Professional Purpose in the University: An Integrative Conceptual Model.
Community, management, professional practice, teaching and research: a relational ecosystem
Abstract
The fragmentation of the constitutive dimensions of academic work: professional practice, teaching, research and management, into non-communicating compartments erodes the sense of purpose of university professionals and limits their transformative capacity on the communities that give them meaning. This positioning article proposes an original conceptual model, the Cup of Professional Purpose, in which these dimensions are understood as a relational ecosystem: community is the root and existential justification of the system; management is its enabling architecture; professional practice is the experiential substrate from which teaching and research emerge; and policy acts as either a catalyst or a dead weight on the whole. The model draws on social capital theory, the capabilities approach, and the social determinants of health. In the health sciences, this model is particularly relevant, given that clinical faculty operate simultaneously across the three pillars it articulates: professional practice, teaching and research, with their professional role and the community setting as the indissociable core of their academic identity. Under this premise, it is argued that the ecological integration of these dimensions is the condition for academic work to transcend its instrumental function and contribute in a sustained way to knowledge, equity and community development.
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