Professional service firms (PSFs) have long pursued a one-firm model promising borderless collaboration and consistent quality. Yet integration typically relies on standardized practices, while those expected to enact them value local autonomy and context-sensitive judgment. Prior research has examined this challenge largely through structural and institutional lenses, showing how dispersed ownership, consensus-based governance, and cross-jurisdictional heterogeneity constrain standardization and coordination across offices. However, less is known about the discursive work by which professionals make sense of-and account for-the integration-autonomy tension in situated accounts. We address this gap by analyzing thirty-one semi-structured interviews with professionals across roles and offices in a global, confederated PSF network through the lens of discursive identity work. We identify three recurring discursive practices-constructing mediated authority, enacting stewardship-and-innovation, and relational positioning-through which participants produce locally grounded framings of the one-firm mandate. Rather than straightforward endorsement or resistance, these practices sustain an ambivalence about integration's compatibility with professional discretion, configuring commitment, discretion, and entitlement across roles and network positions. This paper contributes to one-firm scholarship by showing how professionals enact "one firm" in talk through the discursive repertoires these practices mobilize. On this basis, we reframe the model's apparent incompleteness as ongoing discursive negotiation rather than an implementation deficit. The paper also contributes to PSF power research by specifying how these same accounts reproduce, qualify, and sometimes reconfigure center-periphery relations, with hierarchy emerging as a provisional accomplishment rather than a settled property of formal structure alone.
Digital technologies in welfare organizations frequently generate gaps, ambiguities, and misalignments that require professional intervention. Yet prior research has tended to portray frontline workers mainly as resistant or adaptive actors, leaving under-examined their active contributions to sustaining broader digital infrastructures. This article introduces the concept of digital compensatory work to capture how professionals intervene when specific digital technologies fall short of their own standards for professional service delivery. Drawing on an exploratory literature review, we identify three forms of such compensatory work: complementing digital technologies, rectifying their shortcomings, and dismissing them when they conflict with professional judgment. By theorizing these practices, the article expands existing understandings of professional discretion in digital welfare services, shifting attention from resistance and adaptation to value-driven interventions that actively uphold service quality within digital infrastructures. In doing so, it contributes to debates on digital welfare and highlights the essential role of professional agency in sustaining human service organizations under conditions of digital transformation.
This article examines how the emerging profession of influencers uses video communications on social media to shape audiences' perceptions of their commercial activities. Managing impressions of these activities is crucial, as they may be perceived as inauthentic and call into question the professionals' self-branding efforts. Taking an interpretive, qualitative approach and drawing on Goffman's Frame Analysis, we investigate how influencers use videos on social media to engage in framing practices that alter how their work is perceived by followers or shift the focus of their attention away from it. We also analyse the active role of audiences in these framing practices and how this is influenced by the technology of video. This study contributes to the growing literature on technological and connective professionalism as well as on impression management in virtual environments, by identifying the framing of work activities as a form of impression management behaviour. It also extends the affordance-based perspective on social media impression management, as well as the theorization of technology's agentic properties in the constitution of professions, by identifying two novel affordances. The first is the cinematic affordance of video, which allow influencers to use filmmaking techniques to organize and shape the meaning of their work. The second are the protective and disruptive affordances of followers, which influence these impression strategies.
Hybrid professionalism involves integrating the managerial logic of standardization and fiscal efficiency into professional practices that have traditionally valued autonomy, quality, and commitment to the public good. Hybrid professionals among the established professions (e.g. law, medicine, accounting, and engineering) studied in this review are involved in hybrid professional-managerial roles, such as legal directors, nurse managers, clinical directors, or audit managers. They combine both professional and managerial responsibilities. Although research of hybrid professionalism spans over three decades, an integrated understanding of how and why individual professionals respond to working in hybrid roles is lacking. This limits our understanding of how individual professionals contribute to the transformation of professional practice. To address this gap, we conducted this systematic literature review of sixty-four articles exploring how professionals respond to work in hybrid professional-managerial roles and why. Thematic analysis of these articles identified three responses and their underlying reasons: not taking on hybrid roles, passive hybridizing, and active hybridizing. The review further conceptualizes collaborative control, adaptive autonomy, and integrative competence as the individual-level dynamics underpinning hybrid professionalism. This conceptualization offers theoretical scaffolding for studying the role of individual professionals in fostering hybrid professionalism. Implications and avenues for future research are discussed.
