Daniel Muzio
Biographic Data
| ID | 258738 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Muzio |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Muzio |
| SIGNATURE | MUZIO D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1725-9011 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 455 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Does Price Personalization Ethically Outperform Unitary Pricing? A Thought Experiment and a Simulation Study
Merchants often use personalized pricing: they charge different consumers different prices for the same product. We assess the ethicality of personalized pricing by generalizing and extending an earlier model by Coker and Izaret (Journal of Business Ethics 173:387–398, 2021) who found that price personalization ethically outperforms unitary pricing. Using a simulation analysis, we show that these results crucially depend on the choice of paramete…
From Guardianship to Complicity: A Boundary Perspective on Professional Misconduct
This article explains professional misconduct through a boundary-centred ecological perspective. Although professions have historically justified their status and labour market privileges through social trusteeship and public service claims, numerous scandals—from Enron and Parmalat to the financial crisis and the opioid epidemic—reveal systematic failures of professional gatekeepers. I argue that these failures arise when boundaries within and a…
Gender and Ethnic Intersectionality in Solicitors' Careers, 1970 to 2016
This article provides new insights into the intersection of gender and ethnic inequalities in the solicitors' profession. Using administrative records spanning the entire population of practising solicitors in England and Wales, we analyse structural changes over successive cohorts of solicitors and identify four distinctive employment profiles: high-street solicitors, city solicitors, corporate fast-track and in-house. We show how solicitors wit…
The Evolution of Professionalism as a Mode of Regulation: Evidence from the United States
Opinion is divided on how far and in what ways professionalism as a mode of regulation has evolved. To date, attention has focused on the impact of neoliberal political and economic ideologies that challenge the idea that professions should be trusted to regulate themselves. This article further examines the impact of these attacks on professionalism and assesses whether they have triggered a process of decline. Drawing on a range of documentary …
Learning the rules of the game: How is corporate masculinity learned and enacted by male professionals from nonprivileged backgrounds
Focusing on the lived intersection of social class and hegemonic masculinity, this article uses data elicited over a 5‐year period to analyze the experiences of 10 white male participants from nonprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who were recruited as information technology professionals by a prestigious professional service firm (PSF). Employing a Bourdieusian perspective, we reveal how participants learned to enact the configuration of corp…
Inserting professionals and professional organizations in studies of wrongdoing: The nature, antecedents and consequences of professional misconduct
Professional misconduct has become seemingly ubiquitous in recent decades. However, to date there has been little sustained effort to theorize the phenomenon of professional misconduct, how this relates to professional organizations, and how this may contribute to broader patterns of corruption and wrongdoing. In response to this gap, in this contribution we discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of analyses that focus on the nature, …
Privileges and penalties in the legal profession: An Intersectional Analysis of Career Progression
Intersectionality theory is concerned with integrating social characteristics to better understanding complex human relations and inequalities in organizations and societies (McCall 2005). Recently, intersectionality research has taken a categorical and quantitative turn as scholars critically adopt but retain existing social categories to explain differences in labour market outcomes. A key contention is that social categories carry penalties or…
Professional Misconduct in Healthcare: Setting Out a Research Agenda for Work Sociology
In the light of its surprising absence in extant literature in the domain of the sociology of work, specifically within the journal Work, Employment and Society, this article represents a 'call to arms' for research focused upon professional misconduct in healthcare. Specifically, interrogation of four dimensions of professional misconduct in healthcare is called for: a broader definition of professional misconduct; antecedents of professional mi…
The Oxford Handbook of Professional Service Firms
Over the past three decades the Professional Service Firm (PSF) sector has emerged as one of the most rapidly growing, profitable, and significant in the global economy. In 2013 the accountancy, management consulting, legal, and architectural sectors alone generated revenues of US$1.6 trillion and employed 14 million people. PSFs play an important role in developing human capital, creating innovative business services, reshaping government instit…
Governance in Professional Service Firms
This chapter synthesizes and extends the literature on governance in Professional Service Firms (PSFs). It discusses four foundational theoretical perspectives on governance in PSFs: the agency, the partnership/partnership ethos, the stakeholder, and the trustee perspective. The authors argue these perspectives speak to structural or cultural views of governance, but they leave unanswered critical issues. Given the state of the literature, they a…
