Product Description

A leading MIT social scientist and consultant examines five professions--engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning--to show how professionals really go about solving problems.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #89196 in Books
• Published on: 1984-09-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author

Customer Reviews

A must read for self-aware practitioners
In this book, Schon gives us a language for understanding professional practice. Because the sum of what a professional knows is greater than the sum of what he is aware he knows -- let alone the totality of what he can articulate -- there is a hidden world of practitioner competence. I found Schon to be a little repetitive and his examples difficult to fully conceptualize. However, his discussion of the Technical Rationality model and his vignettes of five professions provide a framework which may be applied to the practice of any profession. I believe that readers of this book can enhance their self-awareness as professionals and artists.

This is an educational theory book
This book discusses the history and theory of professional learning. Schon spends a great deal of time justifying what every professional knows - that framing problems is difficult and that book learning is insufficient to deal with these problems.

If you are interested in positivism, technical rationality, and the evolution of the modern professional school, then this book is loaded with meaty material. If, however, you want to apply methods built upon other epistemologies, go straight to his 2nd book, "Educating the Reflective Practitioner".

The book is well thought out, but I found it a heavy read. Not for the faint-of-heart.

I got a lot out of it. Recommended only for epistemology or history of professional school wonks.

Tough reading - but definitly worht it !
A word of warning. This book is hard to read. Some things are reapeated over and over, while other detailes are never given proper treatment.

But - if you don't mind spending some time reading and analyzing the book, there are heaps of golden nuggets to find.

Schön illustrates why rational design processes doesn't work in reality (for computer enthusiasts this means an explanation of why the waterfall model will never work on real life problems). Instead he tries to explain how designer (architects, musicians, engineers etc.) really work, when they solve real problems. And how to teach expert knowledge to others.

I highly recommend this book for non-whimps...;-)