This study examines how platform-mediated work is transforming psychological professionalism, focusing on the interplay between professional and managerial logics and its implications for professional identity. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a large Italian psychological platform, the paper explores psychologists' experiences of autonomy, organizational support, monitoring, and belonging within a platform-based work context. The findings show that platform-based psychological work unfolds within a condition of institutional complexity, in which managerial mechanisms, such as standardized procedures, supervision, and monitoring, intersect with a historically dominant professional logic grounded in clinical autonomy, ethical responsibility, and expert judgment. Rather than replacing professionalism, managerialism is largely reinterpreted by psychologists as a form of organizational support that responds to professional isolation, economic uncertainty, and the need for collegiality in increasingly fragmented and autonomous career paths. Drawing on perspectives from the psychology of work and the sociology of professions, the paper examines how platform-mediated work contributes to reshaping professionals' understandings of the self and of psychological professionalism. The article concludes by discussing implications for the governance of profession and by outlining directions for future research on platform-based professional work.
This article examines how healthcare professionals respond to organizational change, focusing on the introduction of standardized care pathways in a newly established Emergency Department (ED) at a large Danish hospital. Drawing on qualitative data, it explores the varying responses of three key specialties-internists, orthopaedists, and anaesthetists-and shows that professional sub-groups' reactions are shaped by the material characteristics of their work tasks, including duration, complexity, and manual dexterity. These characteristics influence how professionals perceive care quality, learning opportunities, and the alignment of work design with their craft. The findings show that internists leveraged organizational power to shape ED processes around their task characteristics, anaesthetists remained largely unaffected, and orthopaedists resisted changes that disrupted their professional development. The study contributes to debates on professionalism by demonstrating how protective and connective forms of professionalism coexist and are negotiated at the intra-professional level. It also contributes to work design theory by linking task-level variation to professionals' motivation. By exploring the micro-foundations of professional craft, the article shows the limitations of a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to standardization, as the impacts on care quality vary across specialties. These insights are particularly relevant in the context of increasing regulatory pressures and automation, where the ability to align work design with task characteristics will shape the future trajectories of professional groups.
Organizational and sociological studies of professions typically approach knowledge as something professionals acquire during education, training, and work experience and apply flexibly when providing their services. This paper expands the view by addressing how professionals produce knowledge, asking how they make judgement about how far to pursue their knowledge-making. Based on original, qualitative data on forensic pathology in Sweden, I introduce the concept of knowledge-producing responsibility to address how such judgements take place relative to knowledge about causes of death. I present two perspectives on knowledge-producing responsibility. The research perspective values detail, being extensive, and as close to the truth about the case as possible. The bureaucratic perspective focuses on delivery time, restrictive resource-use, and provision of answers. The question of how far to pursue investigations is incremental to all forms of knowledge production and hence of a general nature. Knowledge-producing responsibility offers several directions for potential studies of related questions of professional knowledge work.
The transformation of professional service firms (PSFs) has attracted considerable scholarly attention, particularly as these organizations navigate tensions between traditional professional values and emerging managerial controls. While prior studies have mapped these shifts using frameworks such as archetypes, logics, and dyads, these accounts tend to understate the internal politics and related discursive struggles through which change is constructed, resisted, and reconfigured. This paper addresses that gap by introducing a discourse-theoretical perspective grounded in Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) theory of hegemony. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a UK law firm, we examine how firm leaders sought to stabilize a managerial framing of professional success through certain metrics and rankings, and how professionals responded by reinterpreting or challenging these framings in ways that reasserted professional values. The analysis reframes PSFs as arenas of ongoing struggle over the meanings and measures of success. In doing so, the paper highlights the discursive struggles that underlie hegemonic projects of organizational transformation in PSFs and calls for renewed attention to how hybrid forms are enacted and contested in professional contexts.