Researching Professional Service Firms
The chapter begins by examining the significance of Professional Service Firms (PSFs) in terms of their scale and significance from an economic and societal perspective, and the insights they offer for academic theory. The authors examine how PSFs have remained “in the shadows,” in terms of their visibility within the economy and within scholarly research, and how and why that situation is changing. The chapter discusses “what exactly is a Profes…
Sources of Homogeneity and Heterogeneity across Professional Services
Research on Professional Service Firms (PSFs) has tended to treat them as homogeneous and to assume there are similarities in how they are organized and managed. This assumption has been challenged recently as scholars have drawn attention to organizational differences stemming from sources of heterogeneity. The authors argue that rigorous theorizing about the organization and management of PSFs requires an understanding of sources of both homoge…
Transnational corporations shaping institutional change: The case of English law firms in Germany
Questions remain about the factors that influence the ability of transnational corporations (TNCs) to shape processes of institutional change. In particular, questions about power relations need more attention. To address such questions, this article develops a neoinstitutional theory-inspired analysis of the case of English law firms and their impacts on institutional change in Germany. The article shows that the shaping of the direction of inst…
The price of corporate professionalisation: Analysing the corporate capture of professions in the UK
Recent debates on the organisation of expert labour focus upon either the growing dominance of managerialism over traditional professions or the unwillingness/inability of new expert occupations to professionalise. Such arguments frequently disregard expert occupations that continue to deliberately pursue professionalisation to improve their status and influence in organisations and wider society, and therefore overlook the consequences of contem…
Structure, agency and career strategies of white women and black and minority ethnic individuals in the legal profession
The legal profession in England and Wales is becoming more diverse. However, while white women and black and minority ethnic (BME) individuals now enter the profession in larger numbers, inequalities remain. This article explores the career strategies of 68 white women and BME legal professionals to understand more about their experiences in the profession. Archer’s work on structure and agency informs the analysis, as does Emirbayer and Mische’s…
Institutional legacies in TNCs and their management through training academies: The case of transnational law firms in Italy
In this article we highlight the effects of heterogeneous institutional contexts on transnational professional service firms, a relatively poorly studied issue. Specifically, we provide empirical analysis of how the specificities of the Italian institutional context affect the activities of English legal professional service firms in Milan. This reveals the intimate connection between a variety of capitalism, place specific workplace cultures and…
London's Legal Elite: Recruitment through Cultural Capital and the Reproduction of Social Exclusivity in City Professional Service Fields
The authors examine the ways in which recruitment and selection processes facilitate the reproduction of elites and elite cultures within City law firms. The research is based upon original research carried out during 2009, consisting of in-depth semistructured interviews, semiotic and content analyses of recruitment materials and websites, and the analysis of publicly available data demonstrating the educational backgrounds of lawyers practising…
Professions in a globalizing world: Towards a transnational sociology of the professions
Globalization has significant implications for the professions, with the societies and the regulators around them changing and the realities of professional work in large organizations taking on increasingly transnational dimensions. However, while there is no lack of empirical studies of the globalization of individual professions and firms, the implications of processes of globalization, reregulation and governmental rescaling for neo-Weberian …
Making Sense of Modern Medical Careers: The Case of the UK's National Health Service
The ongoing debate on the re-articulation of the relationship between professions, the market and the state, pays increasing attention to the issue of professional identities and how these are reframed through processes such as socialization and training. The UK government's Modernising Medical Careers programme (MMC), which introduces significant revisions to the structure, content and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate doctor training, …
Professions, organizations and the state: Applying the sociology of the professions to the case of management consultancy
In the recent literature on knowledge-based occupations it is frequently noted that some groups, such as management consultants, have been far less successful than others in developing a system of professional regulation and organization. This is generally attributed to the functional characteristics of their knowledge base, which is too elusive, fuzzy and perishable to sustain traditional professionalization projects. It is also suggested that t…
