Competence Hans Bernhard Schmid (hans.bernhard.schmid@univie.ac.at) [Submitted to: Emma Dayer-Tieffenbach/Julien Deonna (eds., forthcoming): Dictionary of Values.] In the most common use of the term, competence is the acquired knowledge, capabilities, and skills that allow a person to be effective in her roles and tasks. “Competence” is thus a kind of “ability” or perhaps “practical virtue” in a somewhat Aristotelian sense of the term; the most obvious specific difference is that competence is limited to professional or working life and training in which the emphasis is primarily on specified performance. People may be called competent in their roles as teachers or plumbers, but as far as their roles as friends or parents are concerned, somewhat less efficiency-related terms such as “dedicated” or “staunch” are usually preferred in ordinary discourse. However, under labels such as “social competence”, “emotional competence”, or “self-competence” there are attempts to generalize the concept to a much wider context, extending to virtually all domains of human life. Such wider uses of the term have become pervasive, especially in para-academic literature such as self- improvement books. Placing competence as a core value, especially in domains outside the working life, has often been criticized as advocating a skewed, atomized, impoverished, and perhaps even ideological notion of practical virtue, and of subjecting human life to the imperatives of effectiveness and adaptation. In (modest and partial) defense of the value of competence against this and similar criticisms, it can be pointed out that the concept of competence may play an important role as a comparatively “thin” evaluative term in pluralistic societies. 1. Contexts and Criticisms To assess the value of competence, it is important to take into account the development of the discourse of competence, that is, the complex of attitudes and practices within which competence is accepted as a core value. Especially in the Anglo-Saxon and German speaking world, the term “competence” has experienced an astonishing boom over the past half of a century (this can easily be traced with the help of Google’s Ngram Viewer at https://books.google.com/ngrams). This booming use of the term seems to have originated in Anglo-Saxon business administration in the 1950ies, especially in human resources management, where the idea of competence served to overcome the earlier fixation of human resources departments on knowledge and intelligence (as measured by received intelligence tests) as core criteria of selection, and to focus on cognitive and practical skills (cf. Gelhard 2011). From business administration and human resources management, the discourse of competence has spread – and still seems to be spreading – to an increasing number of other contexts. Especially through debates on vocational training organization, the idea of placing competence as a core value was adopted in education science in the 1980ies, where it has become the established core curricular measure of success or failure, replacing such values as knowledge or scholarly learning (cf., e.g., Bridges 1996). Competence is now the key term in education policy in many countries of the west, including international organizations such as the UNESCO. In parallel with this development, ever wider conceptions of competence have been proposed. Labels such as “social competence” (e.g., Matson 2008), “emotional competence” (e.g., Saarni 1999), or “self-competence” (at heart the self-confidence that arises from past successful actions; e.g., Tafarodi/Swann 1995) stand for the idea of evaluating human action