Threats to professional identities can lead to resistance to organisational change

When professional service firms introduce new approaches to work, professional identities can be uprooted, and resistance may ensue, write Claudine Mangen and Marion Brivot

The challenge of sustaining organizational hybridity: The role of power and agency

Hybrid organizations harbor different and often conflicting institutional logics, thus facing the challenge of sustaining their hybridity. Crucial to overcoming this challenge is the identification process of organizational actors. We propose a theorization of how power relations affect this process. More specifically, we argue that an actor’s power influences her own professional identity: an increase [decrease] in her power, via the heightened [diminished] control that this power provides her over organizational discourse, boosts [threatens] her identity. Our theorization has implications for the longevity of a newly adopted logic within an organization. If the new logic modifies incumbent power relations, the identities of (formerly and newly) powerful individuals are influenced, which may lead these individuals to promote or resist the new logic, thereby affecting the odds that the logic will survive within the organization. We illustrate our theorization with a case study in a professional service firm. Our study contributes to nascent research on hybrid organizations by emphasizing the role of power and agency in the longevity of hybridity

Anxiété et attitude des professionnels face aux risques : le cas des conflits normes-valeurs en comptabilité

Qu'est-ce qui motive l'action située d'un agent A, comptable professionnel agréé, lorsqu'il fait face à un « conflit pratique », au sens de Thomas Nagel (Nagel, 1979), impliquant une tension entre une norme professionnelle N et une valeur personnelle V ? Mon raisonnement s'articule autour d'une mise en situation inspirée d'un cas réel dont j'ai développé trois versions distinctes, susceptibles de faire vivre à A des types et des niveaux d'anxiété différents, sans influencer ses désirs, ses jugements, ses croyances, ni les états de sa volonté. En prenant appui sur les travaux de Charlie Kurth à propos de l'anxiété (Kurth, 2018), je suggère que l'anxiété environnementale et l'anxiété de punition favorisent une lecture du conflit pratique N-V en termes de risques essentiellement centrés sur soi, et pondérés plus ou moins fortement en fonction de l'attitude de A face aux risques. L'anxiété pratique, quant à elle, favorise non seulement une lecture du conflit N-V en termes de risques mais aussi en termes d'opportunités pour A et pour autrui, ce qui rend possible - sans toutefois y mener systématiquement - une motivation morale de l'action. J'ajoute que l'anxiété environnementale et l'anxiété de punition peuvent contribuer à court-circuiter la motivation morale d'un agent confronté à un conflit N-V, de même que l'absence de toute forme d'anxiété ressentie. L'idée directrice de ce mémoire est la suivante : ce n'est pas tant la norme N ni la valeur V en tant que telles qui sont motivantes pour l'action située d'un professionnel confronté à un conflit pratique où N et V s'opposent que le type d'anxiété qu'il ressent (ou non) dans la situation

Beyond panopticism: On the ramifications of surveillance in a contemporary professional setting

This paper provides fieldwork evidence, which solidifies an emerging view in literature,regarding the limitations of the panoptical metaphor in informing meaningfully and productively the analysis of contemporary surveillance and control. Our thesis is that the panopticon metaphor, which conceives of the organization as a bounded enclosure made up of divisible, observable and calculable spaces, is becoming less and less relevant in the age of contemporary surveillance technologies. Through a longitudinal socio-ethnographic study of the ramifications of surveillance ensuing from the implementation of a computerized knowledge management system (KMS) in a Parisian tax/law firm, our analysis points to the proliferation of lateral networks of surveillance having developed in the aftermath of implementation. In this complex and unstable constellation of rhizomatical controls, peers are involved in scrutinizing the validity of one another’s work, irrespective of the office’s hierarchies and official lines of specialization. As a result, games of visibility (exhibitionism), observation (voyeurism) and secrecy (hiding one’s work from the KMS) abound in the office. One of our main conclusions is to emphasize the pertinence of apprehending control and surveillance from angles that take into account the ambiguities, complexities and unpredictability of human institutions, especially in digitalized environments

The moral relationality of professionalism discourses: the case of corporate social responsibility practitioners in South Korea

Building a coherent discourse on professionalism is a challenge for corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners, as there is not yet an established knowledge basis for CSR, and CSR is a contested notion that covers a wide variety of issues and moral foundations. Relying on insights from the literature on micro-CSR, new professionalism, and Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006 [1991]) economies of worth framework, we examine the discourses of fifty-six CSR practitioners in South Korea on their claimed professionalism. Our analysis delineates four distinct discourses of CSR professionalism—strategic corporate giving, social innovation, risk management and sustainability transition—that are derived from a plurality of more or less compatible moral foundations whose partial overlaps and tensions we document in a systematic manner. Our results portray these practitioners as compromise makers who selectively combine morally distant justifications to build their own specific professionalism discourse, with the aim to advance CSR within and across organizations. By uncovering the moral relationality connecting these discourses, our findings show that moral pluralism is a double-edged sword that can bolster the justification of CSR professionalism but also threaten collective professionalism at the field level. Overall, our study suggests paying more attention to the moral relationality and tensions that underlie professional fields

Controls of knowledge production, sharing and use in bureaucratized Professional Service Firms

One of the main obstacles to the current bureaucratization trend in large professional service firms (PSFs) is the organic nature of professional knowledge production, sharing and use. Centralized knowledge management (KM) systems aimed at codifying ‘best practice’ solutions to recurrent client questions for large-scale reuse are a common strategy increasingly employed to overcome this obstacle. Using a socio-ethnographic case study of a business law firm in Paris, this research examines whether the use of centralized KM systems in bureaucratized PSFs contributes to a shift in power from professionals to managers. More specifically, are administrative controls over knowledge resources increasing, or do professionals retain power (i.e. some level of social and self-control) over knowledge production, sharing and use? The results of this study indicate that, far from losing ground, professionals’ social and self-controls have been reinvented and reformed in a bureaucratized context

The use of made-up users

While the existence of fictitious users of financial statements has been confirmed in previous research, our study investigates how this powerful yet ‘made-up’ construct is deployed within the discourses of the main stakeholders as they shape regulatory debates in the international accounting standard-setting arena, including ‘real’ users themselves. Our study draws on Bourdieu’s theorization of dominant discourse as a form of power, and extends it with the phraseological theory of meaning, specifically the linguistic concept of collocation, which focuses on the habitual choices of words in discourse. Using this framework, we conduct a comparative analysis of the recurrent language choices around the term ‘user’ in comment letters submitted on the selected IASB’s regulatory proposals. We provide empirical evidence for the existence of commonalties and subtle differences in the ways in which made-up users are discursively operationalized by the four key accounting constituent groups, the accounting profession, prepares, regulators and ‘real’ users of financial statements. At the theoretical and methodological level, our study showcases the explanatory power of the concept of collocation to identify and interrogate implicit patterns of dominant discourse as set forth by Bourdieu. We also show that the close investigation of how the dominant discourse of the made-up users works generates a series of new why questions regarding the ‘real’ users’ role in accounting standard setting

Trust in Freedom or in Equality? A Comment on Bernard E. Harcourt's The Illusion of Free Markets

“At the end of the day, the notion of a 'free market’ is a fiction. There is simply no such thing as a non-regulated market—a market that operates without legal, social and professional regulation. Those forms of regulation, including the criminal sanction, are precisely what distributes wealth and resources, what makes it possible for the Chicago Board of Trade to exclude non-members from the trading floor, for the Big Four accounting firms to effectively control accounting standards and for large commercial banks to essentially coordinate lending practices” (p. 242).