward the beckoning Manifest Destiny. A swelling middle class, a growing
bureaucracy, and an expanding corporate capitalism all contributed to increasing and
glorifying numerous occupations, raising them to the level of professions. In the
absolute center of this vortex of expansion stood the American university.
The American university
In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, American colleges and universities
revamped their curricula entirely to reflect the new social, economic, and political
concerns of a rising middle class. The Morrill Act of 1862 established the nation’s great

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The Communication Professional: Reality or Myth?

land grant colleges and paved the way for an enlarged definition of the American
University. Purely learned or classical curricula were quickly overshadowed by the
more pragmatic agenda of the expanding American democratic and capitalist systems.
As Magali Larson notes:
The utilitarian desire for an ‘adaptation to reality’ was concretely expressed in a
number of ‘democratic’ beliefs and programmatic changes. First of all, a broadened
notion of ‘calling’ contributed to dignify a great number of technical and specialized
pursuits, which were henceforth able to claim a place in the American university, while
the European institutions almost uniformly relegated them to vocational schools.
The Morrill Acts—establishing land grants for colleges that would provide agricultural
and mechanical instruction—deliberately promoted the vocational orientation of the
university. This typical emphasis explains in part the wide diffusion of
professionalization as a model for the collective improvement of social status.
(1977, p. 150)
At mid-century, as agricultural and mechanical instruction were elevated to university
status, the heretofore humble occupations to which they led—primarily farming and
machine work—were exalted to the level of applied sciences, in a sense becoming the
practical realization of the transcendentalists’ earlier aggrandizing vision.
In popular fiction the best late nineteenth century embodiment of such an education is
Hank Morgan, Twain’s unsentimental Connecticut Yankee munitions manufacturer,
head superintendent of a couple thousand men—in effect, the ultimate product of the
agricultural/mechanical curriculum. Morgan well understood the value of this kind of
education in creating an efficient workforce, with a professional managerial elite cast
in his own image; says he:
Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature;
it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is
merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own;
they are transmitted to us, trained into us. (Clemens, 1889, p. 150)
The best use to which training can be put, of course, is in producing professionals,
those whose calling leads them to undertake what people rather carelessly term
“intellectual work.” According to Morgan:
Intellectual ‘work’ is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest
reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter,
lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when
he is at work . . . . The law of work does seem utterly unfair—but there it is, and
nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the
higher shall be his pay in cash, also. (1889, p. 279)
In the Yankee’s catalog of professionals, we see again the Puritan/transcendental
vision of work. The Puritan hereafter has been secularized by Morgan to the
transcendentalists’ eternal “now.” Reward, he points out, is inherent in work itself
Professional or intellectual work gives rise to the intense, even sublime, joy of being
“constructively” involved in the pleasure of the actual work experience. Even the
poorest paid professional is in heaven when at work. In Morgan’s view, Thoreau’s
laborer, who works for “scientific, or even moral ends,” who, when he works, “does it
for love of it,,, is in effect apotheosized, serenely laboring in his intellectual and
professional heaven on earth (1863, p. 159). And like Thoreau, Morgan recognizes the
socially cruel calculus of “the law of work”: the rich do get richer, and the hard-
working just work harder. Professionals are twice blessed, then, for they are

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The Communication Professional: Reality or Myth?

