Desmond Ryan - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Desmond Ryan

Health and Social Care Chaplaincy, 2013

ABC Radio National, 2008

A talk for the Radio National slot just before the 6 o'clock news.

Accountable Autonomy: Perspectives in Professional Education, ed. Sinclair Goodlad, Guildford: SRHE, 1985

Critiques of the professions, and of education for them were specifically asked for by the SRHE ... more Critiques of the professions, and of education for them were specifically asked for by the SRHE 1984 Conference Committee. While the volume of Preceedings Education for the Professions: Quis custodiet ...? (Goodlad, 1984) raises important questions about the organisation of professionals and about who is to control their work, there is little criticism of how their training affects their ability to perform professional tasks while remaining human beings. This paper offers itself as such a critique.
The paper is structured as an answer to one question: "How can professionals be enabled to respond more adequately than at present to problems which affect individuals as whole people?" For the purposes of this paper I shall assume that it is both possible and desirable for 'professionals' to respond more adequately to problems which affect individuals as whole people, and that an important function of the research community in higher education is to point out ways of so responding. By 'problems which affect individuals as whole people' I refer to those difficulties which detract from a person's overall capacities, social functioning, or subjective well-being - or, as so often, from all three. Physical and mental handicap, chronic sickness, unemployment, addiction, psychological distress, accident, bereavement, ageing, even childbirth - these and other events and states have in common a requirement that those affected make a radical readjustment to the overall pattern of their lives.
This paper, therefore, asks for fresh thinking on the education and training of health and welfare professionals. It first proposes an alternative classification of the overall field of activities which are called 'professional', one which will allow us to focus our attention exclusively on those 'person arts' which deal with the individual as an individual and not with isolated technical details of his functioning. The defensive strategies of specialists in multi-professional work environments are suggested as the principal cause of the inadequacies of response to 'whole-people problems', and the failure to prepare young entrants to each profession for these conflicts as the principal deficiency of present vocational education. Unless the realities, sociological and political, of contemporary professional practice in bureaucratic organizations are confronted before the apprentice is fully inducted into shop-floor practices, those practices will allow full scope for all the pathologies of defensiveness and buck passing to which so many innocent and needy people fall victim.
My purpose is polemical; behind the hosannas and the hurrahs for professions as knowledge-based, service-oriented, and self-regulated by codes of conduct, I detect a self-protective blindness on the part of professionals to the coalescing of two powerful historical trends, both sub-trends of the increasing division of labour in the interests of efficiency. These trends are specialization and bureaucratization. The purpose of the polemic is to remind professionals that it is at best a self-deception to speak of themselves as autonomous in their power of decision when they are in fact as dependent on, and governed by, bureaucracy as most other specialist employees. While they may have a monopoly of particular skills, how they deploy these skills is not always for them to decide, especially if such decisions threaten the efficiencies securable through specialized division of labour, or the authority structure of those great co-ordinators of modern life, the bureaucracies. By remaining blind as to how they are constrained in their response to those in need, professionals come to redefine need as that to which they are entitled to respond. This is, simply, a dreadful way to treat people, and a dreadful plight for the young professional to be in, to have to treat them in this way. Whilst we learn much about the splendour of educating for the professions at conferences such as this, we ought also to discuss a little of the miseries

New Blackfriars, 2006

Why is 'The prodigal son' the most brilliant short story ever told?

