Feigning Incompetence in the Field

Arthur McLuhan

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.16.2.06

Authors

Arthur McLuhan University of Toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6133-5838

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.16.2.06

Keywords:

Ethnography, Impression Management, Competence, Work, Occupations, Professions

Abstract

A basic feature of professions is specialized competence. Indeed, expertise grants professions and their members privileged, prestigious, and protected statuses. Members of professions thus face interactional pressure to appear competent in encounters with colleagues, clients, and lay publics, demonstrating that they, indeed, have the particular competencies expected of and associated with their position. For example, in a classic study of professionalization, Jack Haas and William Shaffir examine how medical students adopt a cloak of competence—presenting more-than-fully-able selves—in their training and work to convince gatekeepers, each other, and patients that they have the ability to do medicine. Similar competence-enhancing presentations are evident in other professions. However, a related dramaturgical phenomenon remains neglected: adopting a cloak of incompetence—presenting less-than-fully-able selves—in performing the professional role. Using the ethnographer’s work as an illustrative case, the following paper examines this other side of managing professional competence.

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Author Biography

Arthur McLuhan, University of Toronto

Arthur McLuhan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto and the MAP Center for Urban Health Solutions, St. Michael’s Hospital. His research engages the sociologies of morality and social problems, self and identity, and subcultures and everyday life. He pursues formal theoretical accounts in these areas by examining generic social processes and patterns that are empirically grounded in the comparative and ethnographic examination of social worlds. His work has been published in Social Forces, Sociological Focus, Sociological Theory, and Symbolic Interaction, among other venues.

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