Apart from questions about professional ethics - perhaps professional ethics are to ethic as military music is to music - McKenna offers a useful low-jargon introduction to notions of jurisdictional power, authority and the professions as knowledge brokers.
I do like his comment at p247 that
As the political theorist Alan Ryan likes to tell the story, during a faculty meeting at Princeton a colleague responded to one of Ryan's flippant comments by remonstrating that "we don't appreciate your constant sarcasm". An American friend quickly spoke up on Ryan's behalf: "Alan is British - he was being ironic - I'm the one who is always sarcastic".He goes on to write that
Whether one is American or British, sarcastic or ironic, contemporary discussions of ethics, morality and professional values seem destined to provoke ridicule from postmodern scholars and scandal-weary readers who insist that we need to move past this anachronistic view of the professions. As sociologist Andrew Abbott argued more than twenty years ago, for professionals, ethics function as a means for existing elites to achieve higher status in their careers and within the wider society. From my perspective, however, I could care less whether these ethical standards are heartfelt or simply a cynical means to a calculated end as long as they eventually become the cultural norm in consulting.