Towards corporate professionalization: The case of project management, management consultancy and executive search
This article explores patterns of professionalization in a number of 'new' knowledge-based occupations: management consultancy, project management and executive headhunters. Against a general assumption in the literature that such occupations are unwilling and/ or incapable to professionalize, this article suggests how a professionalization project has indeed been in play within these occupational domains. Perhaps most interestingly, these occupa…
Introduction: Professions and organizations - a conceptual framework
This collection seeks to reconnect two separate streams of work on professional organizations and professional occupations. In particular the articles collected here identify two key themes: (1) the challenges and opportunities that professional organizations pose for established and emerging professionalization projects and (2) the extent to which professional organizations create, institutionalize and manipulate new forms of professionalism and…
The financialization of large law firms: Situated discourses and practices of reorganization
This article uses the case of the financialization of large law firms to develop debates about the process of the ‘capitalisation of everything’ whereby financial logics spread both geographically between countries and sectorally from one industry to another. Drawing on work that analyses how discourses of shareholder value have led to the re-organization of firms, the article argues that large law firms have undergone ‘surgery’ as part of attemp…
Redirections in the Study of Expert Labour: Established Professions and New Expert Occupations
This book explores recent theoretical and empirical advances in the understanding of how professional occupations are organized. Focusing in particular on the differences between established and emerg
The paradoxical processes of feminization in the professions: The Case of Established, Aspiring and Semi-Professions
The past three decades have been characterized by dramatic labour market developments including the mass entry of women to exclusively male domains. Professional work is particularly indicative of this trend where growth in female membership has fuelled optimistic predictions of shattered glass ceilings and gender equality. This article seeks to challenge these predictions and to explore the associated assumptions linked with the feminization of …
Organizational professionalism in globalizing law firms
Are the challenges of globalization, technology and competition exercising a dramatic impact on professional practice while, in the process, compromising traditional notions of professionalism, autonomy and discretion? This article engages with these debates and uses original, qualitative empirical data to highlight the vast areas of continuity that exist even in the largest globalizing law firms. While it is undoubted that growth in the size of …
The paradoxical processes of feminization in the professions: The Case of Established, Aspiring and Semi-Professions
The past three decades have been characterized by dramatic labour market developments including the mass entry of women to exclusively male domains. Professional work is particularly indicative of this trend where growth in female membership has fuelled optimistic predictions of shattered glass ceilings and gender equality. This article seeks to challenge these predictions and to explore the associated assumptions linked with the feminization of …
Structure, agency and career strategies of white women and black and minority ethnic individuals in the legal profession
The legal profession in England and Wales is becoming more diverse. However, while white women and black and minority ethnic (BME) individuals now enter the profession in larger numbers, inequalities remain. This article explores the career strategies of 68 white women and BME legal professionals to understand more about their experiences in the profession. Archer’s work on structure and agency informs the analysis, as does Emirbayer and Mische’s…
Professions in a globalizing world: Towards a transnational sociology of the professions
Globalization has significant implications for the professions, with the societies and the regulators around them changing and the realities of professional work in large organizations taking on increasingly transnational dimensions. However, while there is no lack of empirical studies of the globalization of individual professions and firms, the implications of processes of globalization, reregulation and governmental rescaling for neo-Weberian …
Can't Live with 'Em; Can't Live without 'Em: Gendered Segmentation in the Legal Profession
Successful professions have historically relied on the establishment of effective closure regimes. The last 30 years or so have witnessed a gradual erosion of the legal profession's external closure regime, which seems to be associated with the gradual feminization of the legal profession. Women now represent the majority of salaried solicitors; yet, despite some recent progress,they still represent a mere quarter of partners. In reference to the…
Introduction: Professions and organizations - a conceptual framework
This collection seeks to reconnect two separate streams of work on professional organizations and professional occupations. In particular the articles collected here identify two key themes: (1) the challenges and opportunities that professional organizations pose for established and emerging professionalization projects and (2) the extent to which professional organizations create, institutionalize and manipulate new forms of professionalism and…
