Organizational Socialization and the Profession of Management

Critical Analysis

If design is considered a profession in a classic sense, students in a design studio should learn the profession and professional practice—the knowledge of design, a sense of pure and practically idealistic view of design, and expectations that decisions will be made by leveraging generalized design principles and approaches. Professionalism should have a form of objectivity, as if there is a right and wrong way to practice and to make decisions. Accomplishment is tied to doing the job well, and well means doing it as it was taught and in a principled manner. In business management, “a professional has sometimes been called someone who knows better what is good for his client than the client” (60), and the same is true in design.

It can be argued that companies, however, are not actually looking for this type of designer. They are not looking for someone with professionally-specific knowledge, knowledge that is generalized into a set of higher-order designerly ways of thinking, doing, and knowing. Instead, they want a designer who can understand the unique norms of a specific company. To understand these norms requires a process of socialization, and part of that demands that a designer forgets the disciplinary knowledge and approaches (the “right way to do things”) and instead learns to do things the way the company does things—to develop the “ad-hoc wisdom which the school has taught him to avoid”—he learns that, “whereas professional training tells him that knowledge is power, the graduate now must learn that knowledge by itself is nothing. It is the ability to sell knowledge to other people which is power” (61).

This selling requires some degree of conformity, or at least a form of manipulation; being influential requires a designer to understand the unique nature of how influence is acceptably applied in a specific organization. This is disheartening to graduates; in an example at Sloan (in 1962), 73% of graduates six years post-graduation had quit their jobs (61). Modern job tenures are much shorter, but are likely to follow the same trend: that quickly after graduating, designers likely become disillusioned with the mismatch between what they have learned and what they are expected to do, and quit.

Schein argues that a company’s recruiters and leadership “tells the graduate that it is counting on him to bring fresh points of view and new techniques to bear on its problems” but “the man’s first boss and peers try to socialize him into their traditional mold” (61). The result is a conflict between creativity as learned and creative expectations as expected, and if studio is teaching students to offer a certain type of creativity, one which has equated creativity to novelty, students may be disappointed when they come to learn that this expectation is only valued rhetorically but not in practice.