**1. Introduction**

This paper confronts a significant conceptual deficit by using a novel interdisciplinary lens, Clarke's Place Model [1,2], to deconstruct critically the term 'professional' and to reimagine a commodious and accessible conceptualization, consisting of five dystopias and a potentially potent oxymoron—*inclusive professional*. Bourdieu's [3] argumen<sup>t</sup> that the term 'professional' should not even be used flew in the face of a reality in which professionals persisted and proliferated in (mostly) ingenuous defiance of one of the most eminent French public intellectuals of the age. He saw professional as a *folk concept* which has been *smuggled into scientific language* (p. 342, [4]). Today, mapping a critical but polysemous understanding of professional is a matter of even greater urgency, in the light of enormously complex global challenges, the growing distrust of professionals which is a significant trend in a rising tide of populist political discourse, and the mounting concern that most of the traditional professions will be dismantled and replaced by a mixture of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and less expert, more flexible people to quote Susskind and Susskind [5]. It may already be too late to save a chameleon term which is widely used in contexts of ambition, admiration and entreaty but is also viewed as inherently slippery, imbued with ambitions for high status and exclusivity, credentialism and over-regulation, and, as Gatenby observes, as a product of self-serving elitism [6].

The word professional attracts many rhetorical ambiguities not least because it is often defined by its most shiny aspects and polished ideals. At the core of the ideal professional is sheer, often unsung, complex work—underpinned by a combination of two key attributes: expertise and trustworthiness. Professionals deserve to be believed because, unlike the laity, they are, in their respective fields, better at finding the truth. However, O'Neill notes that they will be trusted only to the extent that they are not deceitful and are trustworthy [7]. Without this, a profession becomes what wrestling is to sport, a monetized and fabricated performance, which could be readily substituted by robotized AI. Meanwhile, Eliot Freidson's [8] alternatives to professionalism, his other two logics, bureaucracy and the market, are in the ascendancy, shaping both the professions and individual professionals. AI is posited as a further contextual logic here—one whose protean development looks set to encroach further on the place of professionals in ways which seem increasingly less than transparent or predictable. And yet, none of these alternative logics is su fficient for what we still want or need or demand from professionals—as, for example, in Bangladesh where Alhamdan, Al-Saadi, Baroutsis, Du Plessis, Hamid and Honan (p. 499, [9]) state, an ideal 'superhuman' teacher is 'neutral, kind hearted, friendly, knowledgeable, brave, sincere, dynamic, cordial, selfless, a motivator of children, attentive to students and unbiased, sincere, punctual and respectful'. By contrast, George Bernard Shaw decried all professions as merely conspiracies against the laity [10]. Some distrust of professionals has persisted and a century later is being stoked by populist jingoism, although the term 'laity' is more rarely used in this context today. Nonetheless, it may be that we, the laities, are asking too much, even while decrying elitism and expense; o ffering the never-su fficient professional up to the tongue lashing of the demagogue, ye<sup>t</sup> always wanting more from the teacher, the nurse, the academic, the doctor, the lawyer, the engineer, the social worker. It may be that we, the professionals, are asking too much, wanting to maintain an elite, inflexible and expensive place of esteem even while hoarding knowledge, excluding many talented people and hiding the fallibilities which can be exploited by the unscrupulous. We need a better map of this extensive but infinitely contestable place: the place of professionals—this paper aims to provide such a map.

The Place Model will be used to reimagine this important borderland between the world as it is and the world as it could be. Place was a salient idea for the Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, in *The Herbal, Human Chain*. Imagination allowed him to capture and share the landscapes of his life in one of his final poems ... "I had my existence. I was there. Me in place and the place in me" [11]. The Place Model maps a similarly embodied view of place, by speculatively redeploying Doreen Massey's notion of *Geographical Imagination* [12] in which we can each map our own position, in our mind's eye, in respect of two key dimensions: status and location. For the Chinese-American humanistic Geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, these two senses of place are observably interrelated—for example, the status-place of a wealthy person is reflected in where he/she lives, the location of his/her table in a restaurant, and his/her position at the board table [13]. The Place Model, likewise, juxtaposes two senses of place to achieve a timely, *a priori* examination of the place of professionals:


Combining these two senses of place provides an interdisciplinary framework for imaginative discourse which can yield a wide-ranging and challenging set of perspectives on professionals. Clarke [14] admits that whilst "the Model is reductionist in nature (like many models), the Place Model presents a usefully uncluttered landscape which is mapped in a way that is intentionally schematic rather than mathematical in nature (although it does look like a graph), a heuristic rather than a positivist equation". Here it is, once again, pro ffered as an interdisciplinary thinking tool for two key user groups: student professionals and their tutors. In preparing their students for their professional futures, tutors may invite them to consider critically their future learning journeys and status, across its terrain.

The Place Model will be used to consider and compare contemporary conceptions of professionals, and to provide an unconventional and original map, a conception which acknowledges the flaws while suggesting ideals and their limitations. The places within this landscape are strongly influenced by Freidson's [8] other two logics, to be outlined below, together with AI, a putative additional 'logic', in orderto set the scene, before moving on to explore and populate the Place Model itself. This essay will

focus on examples drawn from health, social care and education (the third one will dominate, reflecting the author's professional learning journey) which have arguably been most strongly a ffected by the ascent and increasing dominance of these alternative logics. It is possible to apply the Place Model to all professions, even to politics and sports, where the term is used in quite di fferent ways—where 'professional' can be an insult while being su fficiently elastic to describe both the player and the foul play. Unpacking these exceptional cases is quite another essay, as is a linguistic analysis of profession, professional and professionalism, which are treated here as grammatical variations of the same logic.

## **2. Freidson's Three Logics - and a Fourth**

Freidson [8] views professionalism as a third (and superior) logic, relative to world-views governed by either the market, where consumers are in control**,** or bureaucracy, where managers dominate. This essay pro ffers AI as a fourth logic and the following sections will outline some of the main overlaps between each logic and professionalism. Having used these logics to provide a context, professionalism itself will then be the focus of the remainder of the work.