motivated in their work—what Maslow would later see as the tip of the needs
hierarchy, self-actualization—while simultaneously receiving high pay—what Herzberg
would later call an absolutely essential hygienic factor, money (Koehler, Anatol &
Applbaum, 1981, pp. 141-155).
Morgan’s vision of training and intellectual work reflects the essence of the late
nineteenth century’s desire to disseminate wide the gospel of professionalism. With
the land grant college precedent and the attendant revamping of the curriculum in
America’s most prestigious colleges and universities,1 it would not take a very large
effort for any occupation to latch on to the coattails of “scientific” learning and ride
for free to the glorified apex of “higher” education and its consequent “higher”
status. If agriculture and mechanics could cling to the university, why not the business
occupations?
In the early twentieth century, as Frederick W. Taylor’s practice of scientific
management proved tenable and became increasingly popular, the way was paved for
the elevation of the business occupations to professional status. Taylor’s emphasis on
efficiency caught the practical imagination of the day (as efficiency still does), and
made possible a new emphasis on organizational planning that, in quantifying and
measuring business skills and behaviors, incorporated the criteria of control and
predictability, which had until this time resided strictly within the province of science.
In Larson’s words, the “rational and systematized knowledge” or the mystique of
methodology itself gives science authority as a social force: “science appears not only
as the chief instrument for mastery and control over the physical and even the social
environment, but also as the ultimate legitimization for practical choices and everyday
courses of action” (1977, p. 141). Business welcomed scientific efficiency for its
contribution to profit increase, certainly; but perhaps even more important in the long
run, business embraced university-sponsored scientific methodologies because they
conferred legitimacy, thereby giving business a much desired boost in status. One
need only recall the muckrakers’ hue and cry against big business and the rapacious
monopolies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—made so memorable
in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), and The Pit
(1902)—to realize how desperately American business needed legitimization and social
sanction.
After Taylor and the gradually widening acceptance of scientifically managed
efficiency, business became something more than a loose federation of skills and
experiences whose simple end was amassing money. Like the law and medicine (upon
which all would-be professions model themselves), business gradually became a corpus
of principles, laws, theorems, evidence, data, and research—a CBK or “Common Body
of Knowledge” that had to be rationally sequenced in university curricula. At first for
the new business professional, entrance into the managerial levels of corporate or
government bureaucracy was nearly impossible without the baccalaureate credential.
Today, of course, the chief credential for many fields is the MBA, a similar post-
baccalaureate degree, or a prestigious certificate, such as the accountants’ CPA, the
PRSA’s APR (Accredited in Public Relations), or the IABC’s ABC (Accredited Business
Communicator).
In the twentieth century, the American University has become the central purveyor of
legitimacy for any occupation seeking professional status. Society itself, Burton
Bledstein reminds us, has been influenced formatively by the university:

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The Communication Professional: Reality or Myth?

as the matrix within which the culture of professionalism matured; as the center to
which practitioners trace the theoretical basis of knowledge upon which they establish
authority; as the source of a usable history, economics, political science, and sociology
for individuals who in the course of rapid movement require instant ideas. (1976, p.
289)
One might expand upon Bledstein’s final point: the university may also serve as the
professional’s transcendent final appeal; for whenever the laity must be held in
check—whether in law, psychiatry, marketing, advertising, public relations, or
finance—all the professional need do, much like Hank Morgan, is invoke a sufficient
number of incomprehensible empirical studies or a few suitably esoteric and
impenetrable research monographs. As Hank might say, any upstart client will soon be
humbled to a manageable silence.
The modern professional
The growing middle class needs and desires gave rise to the modern professions
through the redefinition of university curricula, and through the expansion of
corporate capitalism and bureaucracy with its attendant ideology of scientific
management and efficiency. It is wrong, however, to assume that all occupational
specialties are legitimately entitled to professional status. Many are simply non-
professional; and those considered professional can be hierarchically ordered. The
best technique for such ordering is Wilbert Moore’s scalar method, which ranks
professions along a range from low to high (1970, p. 5). At the upper end of the scale
fall the so-called “learned” professions: law, medicine, the clergy, and university
professors. These are the ancient and honorable professions, invested through time
and tradition with high social status and prestige (if not always money). In the mid-
range of the scale might fall Certified Public Accountants, engineers, upper-level
business managers, administrators, and assorted high-level bureaucrats. On the lower
end of the scale might fall insurance and real estate agents, primary and secondary
school teachers, and lower-level managers, bureaucrats, and administrators. Outside
the professional pale would-be crafts- and tradespeople, clerical employees, light
industrial workers, and the like.2
What is it then that makes an occupation a profession? What particular criteria seem
to apply to all professional occupations no matter where they fall on the scale? Moore
suggests six.
First, professionals make their livings, often amassing sizable incomes, from their
occupations. Second, they are often committed “to a calling, that is, the treatment of
the occupation and all of its requirements as an enduring set of normative and
behavioral expectations” (Moore, 1970, p. 5). Third, professionals are distanced from
the laity by various trappings, or signs that tend to identify the particular professional
peer groups, organizations, or associations. Most obvious among these symbols would
be degrees, certificates, and titles as well as professional association memberships.
Fourth, the professional has acquired a high degree of specialized training or
knowledge through education, most likely at the four-year college or university (as
opposed to a vocational or trade school). Fifth, professionals have a service
orientation; that is, they use their knowledge to better the conditions, or meet the
needs, of their clients (or employers). Sixth, the professional, enjoying a certain
amount of autonomy in decision making, is expected to draw upon specialized
knowledge and trained judgment to further the best interests of the client or

