ABSTRACT
Codes often function as a teaching resource, transmitting fundamental ideas about values from one generation of practitioners to the next, and helping shape identity and practice. While they may be able to set loose boundaries of discourse on the nature of values in professional practice, they resolve the ambiguities of active values management facing practitioners engaged in multivalent situations where professional judgement is required to make an adequate response. Professional codes are much more complex and ambivalent documents with regard to professional values and practice than they may have seemed at first. Rather, they can be seen as emergent, living documents-in-creation that reflect the mixed and conflicted value ecology of society in general as well as particular occupational cultures within the social order. Codes are characterised by a mixture of the reflective and the imperative, the aspirational and the descriptive, the ethical and the pragmatic.