This paper examines YouTube videos (or vlogs) featuring a 'day in the life' of the young professional accountant. A netnography of 35 videos and 3085 related comments is conducted. The impressions created in these videos are interpreted by drawing on a dramaturgical theoretical framework. The findings indicate a new phenomenon whereby some Generation Z accountants deploy social media platforms to actively construct and manage their self-image. We witness them using their professional credentials as accountants to perform the role of a social media influencer, providing their audience with an entertaining lifestyle video that often features product endorsement. The main contribution of this paper, therefore, is to suggest the emergence of the Accountant-Influencer, a young accountant who uses their professional status to provide them with a voice within the sphere of social media. A second contribution of the paper is that it reflects on the implications of this emergent image for the accounting profession. Finally, the paper makes a third contribution by extending recent scholarship which applies Goffman's (1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin) dramaturgical model to the contemporary setting of online social interactions by suggesting that both authenticity and the type of audience (of which there may be many in the case of a diffused online audience) are two key and interrelated factors in delivering a successful performance in the online context.
This article explores the consequences of the occupational dynamics that have been triggered by the remodelling of the educational workforce in Sweden. Teachers' work has become increasingly focused on teaching the curriculum, and new lower-status paraprofessional personnel are being hired to perform work that has been 'hived off' by teachers. The paraprofessionals enter this abandoned occupational domain of work and attempt to possess authority over it by processes of interaction, negotiation, and rhetoric. To address these occupational dynamics, we draw on data from fieldwork at three different lower secondary schools. Our findings demonstrate how social influence is coproduced by paraprofessionals in their daily interactions with their colleagues and stakeholders and how this social influence gives them access to a domain of work that is separate from teachers, creating an occupational authority that entails a dependency on the paraprofessional services. Four approaches to achieving this were found in data: (1) Creating close and nonauthoritarian working alliances with pupils, (2) producing soft power by relational ties, (3) residing in pupils' spaces, and (4) operating as intermediary links between parties in the school. By paying attention to lower-status paraprofessionals' coproduction in social processes in which professional authority is negotiated and (re)constructed, this article has the potential to bring new insights into how contemporary processes of specialization of the teaching profession can pave the way for the emergence of a new profession in school.
This paper addresses the need for an approach to theorizing professional work and professional service firms in the generative machine learning (GML) age. We develop an approach using insights from existing literature on digital, algorithmic, and artificial intelligence technologies. We seek to extend existing theories whilst also responding to the distinctive characteristics of GML and the implications for how we theorize change. We argue that an approach is needed focused on emerging and future interdependencies between professionals and GML, something that implies extending but also reimagining theoretical perspectives on expertise, work, and organizations.
In response to the ongoing debate about the role of professional and occupational boundaries in effective service delivery, this paper explores how managers' reconfiguration of these boundaries affects service coordination for public service clients. Based on a combination of survey material and interviews with managers and frontline workers, we analyze three frontline organizations that have achieved varying degrees of service coordination across different occupational domains. To explain the differences in service coordination, we investigate how managers within these organizations have, over time, redefined two types of occupational boundaries-intra-organizational boundaries (which include tasks and jurisdictions between occupational domains) and symbolic boundaries (which pertain to the different role identities of occupational groups)-as experienced by frontline staff. Our findings suggest that dismantling symbolic boundaries is more critical to achieving service coordination than dismantling intra-organizational boundaries. While intra-organizational boundaries can easily reemerge, breaking down symbolic boundaries and constructing new role identities proves to be more impactful, as this transformation creates a more holistic expertise among frontline professionals that is necessary for effective collaboration across occupational domains. However, this reconfiguration process requires considerable time and ongoing boundary work from managers to be successful. This study contributes to existing literature on boundary work by highlighting the intricate interactions between intra-organizational and symbolic boundaries and emphasizing the central role managers play in reconfiguring occupational boundaries at the micro level.
