*2.2. Bureaucracy*

In Freidson's [8] second logic, bureaucracies have increasingly been put in place by governments and organizations wishing to enhance, assess, evaluate and monitor the work of employees and professionals, and, crucially, to manage them. Clarke [14] notes that "effective bureaucracy, at its best, can permit and attempt to ensure that general principles are predictably shared across society". At its most technicist, this amounts to Digital Taylorism**,** a production efficiency methodology that breaks every action, job or task into small and clearly defined segments which can be easily analyzed and taught, named after the US industrial engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor [18]. However, professionals have long been involved in maintaining, sharing and evaluating evidence of their work in ways which help to maintain standards and also underpin their trustworthiness in the most important aspects of their roles—exam pass-rates, infection control, death rates following surgery, numbers of children placed in foster care.

Such scrutiny, as Foucault [19] points out, can even lead to increased self-surveillance (thus the reducing costs of monitoring) and alterations of behavior to align with the dominant discourses. It is only in recent years, though, when bureaucracy has been underpinned by more pervasive metrics systems based in an increasing range of protean and accessible technologies, that vast data trails have been made available to increasing ranks of managers and also to the public, providing data which can make it very clear whether trust is well founded or not. The latter is often more newsworthy and certainly has provided evidence for that most loaded of insults, "the enemies of the people". While the sharing of datasets can assist in fruitful**,** interdisciplinary collaboration, it can also evidence more negative collusion among the professions and can be publicly used to portray professionals as a mere cabal of self-interested conspirators. If professionals' esteem depends on expertise and trustworthiness, and the records show that these are individually or collectively dubious, then their esteem lies in very public disarray.

Bureaucratic accountability has also been developed to monitor and curtail the worst excesses of capitalism but is often too ineffectual and/or too late in these contexts. In addition, professionals playing by morally based rules are often no match for profit driven businesses. Nonetheless, a whole new invasive and pervasive cadre of inspectors has developed, and the laity have become engaged with online rating mechanisms and wearable technologies, so that some days it can feel that, at any one time one, half of the world's population is assessing**,** evaluating, inspecting or rating the other half. The outcomes of such judgements are increasingly made public in league tables which allow users to appraise services and to publicly award prizes which serve both as rewards and advertising opportunities.

In an effort to improve, equalize and sustain standards the most measurable features become the most important, most lionized. The more complex, nuanced, immeasurable realities are less amenable to presentation in league tables or in sound bites and headlines, and are brought to bear much less frequently in such tick boxing evaluations of professionals. Instead, more convenient proxies are used and may be made so overly complex that league tables may be used to confuse consumers and even to subvert their assessments, as in the case of university course directors who tell their students that it would be in their own best interests to rate their courses highly—after all, who wants to be a graduate of a poorly rated course? It is hardly surprising then that professionals seek to avoid and undermine the scrutiny of this 'new managerialism'. Such subversion, bolstered by the marketization of education for example, by viewing students as consumers, is all too obvious in a rise in pupil exclusions or 'off-rolling' from schools prior to inspections or public exams and in pervasive grade inflation in both public exams and university degree classifications. This leads to a spiral of further mistrust, to ever more monitoring, and to the apparent compliance and fabrication of evidence at both institutional and individual levels. In the former, as Clarke [14] points out, we might "witness the proportion of UK universities' energies and resources dedicated to providing evidence for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)—which purport to measure research and teaching**,** respectively, and then allocate both public funding and increasingly complex league table positions based on these". At an individual level, professionals feel obliged to acquire shiny new skills to deal with such managerialism, as Ball says, and the concomitant *terrors of performativity*: "the skills of presentation and of inflation, making the most of ourselves, making a spectacle of ourselves, in response to audit, inspection and review, and for promotion" (p. 1054, [20]). The overall impact of the "tyranny of metrics" to cite Muller [21] can too often be allied to reductionist training, rather than to critical and complex education of professionals, and can make them feel that they are being trained, commodified and deployed as the AI which seems increasingly likely to replace and/or monitor so many of them.

## *2.3. Artificial Intelligence: A Fourth Logic?*

The English Oxford Living Dictionary gives this definition of AI: *the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence*. Clarke [14] admits "that It is debatable whether AI continues a separate fourth logic, after all AI is being designed and developed in the context of the other logics" Nonetheless she argues that "it is increasingly becoming evident that AI can do more than simply replace and replicate existing roles - it is becoming ever clearer that it can behave in ways which are not fully amenable to human comprehension, ethics and control and it is this new phenomenon that means that it is arguably be best understood as a fourth logic, which will have huge impacts on the work of those professionals which it does not fully replace".