Towards corporate professionalization: The case of project management, management consultancy and executive search
This article explores patterns of professionalization in a number of 'new' knowledge-based occupations: management consultancy, project management and executive headhunters. Against a general assumption in the literature that such occupations are unwilling and/ or incapable to professionalize, this article suggests how a professionalization project has indeed been in play within these occupational domains. Perhaps most interestingly, these occupa…
Reinserting the professional into the study of globalizing professional service firms: The Case of Law
In discussions of the globalization of professional service firms there is an increasing recognition that understanding the 'social construction' of organizational architectures is essential. In this article we argue, using the management of transnational law firms as an example, that to understand effectively these social constructions we must reincorporate an understanding of the principles of professionalism into discussions. We highlight the …
On the Consequences of Defensive Professionalism: Recent Changes in the Legal Labour Process
This study of change in the legal profession argues that governmental policies, combined with economic recession and supply-side considerations, have led to decline in the legal profession's historical performance, and a defensive strategy which preserves the status and earning power of equity partners. Related responses include a drive towards organizational consolidation, a long-term increase in the numbers of salaried solicitors, and fewer non…
London's Legal Elite: Recruitment through Cultural Capital and the Reproduction of Social Exclusivity in City Professional Service Fields
The authors examine the ways in which recruitment and selection processes facilitate the reproduction of elites and elite cultures within City law firms. The research is based upon original research carried out during 2009, consisting of in-depth semistructured interviews, semiotic and content analyses of recruitment materials and websites, and the analysis of publicly available data demonstrating the educational backgrounds of lawyers practising…
Professions, organizations and the state: Applying the sociology of the professions to the case of management consultancy
In the recent literature on knowledge-based occupations it is frequently noted that some groups, such as management consultants, have been far less successful than others in developing a system of professional regulation and organization. This is generally attributed to the functional characteristics of their knowledge base, which is too elusive, fuzzy and perishable to sustain traditional professionalization projects. It is also suggested that t…
Learning the rules of the game: How is corporate masculinity learned and enacted by male professionals from nonprivileged backgrounds
Focusing on the lived intersection of social class and hegemonic masculinity, this article uses data elicited over a 5‐year period to analyze the experiences of 10 white male participants from nonprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who were recruited as information technology professionals by a prestigious professional service firm (PSF). Employing a Bourdieusian perspective, we reveal how participants learned to enact the configuration of corp…
Privileges and penalties in the legal profession: An Intersectional Analysis of Career Progression
Intersectionality theory is concerned with integrating social characteristics to better understanding complex human relations and inequalities in organizations and societies (McCall 2005). Recently, intersectionality research has taken a categorical and quantitative turn as scholars critically adopt but retain existing social categories to explain differences in labour market outcomes. A key contention is that social categories carry penalties or…
The financialization of large law firms: Situated discourses and practices of reorganization
This article uses the case of the financialization of large law firms to develop debates about the process of the ‘capitalisation of everything’ whereby financial logics spread both geographically between countries and sectorally from one industry to another. Drawing on work that analyses how discourses of shareholder value have led to the re-organization of firms, the article argues that large law firms have undergone ‘surgery’ as part of attemp…
Transnational corporations shaping institutional change: The case of English law firms in Germany
Questions remain about the factors that influence the ability of transnational corporations (TNCs) to shape processes of institutional change. In particular, questions about power relations need more attention. To address such questions, this article develops a neoinstitutional theory-inspired analysis of the case of English law firms and their impacts on institutional change in Germany. The article shows that the shaping of the direction of inst…
Inserting professionals and professional organizations in studies of wrongdoing: The nature, antecedents and consequences of professional misconduct
Professional misconduct has become seemingly ubiquitous in recent decades. However, to date there has been little sustained effort to theorize the phenomenon of professional misconduct, how this relates to professional organizations, and how this may contribute to broader patterns of corruption and wrongdoing. In response to this gap, in this contribution we discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of analyses that focus on the nature, …
