ABSTRACT
Our intentions in this chapter are deliberative, perhaps even repetitive. We purposefully canvas the literature on professionalism for its account on what it means to be a deliberative professional. Our ambition in revisiting these claims is to encourage the reader, and ourselves, to slow down – to create space for contemplating claims of deliberativeness and to subject these claims to scrutiny. After all, that is the deliberative thing to do. We particularly want to consider what the literature has to say about how the deliberative professional comes into being. In Amartya Sen’s (2009) terms, we are interested in the functionings – the beings and doings – of the deliberative professional as well as in deliberation as a capability to be developed, which is sorely needed by professionals working in the ‘liquid’ times of late capitalism (Bauman 2005).
