Competence, Qualification and Action Theory
Competence is a widely used concept to describe capabilities – mostly of employees – to perform in a certain way in organisations. Although a long and ongoing debate about measuring and developing competence exists, the concept itself is only partly found
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Competence, Qualification and Action Theory Matthias Vonken
3.1
Introduction
Competence is still a widely used concept to describe capabilities – mostly of employees – to perform in a certain way in organisations. Although a long and ongoing debate primarily about measuring competence and secondary about competence development exists, the concept itself is only partly founded on theories. It sometimes seems that ‘competence’ is used as a matter of fact, as if it were a real object like an arm or a head. Rather, it is a social construct, only viable if it is grounded on a common understanding of what it should stand for. And this common understanding seems to be still missing after a debate that lasted at least since the 1980s. What could be helpful is the offer of some theoretical framework that goes beyond what was already discussed by Chomsky, White and others. This chapter will try to formulate such a framework. Therefore, it will start with a short overview of the theory discussion of competence in the past and discuss the relationship between competence and qualification. In the second step, it will try to explain why the close relationship between competence and performance is one of the problems not only to measure competence but moreover to get to a decent understanding of competence itself. That will lead to thoughts about how to get to a theoretically founded explanation of competence. The most used way is to define a desired performance and afterwards derive a relating competence. The chapter will show why this is problematic and offers an alternative explanation of competence on the basis of action theories by analysing the relationship between action, performance, situation and competence.
M. Vonken (*) Department of Vocational and Further Education, Faculty of Education, University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 M. Mulder (ed.), Competence-based Vocational and Professional Education, Technical and Vocational Education and Training: Issues, Concerns and Prospects 23, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41713-4_3
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3.2
M. Vonken
Theoretical Roots of ‘Competence’
‘Professionals are competent when they act responsibly and effectively according to given standards of performance. They are held to possess sufficient competence. Professional competence is seen as the generic, integrated and internalized capability to deliver sustainable effective (worthy) performance (including problem solving, realizing innovation, and creating transformation) in a certain professional domain, job, role, organisational context, and task situation’ (Mulder 2014, p. 111). With this definition, Mulder summarises the majority of recent international discussions about competence. However, it also shows some of the problems included in these discussions. We will examine some of these problems later. First we will have a short look in its history. The concept of competence itself dates back to ancient times (see Mulder et al. 2007, p. 68; Vonken 200
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