An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4.3 Limits on ethics
Group ethics must aim at balance: not too much (the ‘within reason’ limitation) but
not too little. What is at issue here is the danger of an incestuous concern with the
protection of members of the profession by avoiding and covering over complaints
and offences to avoid litigation. Educational linguistics does not in general have
the life and death risks that medicine does, but all professional activity involving
language provides for potential complaints and legal action because of the intrusive
nature of the activity and its normative role.
Safeguards for professional practitioners, in applied linguistics as much as in
medicine, are necessary but it is important that the safeguards are also applicable to
stakeholders other than the professionals themselves. Otherwise they become not
safeguards but fortresses.
Coady and Bloch note that the current obsession with group ethics has produced
a proliferation of written statements setting out what the group intends. ‘One
reaction of these groups to the challenges of government and to the cynicism of
clients and taxpayers is to proclaim their ethical standards through establishing
or reestablishing codes of ethics’ (1996: 1). It may be that our concern with codes
represents a kind of false consciousness with regard to professionalism, a kind of flag
of convenience to justify the public and professional claims of an activity in relation
to society at large. Hence the doubts about the value of codes. It may therefore be
more important to look at less formal statements about an activity, such as the
training and the socialising of apprentices. Atkinson writes of practical job training
in clinical medicine as ‘doctrinal conversion’ and of ‘passing through the mirror’. And
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he comments that ‘most studies of professional socialisation have tended to
concentrate on how the novice comes to take on the appropriate perspectives and
understandings, behaviour and values which characterise their newly-gained occu -
pational culture’ (Atkinson 1981: 19–20).