New Left Review, 1998

This article draws attention to an irony in the history of political economy: the British politic... more This article draws attention to an irony in the history of political economy:
the British political elite making the same mistake twice in less
than 150 years. The mistake in question is the misidentification of the
long-term source of value in the British economy at the point of transition
between staples. The first time, as every schoolchild once knew, the
mistake was corrected by Sir Robert Peel when he sealed the end of the
Age of Corn by repealing the Corn Laws. However, come the second
point of transition, what do we see? Apparently mesmerized by the content
of the dominant staple, the British governments of the 1980s
ignored the emergence and long-term prospects of a new staple; consequently
they persisted with a policy of promoting the manufacturing
interest long after it became clear that the UK had no more lasting a comparative
advantage in machinery than it had earlier had in corn. This
proclaimed defence of the Iron Laws was at the expense of the dynamic
but fragile ‘information interest’, emergent in the British economy since
the eclipse of the imperial economic system in the late 1950s.
The emergence of this interest derived from Britain’s comparative
advantages in scientific research, elite education, and quality cultural
activities—design, the media, art and music. All of these rising sectors
depended for their vitality and competitiveness on the higher education
system. Because British higher education then offered—in comparative
terms—an unusual degree of formative contact with critical and creative
minds at work, its most outstanding graduates, socialized to
expect fulfilling work, often competed to work in sectors allowing the
most liberated exercise of the mind. Higher education became the live
germ of a post-manufacturing production system with a competitive
edge in imaginative ideas. To emphasize the parallel with the staple it
displaced, we may select a term which resonates with ‘manufacturing’
and call higher education the ‘mind-factory’ of the ‘mindfacturing’
industries. It produced the producers of new, high-value, overwhelmingly
abstract goods and services, the ‘new invisibles’ of the post-imperial
trading system. This productive system was a niche
culture, flowering only under organizational conditions similar to those
found in the higher education institutions where its workers had
received their cultural formation.
Herein lay its fragility. That higher education system, that formative
cultural matrix, existed in an economic enclave protected by the state.
This protection depended on a long-established but contingent view of
its interests taken by the controllers of the state. By 1980 those controllers
had changed, and with them changed the proclaimed view of the
state’s interests. In historical perspective, British higher education
between 1945 and 1980 appears as the state-sponsored workshop of the
discipline of originality for an elite destined for leadership roles across
those parts of the culture which gave scope to critically trained and creative
minds. Today, however, as the generative source of a culture of
intellectual adventurousness, of self-surpassing excellence in individual
achievement, and of norm-questioning deep play, the British higher
education system has been all but smashed—not by superior competition
from the mindfacturing systems of other countries, but by its own
former sponsor, the state.

Drafts by Desmond Ryan

'Valential (Lat: valere, to be strong, to be well, to be worth) love' is a sociological theory-co... more 'Valential (Lat: valere, to be strong, to be well, to be worth) love' is a sociological theory-concept grounded in the life-worlds of flourishing 12-14 year olds in an eastern Spanish city. It refers to the triple bi-directional 'beams' of tutelary-formative energy in which they are held and enabled to become who they are: beams experienced in their relations with family, with peer group and with school*. The theory-concept is properly sociological in that the focal issue is how the most fortunate children experience positive developmental energy with all social institutions in which they are involved. Valential love is thus posited non-reductively as an achievement of the culture in constructing a cosmos/'world' (Uexküll's Umwelt) which evokes the self-creation (Polanyi's 'ontogenesis') of hierarchically higher-level organisms: self-confident children.

Health and Social Care Chaplaincy, 2013

ABC Radio National, 2008

A talk for the Radio National slot just before the 6 o'clock news.

Accountable Autonomy: Perspectives in Professional Education, ed. Sinclair Goodlad, Guildford: SRHE, 1985

Critiques of the professions, and of education for them were specifically asked for by the SRHE ... more Critiques of the professions, and of education for them were specifically asked for by the SRHE 1984 Conference Committee. While the volume of Preceedings Education for the Professions: Quis custodiet ...? (Goodlad, 1984) raises important questions about the organisation of professionals and about who is to control their work, there is little criticism of how their training affects their ability to perform professional tasks while remaining human beings. This paper offers itself as such a critique.
The paper is structured as an answer to one question: "How can professionals be enabled to respond more adequately than at present to problems which affect individuals as whole people?" For the purposes of this paper I shall assume that it is both possible and desirable for 'professionals' to respond more adequately to problems which affect individuals as whole people, and that an important function of the research community in higher education is to point out ways of so responding. By 'problems which affect individuals as whole people' I refer to those difficulties which detract from a person's overall capacities, social functioning, or subjective well-being - or, as so often, from all three. Physical and mental handicap, chronic sickness, unemployment, addiction, psychological distress, accident, bereavement, ageing, even childbirth - these and other events and states have in common a requirement that those affected make a radical readjustment to the overall pattern of their lives.
This paper, therefore, asks for fresh thinking on the education and training of health and welfare professionals. It first proposes an alternative classification of the overall field of activities which are called 'professional', one which will allow us to focus our attention exclusively on those 'person arts' which deal with the individual as an individual and not with isolated technical details of his functioning. The defensive strategies of specialists in multi-professional work environments are suggested as the principal cause of the inadequacies of response to 'whole-people problems', and the failure to prepare young entrants to each profession for these conflicts as the principal deficiency of present vocational education. Unless the realities, sociological and political, of contemporary professional practice in bureaucratic organizations are confronted before the apprentice is fully inducted into shop-floor practices, those practices will allow full scope for all the pathologies of defensiveness and buck passing to which so many innocent and needy people fall victim.
My purpose is polemical; behind the hosannas and the hurrahs for professions as knowledge-based, service-oriented, and self-regulated by codes of conduct, I detect a self-protective blindness on the part of professionals to the coalescing of two powerful historical trends, both sub-trends of the increasing division of labour in the interests of efficiency. These trends are specialization and bureaucratization. The purpose of the polemic is to remind professionals that it is at best a self-deception to speak of themselves as autonomous in their power of decision when they are in fact as dependent on, and governed by, bureaucracy as most other specialist employees. While they may have a monopoly of particular skills, how they deploy these skills is not always for them to decide, especially if such decisions threaten the efficiencies securable through specialized division of labour, or the authority structure of those great co-ordinators of modern life, the bureaucracies. By remaining blind as to how they are constrained in their response to those in need, professionals come to redefine need as that to which they are entitled to respond. This is, simply, a dreadful way to treat people, and a dreadful plight for the young professional to be in, to have to treat them in this way. Whilst we learn much about the splendour of educating for the professions at conferences such as this, we ought also to discuss a little of the miseries

