A “Relating” Lens on Occupations and Professions: Collaboration, Coproduction, and Brokerage

This symposium showcases research that adopts a “relating” lens (Anteby, Chan & DiBenigno, 2016) to the study of occupations and professions in organizations—focusing on how actors interact and engage in practices of occupational collaboration, coproduction, and brokerage to achieve collective outcomes. Such relational practices are of increasing interest to scholars because important organizational processes such as the coordination of complex work (DiBenigno & Kellogg, 2014; Karunakaran, 2021) and the implementation of reform (Kellogg, 2014; Huising, 2015) rely on occupational groups working together with other stakeholders in their ecosystems. Given this recognition, scholars have called for empirical work that advances our understanding of how occupations collaborate, coproduce and broker with other groups in order to achieve shared or complementary goals (Anteby, Chan & DiBenigno, 2016). Consequently, empirical research using this approach has begun to grow, but there has been little integration across studies to offer a broader understanding. This symposium aims to bring together new insights emerging from work that adopts a relational lens to diverse work settings—emergency response, anesthesiology, mergers and acquisitions, and scientific laboratory work. By integrating this set of studies, we hope to broaden our theoretical understanding of how occupational groups productively engage with other members of their ecosystems, and to identify areas of interest for further study by scholars of work and occupations. Truce Structures: Mechanisms for Addressing Protracted Jurisdictional Conflicts Between Professions Presenter: Arvind Karunakaran; Stanford U. Toppling One’s Professional Expertise from Within: The Use of Hypnosis by French Anesthesiologists Presenter: Nishani Bourmault; NEOMA Business School Tool-Oriented Occupations as Brokers for Application-Oriented Occupations Presenter: Danielle Elaine Bovenberg; UC Santa Barbara Brokerage Professions and Insight Into Concealed Knowledge Presenter: Rohin Borpujari; London Business School