The professional and personal values and their revelation through professional doctorates

This paper discusses the relationship between individual practitioners’ personal values and their developing professional agentic values. It considers how the former might be in tension with the prescribed forms of practice held to be ‘professional’ by professional bodies, warranting membership and, indeed, any licence to practice. These practices and their underpinning values have a functionality that may be at odds with the personal values of new professionals as their careers develop and they learn more, both propositionally and tacitly, within the profession. Becoming a professional within the cocoon of the profession is a career-long engagement and commitment. The cocoon and its values may be challenged by practice at the periphery of the professional domain—for instance multi-disciplinary lawyers’ and accountants’ practice—or by critical reflection on individuals’ own practice and the hidden values that sustain it. Through the lens of an ‘I’ and ‘we’ framework introduced in the paper and the use of a professional doctorate, we discuss how a practitioner’s and profession’s values may be in tension. An example might be found by turning to the field of law, where justice and human rights may be lost beneath weighty procedure and expensive entry costs. The paper seeks an understanding of the different personal and collective ontological stances and tensions that practitioners may experience as they progress through their careers, attempting to align their own values with those of the collective values within their profession. We explore this through a Heideggerian reading of transdisciplinarity.