Symbolic competence and discrimination in employment

Symbolic competence and discrimination in employment

This article has one single purpose – to problematise the notion of someone or something being “unprofessional”. Specifically, I unpack the underlying themes and assumptions we take for granted but which inform discriminatory and unfair practices in employment we have come to accept as normal. Essentially, my position is that the dogma of professionalism is summoned with religious conviction, all the while holding the conceptual rigour of a fairy tale.

From the outset, one issue needs to be clarified: It has been seen, especially within online spaces of engagement, that the moment a generally accepted practice is challenged, traditionalists and people with more conservative worldviews tend to immediately grasp at strawman arguments in an attempt to invalidate the challenge. In this instance, a “strawman argument” refers to a type of logical fallacy that is used in rhetoric. The purpose of a strawman argument is to misquote, misrepresent, or oversimplify information in order to create an easier target to attack and appear to show the flaws in an opponent’s position while the opponent’s actual argument is not being addressed (Aikin & Casey, 2019). This is typical of the arguments about professionalism that abound. A very common response to critiques about norms of professionalism is something along the lines of “So everyone can just do and say what they want at work?!” Of course this is not the intention of my critique. I am also not referring to the context of appropriate behaviour or the codes of conduct that govern certain areas of work. Instead, my argument here is that we need to closely examine the assumptions that form the foundation of the average person’s understanding of what constitutes “professional” and “unprofessional”.

The existing literature on professionalism focuses predominantly on issues of professionalism that are profession-specific. These include debate on what is to be considered appropriate decisions, behaviours and practices that relate to highly specific contexts such as law, medicine, psychology, education, engineering etc. The characteristics discussed are value-oriented conceptualisations of professionalism such as Altruism, accountability, and excellence in medicine (Arnold & Stern, 2006), ethics, competence, honesty and courtesy, ethics, competence and honesty in law (Thornton, 2021), or independence, conscientiousness, and determination in education (Demirkasimoǧlu, 2010). The reality, however, is that when the average person assigns the label of “unprofessional”, it is usually the result of a deviation from the white Western male standard of what constitutes “normal” (Gray, 2019). When someone refers to a person as “unprofessional” we don’t immediately think of the different ways in which the person could be violating the ideals of altruism, courtesy, or determination. When the average person hears “unprofessional”, we think of hair, clothes and the font used in their CV.

Generally, assigning the label of “unprofessional” has nothing to do with an ability or capacity for making authoritative decisions within discretionary spaces (Noordegraaf, 2020), and seems to be more related to a process of “masking” in order to comply with norms of symbolic competence that is linked to the western white male identity. In fact, nearly a century ago, Marshall (1939) had already stated that the notion of professionalism is less about the norms regarding the organising of work and more about organising society. Yet, recent empirical evidence published from this very year (Ferguson & Dougherty, 2021) shows how people mindlessly invoke the concept of professionalism in order to defend discriminatory views of people of colour in employment.

Using seemingly neutral standards of what can be considered acceptable and what cannot is not limited to race. Consider the experiences of Jules Tyler, a LinkedIn user who shared her experiences of being labelled as “unprofessional” for her appearance not complying with traditional views of what a woman in the workplace should look like: Jules works as an admin and tech consultant. No reasonable application of admin or tech skills require hair or skin which is free of tattoos, yet she is constantly faced with comments claiming her appearance is “unprofessional”. Jules lost her hair due to Alopecia. She sometimes wears a wig, but other times she wears no head covering a sports her decorative scalp tattoo which she had done partly as to not be confused with cancer patients who might only be temporarily bald. This appearance has been labelled as making her look like a “thug”, despite her ru