Debates rage across the globe as to whether professionals could or should be replaced by robots and are likely to increase although no one really knows how things will turn out in respect of the erosion, augmentation or replacement of professionals. Conversely, the Susskinds [5] argue that the traditional professions will be dismantled leaving most (but not all) professionals to be replaced by high performing AI (and also by less expert people). Frey and Osborne's seminal Oxford Martin School study [22] showed that about 47% of US employment is at risk of computerization. The study evidenced strong negative relationships between an occupation's probability of computerization, and both wages and educational attainment. When robots are controlled by AI, those jobs most at risk include some of the more technicist professions, including those with high levels of analytical accuracy. In the health sector, these already include those who work on the painstaking analysis of diagnostic images such as X-rays, ultrasound scans and biopsy sections. However, in the longer term, the work of even the loftiest of the traditional professions may be replaceable by AI-controlled robots. The surgeon's expertise and trustworthiness will increasingly be questioned when compared to a robot with the steadiest, most untiring and hygienic hands, informed by a less expensive and more extensive AI expertise which has been synthesized from a truly encyclopedic and dynamic knowledge of every case, everywhere. However, the value of such syntheses is already being questioned, not least because the machine learning algorithms can create models based on huge data sets which even their creators do not understand. In Katwala's opinion, they are, in e ffect, a black box and can make life-changing decisions in the dark [23]. By contrast, Aoun [24] o ffers a promising educational solution to preparing humans to confront the rapidly evolving challenges of AI transparency in a novel, interdisciplinary model of learning, termed Humanics, which is already on the curriculum of Northwestern University. The course "enables learners to understand the highly technological world around them and that simultaneously allows them to transcend it by nurturing the mental and intellectual qualities that are unique to humans—namely, their capacity for creativity and mental flexibility" [24]. In addition, the capacity to empathize with and care for others is a key human faculty which is a surprising omission in Aoun's Humanics [24], an omission which may be seen to reflect the fact that much of social care is not, as yet, fully researched and developed—not fully professionalized, even though it is the vulnerable who are most in need of trustworthy experts to understand, to advocate and to care for them. Working with AI in many professional contexts, the key question is 'who takes the key decisions?'. The International Labour Organisation's recent report suggests a "'human-in-command' approach to artificial intelligence that ensures that the final decisions a ffecting work are taken by human beings, not algorithms" (p. 43, [25]).

## **3. Components of the Place Model**

The speech bubble below the heading of Place Model (Figure 1 below) is significant because it links professionals to their respective laities by asking the question: *Who is my professional today?* Clarke [14] argues that *"*The Model provides a usefully challenging range of answers based on comparing the two conceptions of place noted above by Massey as a *Geographical Imagination"* [12].

**Figure 1.** The Place Model.

The horizontal 'axis' is based upon building expertise across one's career. On the diagram (Figure 1) this axis starts where a 'new' professional takes up their first job, but one might imagine that, putatively, on the most extreme left (well off the edge of the diagram) is the position of an egocentric baby, an extreme example of an incipient learner in its utterly Piagetian, "egocentric" [26] world view. To the extreme right is the end of an expansive growth of expertise across a career, or series of careers. Clarke [14] points out that "this axis is *not* about terrestrial space—professional practice most often transpires locally and has local impacts, but the internet means that learning can readily become much more far wide-reaching in both depth and breadth. In addition, the axis is *not* a timeline, *not* a history, and it is *not* a matter of passive survival for 30–40 years, gathering up a few tips and tricks about good practice on the way. Rather, the learning process is conceived as an expanding professional place", using Tuan's [13] clear formula: "*Place* = *Space* + *Meaning".* The horizontal axis can be an extensive, complex and intricately featured place, built through cumulatively accreting processes of professional learning, an expanding horizon of Massey's "*outwardlookingness"* [12]. As for Fullan argues [27], "learning is the work". Clarke [14] argues that "This place may be conceived on either personal or profession-wide scales—an individual's career or the systemic capacities for learning within a particular context, drawing on, and contributing to, a critical understanding of the best of what is known though the consumption of and/or the creation of relevant research", with "particularly significant resonance with the early twenty-first century debates about professional status and regulation and marketization". On the one hand, there are those who "promote a narrowly conceived technicist training approach which are linked to greater deregulation, flexibility and privatization (on the left-hand side of the axis), versus, on the other hand, the expansive professional education, predominantly within the master's-level courses within college and university systems across the globe" [14]. Clarke [14] recognizes that "a key limitation of the Model is that the straight line of this axis cannot convey the ways in which careers are becoming more varied and more fragmented" and that "Imagination is needed here to conjure the cumulative, career-long learning journey which the increasingly dynamic nature of work demands—is there an inherent incompatibility between these demands, and the deep expertise and constant trustworthiness which are essential to professions?"

On the vertical axis, however, professionals often have much less agency as this depends on the constraints of public perceptions of esteem. The intersection of the status and learning axes alloows the creation of four quadrants which have been labelled as proto-professionals, precarious professionals, the de-professionalized and the professional. A fifth, equally important, element lies outside the axes, where the answer to the question 'Who is my professional today?' is 'No one'.

## **4. 'Populating' the Place Model**

Each of these components can be examined by 'populating' Model using the classroom thinking skills technique, Leat's Living Graphs [28], to place a range of potential exemplars. The examples also illustrate how the other three logics have a bearing on professions. Using these examples, the following sections provide a tour of the Place Model. The tour begins by initiating the reader into the axis of the model, starting with the top left corner, the 'proto-professionals' before making a detour to the o ff-axis 'no professional' component and then moving anticlockwise around each of the three remaining in-axis quadrants of the model, culminating in the 'professionals' quadrant. In designing the Model, it has become evident that these components are neither positive nor neutral, that they are mostly dystopian, but, importantly, that there is still, perhaps, a positive place, perhaps even a utopian place for the trustworthy expert.