New Blackfriars, 2006

Why is 'The prodigal son' the most brilliant short story ever told?

New Left Review, 1998

This article draws attention to an irony in the history of political economy: the British politic... more This article draws attention to an irony in the history of political economy:
the British political elite making the same mistake twice in less
than 150 years. The mistake in question is the misidentification of the
long-term source of value in the British economy at the point of transition
between staples. The first time, as every schoolchild once knew, the
mistake was corrected by Sir Robert Peel when he sealed the end of the
Age of Corn by repealing the Corn Laws. However, come the second
point of transition, what do we see? Apparently mesmerized by the content
of the dominant staple, the British governments of the 1980s
ignored the emergence and long-term prospects of a new staple; consequently
they persisted with a policy of promoting the manufacturing
interest long after it became clear that the UK had no more lasting a comparative
advantage in machinery than it had earlier had in corn. This
proclaimed defence of the Iron Laws was at the expense of the dynamic
but fragile ‘information interest’, emergent in the British economy since
the eclipse of the imperial economic system in the late 1950s.
The emergence of this interest derived from Britain’s comparative
advantages in scientific research, elite education, and quality cultural
activities—design, the media, art and music. All of these rising sectors
depended for their vitality and competitiveness on the higher education
system. Because British higher education then offered—in comparative
terms—an unusual degree of formative contact with critical and creative
minds at work, its most outstanding graduates, socialized to
expect fulfilling work, often competed to work in sectors allowing the
most liberated exercise of the mind. Higher education became the live
germ of a post-manufacturing production system with a competitive
edge in imaginative ideas. To emphasize the parallel with the staple it
displaced, we may select a term which resonates with ‘manufacturing’
and call higher education the ‘mind-factory’ of the ‘mindfacturing’
industries. It produced the producers of new, high-value, overwhelmingly
abstract goods and services, the ‘new invisibles’ of the post-imperial
trading system. This productive system was a niche
culture, flowering only under organizational conditions similar to those
found in the higher education institutions where its workers had
received their cultural formation.
Herein lay its fragility. That higher education system, that formative
cultural matrix, existed in an economic enclave protected by the state.
This protection depended on a long-established but contingent view of
its interests taken by the controllers of the state. By 1980 those controllers
had changed, and with them changed the proclaimed view of the
state’s interests. In historical perspective, British higher education
between 1945 and 1980 appears as the state-sponsored workshop of the
discipline of originality for an elite destined for leadership roles across
those parts of the culture which gave scope to critically trained and creative
minds. Today, however, as the generative source of a culture of
intellectual adventurousness, of self-surpassing excellence in individual
achievement, and of norm-questioning deep play, the British higher
education system has been all but smashed—not by superior competition
from the mindfacturing systems of other countries, but by its own
former sponsor, the state.

'Valential (Lat: valere, to be strong, to be well, to be worth) love' is a sociological theory-co... more 'Valential (Lat: valere, to be strong, to be well, to be worth) love' is a sociological theory-concept grounded in the life-worlds of flourishing 12-14 year olds in an eastern Spanish city. It refers to the triple bi-directional 'beams' of tutelary-formative energy in which they are held and enabled to become who they are: beams experienced in their relations with family, with peer group and with school*. The theory-concept is properly sociological in that the focal issue is how the most fortunate children experience positive developmental energy with all social institutions in which they are involved. Valential love is thus posited non-reductively as an achievement of the culture in constructing a cosmos/'world' (Uexküll's Umwelt) which evokes the self-creation (Polanyi's 'ontogenesis') of hierarchically higher-level organisms: self-confident children.