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employer (Moore, 1970, pp. 6-22). The need to regulate members of the profession,
thereby guaranteeing the professional integrity to the laity (who are excluded from
the profession’s “secret” knowledge and skills), gives rise to codes of ethics and
committees that assure enforcement of ethical behavior.3
Weaving its way throughout these six criteria is the somewhat chilling tendency
toward careerism. With the rise of bureaucracies in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, professional ideologies changed somewhat dramatically from their earlier
manifestations. Allegiance shifted from the community in general (or society) to the
corporation (or employer). Careerism, in Bledstein’s words, 11the pre-established
total pattern of organized professional activity, with upward movement through
recognized preparatory stages, and advancement based on merit and bearing honor”
(1976, p. 172), meant that professionals could introduce a structure previously lacking
in their occupational lives. But society paid a price for this reordering of priorities:
The inner intensity of the new life oriented toward a career stood in contrast to that of
the older learned professional life of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In
the earlier period such external attributes of gentlemanly behavior as benevolence,
duty, virtue, and manners circumscribed the professional experience. Competence,
knowledge, and preparation were less important in evaluating the skills of the
professional than were dedication to the community, sincerity, trust, permanence,
honorable reputation, and righteous behavior. The qualifying credentials of the learned
professional were honesty, decency, and civility. Hence, he did not think of a
professional life in terms of ascending stages, each preparatory in training for the next,
but as a series of good works or public projects, performed within a familiar and
deferential society which heaped respectability on its first citizens. (1976, pp. 172-173)
Because the community has lost direct career influence over the professional, and
exerts control only indirectly through the granting of status and prestige, associations
and corporations must ensure professional responsibility through enforceable codes of
ethics. Thus, today’s credentialed, university-trained, career-oriented professionals,
highly pragmatic, effective, and efficient, generally operate out of a limited ideology
of self-interest, subordinating the socially altruistic motivations of their professional
forebears to the career-aggrandizing accumulation of honorifics, networks of
influentials, ever fatter emoluments, prestigious association memberships, finer
homes, better cars, luxurious vacations—the good life. For many professionals, if not
for the majority of them, the Puritan/transcendental work ethic is alive and well, but
its heavenward and humanitarian aims are now exclusively earthbound, constricted in
the main toward the ever narrowing pursuit of money, tending inwardly and down—
shrunk to serving a human constituency of one, the self.
The communication professional
With a clearer sense of the historical, social, and ethical dynamics at play in the
formation of the American professional elite, we can now address the second term in
our central question: is the “communication” professional reality or myth?
The best place to start in completing the answer to this question is with the various
occupations which the term “communication” comprises; they are legion. In her
examination of career opportunities for writers, Rosemary Guiley (1985) categorizes
eight professional areas of practice:
Media and information services (newspapers, videotex, magazines, television and radio)
Book publishing

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The Communication Professional: Reality or Myth?

Arts and entertainment
Business communications and public relations
Marketing
Federal government and politics
Scholastic, academic, and nonprofit institutions
Freelance, specialized, and writing-related fields (Buchholz, 1987, p. 48)
More specifically related to business and technical communication, a detailed study of
one major metropolitan communication market, Boston, Massachusetts, reveals six
major occupational categories (Buchholz, 1989, 12). The 1585 catalogued positions
cover all areas of communication in business, industry, and government, profit and
non-profit alike. The following table shows these categories and the number of
positions therein:

Table I: The Boston Metropolitan Business and Technical
Communication Categories

Category
Total Positions
1.
Technical Documentation
335
2.
Publishing
305
3.
Public Relations
278
4.
Marketing
273
5.
Development
208
6.
Training
186

Total
1585

Exploration of these six categories reveals this listing of some of the occupation titles:
administrator/communicator, advertising and promotions director, advertising
copywriter, agency relations manager, alumni relations director, annual fund
coordinator, director of public giving, director of publications, capital campaign
director, publications editor, director of development, business journalist, business
plan writer, communications director (manager, specialist, planner, representative,
consultant, assistant), community relations manager, copy editor, customer relations
manager, developmental writer, desktop publishing assistant, direct mail copywriter,
direct marketing copy chief, director of corporate gifts, director of grants (major
gifts, marketing and communications, public affairs, special events), documentation
writer, editor/writer, grant writer/fund raiser, marketing communications manager
(coordinator, specialist, consultant, assistant, writer), media relations specialist,
newsletter editor, public information specialist, public relations (account executive,
manager, supervisor, assistant, associate, coordinator, director, manager, representa-
tive, specialist), publicity specialist, publisher, special gifts coordinator, technical
editor, telemarketing manager, vice president of communications (development,
public relations).4 The list goes on.
These are the communication practitioners. But are they communication professionals?
How many of Moore’s six criteria do these practitioners fulfill?