The price of corporate professionalisation: Analysing the corporate capture of professions in the UK
Recent debates on the organisation of expert labour focus upon either the growing dominance of managerialism over traditional professions or the unwillingness/inability of new expert occupations to professionalise. Such arguments frequently disregard expert occupations that continue to deliberately pursue professionalisation to improve their status and influence in organisations and wider society, and therefore overlook the consequences of contem…
Institutional legacies in TNCs and their management through training academies: The case of transnational law firms in Italy
In this article we highlight the effects of heterogeneous institutional contexts on transnational professional service firms, a relatively poorly studied issue. Specifically, we provide empirical analysis of how the specificities of the Italian institutional context affect the activities of English legal professional service firms in Milan. This reveals the intimate connection between a variety of capitalism, place specific workplace cultures and…
Professional Misconduct in Healthcare: Setting Out a Research Agenda for Work Sociology
In the light of its surprising absence in extant literature in the domain of the sociology of work, specifically within the journal Work, Employment and Society, this article represents a 'call to arms' for research focused upon professional misconduct in healthcare. Specifically, interrogation of four dimensions of professional misconduct in healthcare is called for: a broader definition of professional misconduct; antecedents of professional mi…
Making Sense of Modern Medical Careers: The Case of the UK's National Health Service
The ongoing debate on the re-articulation of the relationship between professions, the market and the state, pays increasing attention to the issue of professional identities and how these are reframed through processes such as socialization and training. The UK government's Modernising Medical Careers programme (MMC), which introduces significant revisions to the structure, content and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate doctor training, …
The Evolution of Professionalism as a Mode of Regulation: Evidence from the United States
Opinion is divided on how far and in what ways professionalism as a mode of regulation has evolved. To date, attention has focused on the impact of neoliberal political and economic ideologies that challenge the idea that professions should be trusted to regulate themselves. This article further examines the impact of these attacks on professionalism and assesses whether they have triggered a process of decline. Drawing on a range of documentary …
Gender and Ethnic Intersectionality in Solicitors' Careers, 1970 to 2016
This article provides new insights into the intersection of gender and ethnic inequalities in the solicitors' profession. Using administrative records spanning the entire population of practising solicitors in England and Wales, we analyse structural changes over successive cohorts of solicitors and identify four distinctive employment profiles: high-street solicitors, city solicitors, corporate fast-track and in-house. We show how solicitors wit…
On the Consequences of Defensive Professionalism: Recent Changes in the Legal Labour Process
This study of change in the legal profession argues that governmental policies, combined with economic recession and supply-side considerations, have led to decline in the legal profession's historical performance, and a defensive strategy which preserves the status and earning power of equity partners. Related responses include a drive towards organizational consolidation, a long-term increase in the numbers of salaried solicitors, and fewer non…
Reinserting the professional into the study of globalizing professional service firms: The Case of Law
In discussions of the globalization of professional service firms there is an increasing recognition that understanding the 'social construction' of organizational architectures is essential. In this article we argue, using the management of transnational law firms as an example, that to understand effectively these social constructions we must reincorporate an understanding of the principles of professionalism into discussions. We highlight the …
Can't Live with 'Em; Can't Live without 'Em: Gendered Segmentation in the Legal Profession
Successful professions have historically relied on the establishment of effective closure regimes. The last 30 years or so have witnessed a gradual erosion of the legal profession's external closure regime, which seems to be associated with the gradual feminization of the legal profession. Women now represent the majority of salaried solicitors; yet, despite some recent progress,they still represent a mere quarter of partners. In reference to the…
Redirections in the Study of Expert Labour: Established Professions and New Expert Occupations
This book explores recent theoretical and empirical advances in the understanding of how professional occupations are organized. Focusing in particular on the differences between established and emerg
The paradoxical processes of feminization in the professions: The Case of Established, Aspiring and Semi-Professions
The past three decades have been characterized by dramatic labour market developments including the mass entry of women to exclusively male domains. Professional work is particularly indicative of this trend where growth in female membership has fuelled optimistic predictions of shattered glass ceilings and gender equality. This article seeks to challenge these predictions and to explore the associated assumptions linked with the feminization of …
