Professional sacrifice: architects, ethics and advertising

Fischer, James Karl (2005). Professional sacrifice: architects, ethics and advertising. PhD thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00010197

Abstract

The institutional ethics of the professional architect arose as the consequence of specific social groups operating regressively in the market. Advertising bans within this ethics typify a general difficulty with payment for service, forming a dysfunctional symptom of market-bound professionalism. The particular relations of identification behind such dysfunction determine such practices in terms of advisory, 'cautionary' exchange, giving professionalism its peculiar expressions of disavowal and the service ideal. This dissertation illustrates this thesis by examining the ethics of professionalism through a series of case studies.

The dissertation takes the position, that the specific aesthetic aspects of well-defined groups enable one to consider phenomena typically cited but rarely accounted for in sociological analyses of professionalism, such as the general disavowal with payment found within advisory services as such. We question three broad assumptions within existing literature. It is typically presumed that professional ethics originated in Britain, that such practices lingered within modernity from a by-gone era (18th Century gentility), and that the sanctions of professionalism actually set out to do what they claimed without complication. The archives of specific professional associations sustain none of these presumptions, particularly in the case of advertising and the various bans upon it.

The dissertation produces several histories of institutional ethics expressed in archival material to offer its own conclusions. Case studies upon bans against advertising in 19th Century medicine, the 19th Century architectural obsession with competitions, and 20th Century architectural bans against advertising, sustain a thesis that such bans mask the market relations of professionalism in a rather odd way. Ethical sanctions tended to produce limited forms of the very objects they rallied against. Advertising bans, for example, sustained alternative strategies to achieve viable substitutions for advertising. Whilst in America, medicine and law overcame such self-imposed debilitation through close alignment with the state, without similar arrangements the business of architects suffered greatly.

This realigns the unsubstantiated sociological presumptions as part of a problem to be addressed in future work, and ought to raise pragmatic architectural interest as well. We provide hitherto unexamined historical materials from which this can be done. Firstly, the work compiles and examines relevant ethical codes closely. Secondly, it compiles and presents a substantially complete chronology of AIA disciplinary cases for the first time. Code and discipline are therefore examined together. Finally, the dissertation produces a history of building product advertisements and the place of architects within them. This material therefore provides a resource to further consider the ethics of professional ethics.