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All satisfy the first criterion: they make their livings in these positions, some rather
handsomely. Many certainly, at least in their own minds, satisfy the second criterion:
they are committed, often passionately, to their areas of expertise. Because those
beyond entry level have garnered a number of certificates, titles, and awards in
pursuing their careers, many can be said to satisfy the third criterion. A good number,
but certainly not all, have satisfied the fourth criterion, having been graduated from
4-year colleges or from Master’s programs. The fifth and sixth criteria are much more
difficult to assess—the fifth because the answer really resides with the individual; that
is, everyone will profess to the service attitude, but how many truly are motivated by
it is impossible to tell. Professional autonomy, criterion six, is enjoyed by a few
certainly, but bureaucratic, political, and economic conditions always dictate the
nature and extent of professional autonomy. Based upon observation and experience, I
am afraid that the ideology of professional autonomy in bureaucratic settings is largely
mythical.
Thus, in trying to label all these communication occupations as professional, we are on
rather shaky ground. Some may be almost pure examples of professionalism. One can
imagine, for example, a public relations counsel in the stamp of Edward Bernays,
independent and high-minded, socially conscious, secure enough in values, reputation,
career, and income; well educated, influential, and highly esteemed by his peers.
Such a man fulfills Moore’s six criteria absolutely. But practitioners like this are
relatively rare. Why is that?
Careerism and bureaucracy, of course, are partly to blame. The practitioner, ever on
the make, concerned chiefly with a career that keeps ratcheting upwards, whatever
the moral and ethical cost, is doomed to become the hollow echo of the true
professional, a modern version of Melville’s Confidence Man (1857)—or Woman.
Unfortunately, these lean and hungry practitioners dwell to some extent in all of us.
What helps exaggerate this natural depravity are the temptations dangled before us,
and the punishments inflicted upon us, every day in the workplace. The bureaucratic
crush of huge organizational monoliths (whether corporate, governmental, or
academic), which grind the individual down to an irresponsible self-interest, makes it
possible to justify almost any means for almost any ends. Without the supporting
matrix of strongly held ethical values, the practitioner is cut adrift, left to steer a
course by the only compass at hand: career advancement.
Perhaps equally culpable in the degradation of the communication practitioner is
education, both in quality and in kind. Many communication practitioners, with liberal
arts degrees and certain language skills, move from secretarial, clerical, or general
entry-level positions without ever having taken a course in document design, business
communication research, technical editing, graphics, marketing communication,
public relations theory, mass communication, journalism, and the like. Basic
communication principles and research, communication law, communication ethics,
problems in international and cultural communication—these and more are areas with
which many practitioners have no acquaintance, let alone any degree of facility. To
further compound the difficulty here, communication associations either have no
codes of ethics and professional guidance (the ABC) or else have incomprehensible and
simplistic codes, powerless really to raise the ethical sensitivity of practitioners (the
IABC, PRSA, and STC) (Buchholz, 1988).

