How can we define mastery? Reflections on learning, embodiment and professional identity.
| Autor | Figueiredo, Marina Dantas |
| Cargo | Essay |
Introduction
This article aims to foster a reflection on the corporal knowledge-production process in the social-material arrangement of craft. Falling back upon phenomenology to explain the learning experience as a result of the perception of the living body, we seek to theoretically understand how one achieves the so-called mastery related to craftwork know-how. As mastery can be defined as practical proficiency, or as the embodied comprehension of a practical knowledge, we focus on the way how skill constitutes and maintains itself through the bodily relation that someone achieves while performing practices with high levels of proficiency. The objective of this paper, though, is to develop a theoretical background to analyze the kind of practical know-how, such as mastery, that relies on some embodied features of its practitioners to build professional identities.
The intended contribution to the field of Organization Studies (OS) is to theoretically reinforce the concept of mastery as a way to understand skill as resulting from knowledge embodiment. In this respect, even though practice-based studies on OS have privileged the analysis of knowledge embodiment as lived experience, the lack of concrete references to the cultural context where it takes place ends up making most of those studies describe such processes in a superficial way (Sandberg & Dall'Alba, 2009). While traditional ontology takes the principle of detachment--meaning people are essentially detached from the world, but get connected to it as they perform and experience many practical activities during the process of living in the world--a phenomenological perspective such as the one we take in this article considers that the entwinement of the person with the world is the defining condition of being.
Within craft, mastery relates to a way of being that rises from practice, during the embodiment process of a skill. Being a master craftsperson refers to the social identity of someone due to the skills that this person has learned with his/her body while performing such practice. Departing from that, we can achieve the understanding that the person who embodies a skill not only has the knowledge that describes his/her professional formation, as the embodiment of a skill changes the whole person, transforming him/her into a skillful body. We understand that the enduring contact of someone with a certain kind of practical knowledge is a defining experience, in such a way that professional and personal identities are never separable and both cannot exist beyond the context of practices regarding this profession.
As we intend to discuss professional identity taking craft as a powerful example and/or object of reflection, considerations on professions and professionalization are also necessary. Professions are understood as occupations with special attributes, where cognitive dimension is centered on a certain body of knowledge and techniques and on the training necessary to master such knowledge (Larson, 1977). In a modern perspective, professions are closely connected to social structure (Parsons, 1939) and to an ideal of work that has been developed in the West, particularly after the Industrial Revolution. If in the pre-modern period professions would be considered as a matter of tradition (Sennett, 2008), modern professions depend on practical and intellectual institutions that legitimate structures of authority and competence, such as universities (Jackson, 1970). The professional environment, understood as an institutional environment, has deep implications on the process of embodiment of professional know-how and the forge of professional identity.
However, the idea of identity that we support in this paper has no connection to the performance of social actions, as we want to show that the embodiment of professional identity goes beyond learning the cognitive and normative features of a certain kind of work. To accomplish this we briefly examine the field of sociology of professions, beyond the bureaucratic tendencies of its traditional approaches (Klegon, 1978; Parsons, 1939), in order to clarify how professional practices shape ways of being in the world that goes way outside the limits of occupational tasks performed by social actors within an institutional framework. Notwithstanding how the discussions within the sociology of professions field develop in the background of modern paradigms, we turn to craft as an illustration of a pre-modern or a non-modern profession that can be analyzed through the lenses of post-modern theories as a phenomenology and embodiment paradigm to help to explain how the forge of professional identity is a matter of becoming. More than a profession, craftsmanship is a way of life that seems to have been waned with the advent of industrial society, but--as Sennett (2008, p. 9) states "Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist".
It is worth mentioning that we could have chosen the word craftsmanship as a synonym of mastery, as we understand their meanings to actually be really close. So we can highlight that the word craftsmanship connects the substantive craftsman/craftsperson with the suffix -ship, meaning certain status, domain or specific condition that defines a state or condition of being. Relying on that, the intended meaning for the word mastery in this article is one that designates the very own condition of being a master of something. What we want to express through the idea of mastery is the practical domain of a skill, or a mastery that we carry in our bodies and that is refractory to formulation in terms of any system of mental rules and representations. Such skill is acquired not only through formal instruction, in an institutional arena, but also and mainly by routinely carrying out specific tasks involving characteristic postures and gestures in the natural setting of such practice. It also relates to the total field of relations constituted by the presence of the organism-person, indissoluble body and mind, in a richly structured environment (Ingold, 2000).
To achieve the objective of this article, we also need to define (even though in a superficial way) craft among the vast array of human achievements. Initially it may be necessary to shed light on the usages of the word craft and to choose the one that seems to be more appropriate to the considerations about mastery that we want to make here. After all, craft entangles different meanings, shifting from an artistic expression to a range of extremely practical activities, as well as to a system of production. Even though the word craft may have enough representative potential to comprise these and other ideas, we start from a relatively stable definition, which states that craft is a set of knowledge and skills that may be used in a practical way, in order to produce something, usually an object, according to a preformulated aim (Adamson, 2007; Becker, 1978; Risatti, 2007). Such aim is rooted in a craft's traditions and in the desire to perform a purposeful work that are both constituent parts of the master's identity, meaning something he/she deeply understands as an essential part of his/her performance, and also an essential part of him/herself.
In the following sections, we hope to clarify some of the abstract ideas that we have just outlined. The article is structured as follows. First, we define know-how from a phenomenological standpoint to highlight the embodiment paradigm (Csordas, 1990) as an emergent issue for practice-based theories on learning within the field of OS. Next, we delve into the work of the skillful craftsperson in order to connect the idea of someone's embodiment of a skill with the formation of professional identity. Then, we bring up the discussion of previously presented ideas, followed by a brief conclusion that clarifies the intended contributions of this paper and indicates the applicability of the ideas that we have discussed in future empirical studies.
An Embodied Approach on Know-how
The embodiment paradigm (Csordas, 1990) opens up possibilities for understanding culture as embodied experience. As a result, it also allows investigations on how the world constitutes people as selves (Hancock, 2008). Traditionally, studies that take the embodiment perspective have flourished in the anthropological field following two main streams. Firstly, one that approaches the body as a resource for the metaphors that constitute culture (Csordas, 1990). Secondly, one that takes the body within the ongoing process of adaptation to culture (Kleinman & Kleinman, 1991).
According to the assumptions of both streams, many studies--more or less related to the embodiment paradigm or to a phenomenological perspective--have developed emphasis on two specific issues. The first one, more related to the first stream, highlights that body movements are the generating principle of a way of somatic knowledge (Ness, 1992; Reed, 1998; Sheets-Johnstone, 1990; Sklar, 1994). The second one, more related to the second stream, elaborates the understanding that perception rises from a bodily and embodied pre-reflexive knowledge, and that cognition rests upon the environment as a consequence of a process of active engagement (Csordas, 1990; Ingold, 2000; Merleau-Ponty, 2012).
Studies that address the issue of body movement state that somatic knowledge is a resource for embodied communication. They understand that body movement itself produces an authentic way of knowledge that is just as laden with the meanings that people need to accomplish their existences as any other form of knowledge, for example the ones that enable verbal communication (Sklar, 1994). It means that people express their own selves and recognize each other's selves through the habits they accumulate in their bodies as much as with verbalizing words. After all, both are ways of...
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