Organizational professionalism in globalizing law firms
Are the challenges of globalization, technology and competition exercising a dramatic impact on professional practice while, in the process, compromising traditional notions of professionalism, autonomy and discretion? This article engages with these debates and uses original, qualitative empirical data to highlight the vast areas of continuity that exist even in the largest globalizing law firms. While it is undoubted that growth in the size of …
The financialization of large law firms: Situated discourses and practices of reorganization
This article uses the case of the financialization of large law firms to develop debates about the process of the ‘capitalisation of everything’ whereby financial logics spread both geographically between countries and sectorally from one industry to another. Drawing on work that analyses how discourses of shareholder value have led to the re-organization of firms, the article argues that large law firms have undergone ‘surgery’ as part of attemp…
Making Sense of Modern Medical Careers: The Case of the UK's National Health Service
The ongoing debate on the re-articulation of the relationship between professions, the market and the state, pays increasing attention to the issue of professional identities and how these are reframed through processes such as socialization and training. The UK government's Modernising Medical Careers programme (MMC), which introduces significant revisions to the structure, content and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate doctor training, …
Professions, organizations and the state: Applying the sociology of the professions to the case of management consultancy
In the recent literature on knowledge-based occupations it is frequently noted that some groups, such as management consultants, have been far less successful than others in developing a system of professional regulation and organization. This is generally attributed to the functional characteristics of their knowledge base, which is too elusive, fuzzy and perishable to sustain traditional professionalization projects. It is also suggested that t…
Towards corporate professionalization: The case of project management, management consultancy and executive search
This article explores patterns of professionalization in a number of 'new' knowledge-based occupations: management consultancy, project management and executive headhunters. Against a general assumption in the literature that such occupations are unwilling and/ or incapable to professionalize, this article suggests how a professionalization project has indeed been in play within these occupational domains. Perhaps most interestingly, these occupa…
Introduction: Professions and organizations - a conceptual framework
This collection seeks to reconnect two separate streams of work on professional organizations and professional occupations. In particular the articles collected here identify two key themes: (1) the challenges and opportunities that professional organizations pose for established and emerging professionalization projects and (2) the extent to which professional organizations create, institutionalize and manipulate new forms of professionalism and…
Institutional legacies in TNCs and their management through training academies: The case of transnational law firms in Italy
In this article we highlight the effects of heterogeneous institutional contexts on transnational professional service firms, a relatively poorly studied issue. Specifically, we provide empirical analysis of how the specificities of the Italian institutional context affect the activities of English legal professional service firms in Milan. This reveals the intimate connection between a variety of capitalism, place specific workplace cultures and…
London's Legal Elite: Recruitment through Cultural Capital and the Reproduction of Social Exclusivity in City Professional Service Fields
The authors examine the ways in which recruitment and selection processes facilitate the reproduction of elites and elite cultures within City law firms. The research is based upon original research carried out during 2009, consisting of in-depth semistructured interviews, semiotic and content analyses of recruitment materials and websites, and the analysis of publicly available data demonstrating the educational backgrounds of lawyers practising…
Professions in a globalizing world: Towards a transnational sociology of the professions
Globalization has significant implications for the professions, with the societies and the regulators around them changing and the realities of professional work in large organizations taking on increasingly transnational dimensions. However, while there is no lack of empirical studies of the globalization of individual professions and firms, the implications of processes of globalization, reregulation and governmental rescaling for neo-Weberian …
The price of corporate professionalisation: Analysing the corporate capture of professions in the UK
Recent debates on the organisation of expert labour focus upon either the growing dominance of managerialism over traditional professions or the unwillingness/inability of new expert occupations to professionalise. Such arguments frequently disregard expert occupations that continue to deliberately pursue professionalisation to improve their status and influence in organisations and wider society, and therefore overlook the consequences of contem…
