Dear Terry,
This question is not a question about design thinking, but a question of human nature and human behavior. I have therefore changed the header from “Re: More on Design Thinking” to “The ox is on my tongue.” (Line 38 of The Agamemnon by Aeschylus.)
You asked whether my comment on rent-seeking and self-serving behavior described researchers and scholars. Researchers and scholars are as guilty of these vices as consultants and professional practitioners are.
Adam Smith was scathing in his criticism of Oxford University. Smith studied at Balliol College, returning to Scotland with lasting contempt for the English university system.
The problems I describe apply to universities. Even so, I propose a distinction between universities and consulting firms. Researchers and scholars are paid in annual salaries and our salaries are established across the university by pay grade. We do not charge clients by the hour. We are not paid to reach specific conclusions, but rather to examine issues and to reach the conclusions supported by evidence.
Despite this, some professors find ways to increase their salaries. Some do so by consulting. Therefore, they increase their salaries by maximizing their hours. In some of these cases, professors reach the conclusions that meet the needs of those who pay for the research.
Which goes to show you that researchers and scholars, like designers, lawyers, and engineers, are human.
Toward the end of the movie Unforgiven, the Schofield Kid talks about killing a villain named Quick Mike. Even though Quick Mike was a scoundrel and a brute, the Kid feels guilty for shooting him. The Kid says: “Well, I guess he had it coming.” Will Munny, the protagonist of the movie gives this some thought. He replies, “We all have it coming, Kid.”
I suppose you can say this about everyone who takes on human form. Professors or professionals, designers or ditch-diggers, cowboys or consultants, none of us is perfect and we all have it coming.
“In the long run,” as Lord Keynes famously said, “we are all dead.” From Job and Ecclesiastes through the Oresteia and the Theban trilogy, the verdict is the same.
Since researchers and scholars are human, then, yes, this is about researchers and scholars as well as professional practitioners in the many fields of practice.
People would understand a great deal more about the world were they to read Aeschylus and Sophocles along with Herbert Simon and Christopher Alexander. Or at least they’d know a great deal more about themselves and what it is to be human.
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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Terry Love wrote:
—snip—
Hi Ken,
You wrote,
‘Expertise and professional self-governance brings with it high social status. The privileges and opportunities that attend this status drive professional ambition and set professional practitioners at odds with fellow citizens outside the professional group. Even though professionals are citizens who presumably act on behalf of the larger society, high social status and power engender forms of corruption that are not always measured in vice and venality, but may be measured in rent-seeking and self-serving behavior. The argument of professional conspiracy appears in Adam Smith (1976: 144). It appears again as one aspect of the corrosion of character in Richard Sennett (1998).’
This is about researchers and scholars?
Terry
—snip—
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