This article examines how elite legal professionals in Norway navigate career pathways in the male-dominated field of tax law. We shift the focus from explaining women's underrepresentation in elite positions to understanding how those who succeed reach them, exploring sectoral stability and mobility in careers and narratives of career decisions and strategic navigation across sectors. Using a mixed-methods design-combining sequence analysis of career paths with qualitative interviews-we identify significant gendered patterns. Men more often ascend through stable careers within a single sector, typically law firms or the Tax Administration, whereas women more frequently reach elite positions through cross-sectoral mobility. Women strategically accumulate and mobilize sector-specific capital to attain top positions, often timing their career moves with family commitments. These divergent paths highlight persistent structural inequalities in the legal field: men can rely on loyalty and internal promotion, while women must navigate more complex routes to achieve comparable prestige and rewards. Yet women have turned what was once a liability-leaving law firms for more flexible roles-into a resource, strategically using mobility to remain within the legal elite.
This paper explains how corporate and organizational professionals reach top positions, emphasizing organizational careers-the history of organizational experiences throughout an individual's work life-as a key status dynamic. Trajectories to the top traverse not only in-house career ladders but operate across multiple status orders, specifically as exchanges between hierarchical status (rank within an organization) and organizational status (rank of an organization in the field). I theorize three ideal-type trajectories to the top: fidelity (hierarchical status accumulation in high-status organizations), conversion (trading organizational for hierarchical status), and regulatory capital (exploiting regulatory knowledge and networks for high-status positions). Analysing a novel database of elite careers in the global tax field-a domain marked by corporate and organizational professionalism-I find evidence for the centrality of these three trajectories, with their distribution marked by both general and field-specific dynamics, notably the power of the Big Four firms and the distinctive importance of regulatory experience. Conceptually, the study extends research on contemporary knowledge-based professionals by specifying and showing how status dynamics vary across career pathways and fields; methodologically, it advances a personnel-flow-based measure of organizational status that is applicable across heterogeneous fields.
In our increasingly transactional world-where tasks routinely involve individuals, firms, and governments-lawyers play an integral role. A well-functioning society depends on a commitment to the rule of law, which lawyers help promote, ex post and ex ante. For this reason, our legal system also relies on lawyers acting in accordance with their professional obligations. While legal profession scholars have richly explored how lawyers should conduct themselves, how lawyers navigate ethical challenges in practice settings remains underexplored. This article seeks to bridge this gap. We conduct an experiment involving licensed lawyers in Alberta, Canada, in which we randomly assign respondents two fact scenarios in which ethically questionable conduct is committed by either a senior or junior colleague within the respondents' firm. We find respondents from both groups provided near-identical responses for each scenario when asked how they would act. And when asked how most other lawyers would respond, each group responded similarly but, in each scenario, believed their fellow lawyers were less likely to find the colleague acted in violation of the professional rules. This gap was largest when respondents evaluated the conduct of a senior colleague whom most believed had violated the professional rules. Our findings suggest that lawyers believe the professional rules constrain their own actions more than those of their professional peers. In the real-world, where lawyers of varying seniority routinely work with one another on behalf of clients, these contrasting self-other perceptions may influence how they act in real-world, ethically challenging contexts.
In public service, the replacement of traditional professional and managerial cultures by a more entrepreneurial ethos has reemerged as a political goal in recent years, presented as a necessary response to acute fiscal challenges. In this paper, we consider the impact of increasing influence of enterprise and entrepreneurial discourses in the UK public sector, specifically in respect of healthcare in the UK. We examine the evolution of managerial and professional identities in healthcare in the UK, considering the evolution of health service management identities from administrator through leader to entrepreneur in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on an empirical study of a health care organization in the English National Health Service, we examine how engineered competition in this sector drives opportunistic entrepreneurial behaviour among staff, with direct implications for the identity and conduct of professional healthcare managers. Following Deetz on 'corporate colonization', we explore the perceived inevitability of this shift, even where it is felt that such changes occur to the detriment of professional and clinical concerns. We integrate these practical and theoretical issues together to critically evaluate how short-term entrepreneurial activity acts as a powerful organizing principle, at the risk of undermining the ethics of care.