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The promotion of communication professionalism
Just as in the late nineteenth century, so today the responsibility for upgrading an
occupation to professional status falls to both the professional associations and the
American 4-year colleges and universities. What better means to begin the task of this
upgrading than through organizations like the ABC, organizations with long historical
ties to the university, organizations dedicated to pursuing scholarly research and
committed to excellence in teaching? The ingredients are perfect. For over a century
in the history of American education and professionalism, this combination of the
professional association working closely with the university has successfully upgraded
occupational aims and behaviors, turning mere practitioners into true professionals.
organizations like the PRSA, IABC, and STC, must join the ABC in this commitment to
set the agenda for upgrading the professionalization of the communication
practitioner. What then might be the broad outlines of such an agenda?
First, the communication associations must work in concert with practitioners and the
university to establish the larger perspectives of communication as a profession. For
example, business communication might be seen as comprising definite sets of
perspectives, such as the bureaucratic (focusing on the communication dynamics and
needs prevalent in large organizations whether corporate, academic, or governmental)
, the entrepreneurial (focusing on the communication needs of small businesses,
freelancers, consultants, and the like), and some mix of the two. Or business and
technical communication may be redefined more broadly to include any kind of
written and oral communication in business, industry, or government—profit and
nonprofit alike. Thus, public relations, corporate communications, fund raising, public
affairs, sales, marketing communications, corporate journalism, and a whole host of
like specialties would fall under the rubric “business and technical communication.”
Without a professional matrix of some sort, without a clearer sense of the boundaries
of communication’s occupational scope, the profession will remain fragmented and
weak, not really a unified and coherent profession like the law or medicine so much as
a Balkanized collection of specialties, uneasy coalitions of imprecisely defined
occupational areas.
Second, professional associations, practitioners, and college faculty must establish and
maintain a dialogue concentrating on curriculum design. Advisory boards—national,
regional, and local—might be created that would assure ongoing discussions of course
content, program creation, as well as degree, certification, and possible licensing
requirements. Thus if a college desired to establish a marketing communication major,
faculty from the communication, marketing, and management disciplines could be
guided in creating the major through discussion with each other as well as through
discussion with professional associations and representatives of the marketplace. Only
through open and robust debate of the practical and academic issues involved in such
curriculum design can the communication field ever hope to establish the clear
guidelines necessary for a high level of professional education. Effective curricula,
therefore, must be derived from rigorous debate between the university and the work
place to assure effective definition and presentation of the historical, practical,
research, and theoretical framework which defines the profession itself.
Third, occupational guidance and professional counseling must be provided to offset
the negative influences of careerism. The professional must have a strong sense of the
service responsibility: service to client, service to employer, and, perhaps most
important, service to society itself. In addition, practitioners should have a sure grasp

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of the entire corporate, agency, or government operation of which they are a part.
Within that operation, care must be taken to insure that people understand the
direction of the various career paths (where they may tend economically, creatively,
and managerially). Such career clarification may be achieved very early through
internship programs, which allow students an on-site work experience that provides
valuable applications perspective. Internships would also work to solidify the link
between academia and the work place, allowing a cross fertilization of ideas,
practices, and values as faculty and practitioners work together to design and
implement the internship programs.
Career enrichment practices beyond the internship could also include
faculty/practitioner exchange or visitation programs, whereby for a semester or a year
faculty enter business, or business practitioners enter the university, to learn from
each other, sharing expertise in working together to improve relations between the
university and the work place. In the short term, of course, faculty could invite
practitioners to campus to speak about careers, run course modules, work as
counselors to students. By the same token, practitioners could invite faculty into the
work place to run short courses and seminars, explain curricular design and program
expansion, discuss important issues that relate to professionalism and practice, as well
as to offer advice and counsel on advanced degrees, certificates, the pros and cons of
licensing, and whatever else appears feasible to help raise the level of
professionalism. In sum, communication practitioners must see that careers should
repay the effort put into them not just in money or status or power, but more
importantly—to adopt the language of our professional forebears of the last century—
they must see that a career should be a vocation, a calling, devoted chiefly to the
good of the larger community and not devoted exclusively to the good of the self.
Fourth, professional association codes of ethics must be carefully framed and clearly
written. The IABC, STC, and PRSA have woefully inadequate codes; the ABC has none
at all. In regard to professionalization, this situation is dangerous because:
Operating essentially as a social contract that outlines group values, norms, and
responsibilities, the professional code reinforces an occupation’s claims to unique social
utility. By and large, in these promissory documents the profession articulates its
foremost duties: to serve the public and to protect the commonweal. In large part,
then, through the code, altruism officially becomes the prime motivator of the
profession. It is arguable, of course, whether members of professions actually do
perform unique services altruistically. One need only reflect on the immense wealth
accumulated by certain doctors and lawyers. But whether professionals do in fact
operate altruistically is beside the point; what matters is that professions project the
altruistic attitude central to their mystique. Official embracement of altruism—the
public vow to serve all mankind—undergirds the social sanction so necessary for the
profession to attain its status. (Buchholz, 1988, p. 14).
To ensure that the university inculcates the proper values and ethical perspectives
reflected in the professional codes, the curriculum must deal forthrightly and
extensively with the occupation’s ethical issues. Practitioners, if they are ever to be-
come professionals, simply must be educated to understand the broader social and
cultural ramifications of the issues they confront daily in the work place.
Conclusion
The current state of affairs suggests that the “communication professional” is
somewhere between myth and reality. Examination of the historical emergence of

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William J. Buchholz page 10 02/04/2001

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