Structure, agency and career strategies of white women and black and minority ethnic individuals in the legal profession
The legal profession in England and Wales is becoming more diverse. However, while white women and black and minority ethnic (BME) individuals now enter the profession in larger numbers, inequalities remain. This article explores the career strategies of 68 white women and BME legal professionals to understand more about their experiences in the profession. Archer’s work on structure and agency informs the analysis, as does Emirbayer and Mische’s…
Transnational corporations shaping institutional change: The case of English law firms in Germany
Questions remain about the factors that influence the ability of transnational corporations (TNCs) to shape processes of institutional change. In particular, questions about power relations need more attention. To address such questions, this article develops a neoinstitutional theory-inspired analysis of the case of English law firms and their impacts on institutional change in Germany. The article shows that the shaping of the direction of inst…
The Oxford Handbook of Professional Service Firms
Over the past three decades the Professional Service Firm (PSF) sector has emerged as one of the most rapidly growing, profitable, and significant in the global economy. In 2013 the accountancy, management consulting, legal, and architectural sectors alone generated revenues of US$1.6 trillion and employed 14 million people. PSFs play an important role in developing human capital, creating innovative business services, reshaping government instit…
Governance in Professional Service Firms
This chapter synthesizes and extends the literature on governance in Professional Service Firms (PSFs). It discusses four foundational theoretical perspectives on governance in PSFs: the agency, the partnership/partnership ethos, the stakeholder, and the trustee perspective. The authors argue these perspectives speak to structural or cultural views of governance, but they leave unanswered critical issues. Given the state of the literature, they a…
Researching Professional Service Firms
The chapter begins by examining the significance of Professional Service Firms (PSFs) in terms of their scale and significance from an economic and societal perspective, and the insights they offer for academic theory. The authors examine how PSFs have remained “in the shadows,” in terms of their visibility within the economy and within scholarly research, and how and why that situation is changing. The chapter discusses “what exactly is a Profes…
Sources of Homogeneity and Heterogeneity across Professional Services
Research on Professional Service Firms (PSFs) has tended to treat them as homogeneous and to assume there are similarities in how they are organized and managed. This assumption has been challenged recently as scholars have drawn attention to organizational differences stemming from sources of heterogeneity. The authors argue that rigorous theorizing about the organization and management of PSFs requires an understanding of sources of both homoge…
Inserting professionals and professional organizations in studies of wrongdoing: The nature, antecedents and consequences of professional misconduct
Professional misconduct has become seemingly ubiquitous in recent decades. However, to date there has been little sustained effort to theorize the phenomenon of professional misconduct, how this relates to professional organizations, and how this may contribute to broader patterns of corruption and wrongdoing. In response to this gap, in this contribution we discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of analyses that focus on the nature, …
Privileges and penalties in the legal profession: An Intersectional Analysis of Career Progression
Intersectionality theory is concerned with integrating social characteristics to better understanding complex human relations and inequalities in organizations and societies (McCall 2005). Recently, intersectionality research has taken a categorical and quantitative turn as scholars critically adopt but retain existing social categories to explain differences in labour market outcomes. A key contention is that social categories carry penalties or…
Professional Misconduct in Healthcare: Setting Out a Research Agenda for Work Sociology
In the light of its surprising absence in extant literature in the domain of the sociology of work, specifically within the journal Work, Employment and Society, this article represents a 'call to arms' for research focused upon professional misconduct in healthcare. Specifically, interrogation of four dimensions of professional misconduct in healthcare is called for: a broader definition of professional misconduct; antecedents of professional mi…
Learning the rules of the game: How is corporate masculinity learned and enacted by male professionals from nonprivileged backgrounds
Focusing on the lived intersection of social class and hegemonic masculinity, this article uses data elicited over a 5‐year period to analyze the experiences of 10 white male participants from nonprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who were recruited as information technology professionals by a prestigious professional service firm (PSF). Employing a Bourdieusian perspective, we reveal how participants learned to enact the configuration of corp…
Political science (25 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Public relations (17 works) · Economics (13 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (11 works) · Social science (11 works) · Law (10 works)