Individuals who are closely affiliated with total institutions often have their personal identities intertwined with the institutional logics of the institution. When these individuals transition from these institutions, they carry the logics of their past affiliations with them. This study aims to explore the boundaries that individuals cross during career transitions from a total institution such as the military. Qualitative research was conducted with a sample of twenty-five Indian Navy officers to understand the identity transformation process that veterans undergo to adapt to civilian careers. Semi-structured interviews were used to gain insights into the experiences that veterans face when transitioning to non-military work environments. Navigating these institutional boundaries requires the individual to either identify with or adopt the logics of the new setting. The study found that this transition occurs on a spectrum, ranging from active identification with the new logics to complete resistance to adopting the new institutional logic. Based on their position on the spectrum, the participants were categorized into three archetypes: Achievers, Jugglers, and Defenders.
Dashboards are increasingly used in public service organizations to enhance service provision and reorganize professional work. However, their impact on professional roles and relational dynamics between frontline professionals, such as work coaches, and screen-level professionals, such as managers and quality officers, remains unclear. This article presents a qualitative case study of a dashboard that was implemented in the work and income department of a large Dutch city. This article examines how the relational dynamics in a frontline-screen-level network are reshaped by the implementation of a dashboard. The results present the analysis of (1) the discrepancy between the intended scripts and the actual enactment of functions and roles that were introduced during the dashboards' implementation, (2) how professionals navigate tensions caused by contradictory logics due to the implementation of the dashboard, and (3) how the dashboard's implementation reshaped relational dynamics. Our results revealed that some professionals resisted using the dashboard because they experienced a tension between their client-driven professional logic and the managerial logic equating client-driven work with data-driven work. This divided professionals into those who did not experience the tension between the logics and thus embraced the scripts of their new functions and roles, from those who did experience the tension and therefore resisted adopting the scripts of their new functions and roles. This division manifested in two key themes: (1) competition and (2) the pursuit of autonomy. The dashboard's implementation reshaped the relational dynamics in this frontline network, constituting profound changes in the fabric of organizational life.
In this study, we analyse the discursive strategies of professionalization used by psychology in Spain during its professionalization phase in the health sector in the early twenty-first century. Our primary focus is the conflict with political regulators and other healthcare professions after the Ley de Ordenaci & oacute;n de Profesiones Sanitarias (Healthcare Professions Act) came into effect, since this Act calls into question the extent to which psychology can be viewed as health care. We use discourse analysis to determine the discursive structure of the conflict, which has an interprofessional dimension, as well as the professionalization and social closure strategies of psychology within the framework of professional relationships (boundary work). We argue that understanding this conflict requires viewing it as part of the European and international regulation context of healthcare professions. Highlighted in the analysis is the emergence of two psychology discourses divided into four modes of enunciation (professionalizing, cultural, scientific, and political-economic). Among other aspects, the conclusions focus on the dual interprofessional and intraprofessional nature of the conflict and evidence of a dual closure in psychology. The latter's professionalization strategies in the sector occasionally resemble those employed by nursing, although at other times they are similar to those followed by some paramedical professions.
This paper describes and explains how different stories for clinicians and administrators are constructed and how they influence occupational practices in healthcare organizations. To do that, we employed an analytical frame based on research that underscores the role of temporality and placing for organizing processes and professional relations. The enactments and constructions shown in the data carry consequences for behaviours and relations in practice, resulting in two parallel stories being present simultaneously. The stories tell how administrators and clinicians, respectively, are those with prerequisites that can be summarized as being privileged or undervalued. As these stories are in parallel, it becomes impossible for them to meet and converge, meaning that professional knowledge and initiative may be not sufficiently utilized, for both groups.
