347 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
My liminal life: Perpetual journeys across the research-practice divide
I develop the theme of liminality to interpret my ongoing journeys across the researchpractice divide. My intention is to encourage you to make that journey and to help you avoid the mistakes I have made. I chronicle the creation and evolution of my research centre, the Centre for Professional Service Firms at Cass Business School. I analyse the serious difficulties associated with engaging with practitioners in the current academic environment and explain how the Centre has achieved considerable success in spite of these difficulties. I go on to describe the insights and experiences I have gained from my most powerful experience of impact to date. I conclude by outlining the personal rules I now attempt to live by when engaging with practitioners, to help other academics minimise the difficulties and maximise the opportunities that will arise through these interactions
Recommended from our members
Ambiguous authority and hidden hierarchy: Collective leadership in a professional service firm
This study represents a detailed analysis of collective leadership, examining the distinctive power dynamics revealed among professional peers as they attempt to act decisively in response to an acute organizational crisis. It identifies how professional peers deliberately construct and amplify ambiguity in both the composition and authority of their collective leadership group, and examines how that ambiguity can serve a functional purpose for group members. Intuitive mutual adjustment is the prevailing pattern of interaction, but this changes to a more managed form of mutual adjustment as a hidden hierarchy is revealed in response to the crisis. The study identifies the micro interactions which constitute both intuitive and managed mutual adjustment, and shows how members of a collective leadership group can maintain cohesion and act decisively, in spite of lacking the formal authority to do so. The findings challenge some foundational assumptions of collective leadership theory and extend our understanding of leadership power dynamics more generally by: demonstrating how leaders can exercise considerable informal power under the cloak of ambiguity, highlighting the hidden hierarchy that can exist within a collective, and emphasising the significance of the individual âheroicâ leader within collective leadership
Recommended from our members
Illusio and overwork: playing the game in the accounting field
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand: how and why do experienced professionals, who perceive themselves as autonomous, comply with organizational pressures to overwork? Unlike previous studies of professionals and overwork, the authors focus on experienced professionals who have achieved relatively high status within their firms and the considerable economic rewards that go with it. Drawing on the little used Bourdieusian concept of illusio, which describes the phenomenon whereby individuals are âtaken in and by the gameâ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), the authors help to explain the âautonomy paradoxâ in professional service firms.
Design/methodology/approach
This research is based on 36 semi-structured interviews primarily with experienced male and female accounting professionals in France.
Findings
The authors find that, in spite of their levels of experience, success, and seniority, these professionals describe themselves as feeling helpless and trapped, and experience bodily subjugation. The authors explain this in terms of individuals enhancing their social status, adopting the breadwinner role, and obtaining and retaining recognition. The authors suggest that this combination of factors cause professionals to be attracted to and captivated by the rewards that success within the accounting profession can confer.
Originality/value
As well as providing fresh insights into the autonomy paradox the authors seek to make four contributions to Bourdieusian scholarship in the professional field. First, the authors highlight the strong bodily component of overwork. Second, the authors raise questions about previous work on cynical distancing in this context. Third, the authors emphasize the significance of the pursuit of symbolic as well as economic capital. Finally, the authors argue that, while actorsâ habitus may be in a state of âpermanent mutationâ, that mutability is in itself a sign that individuals are subject to illusio
Recommended from our members
Leadership and Professionals: Multiple Manifestations of Influence in Professional Service Firms
This chapter examines the foci, resources and mechanisms of leadership in professional service firms, a context where traditional conceptions of leadership and followership are problematic given the importance of individual autonomy to knowledge-based work. We argue that leadership in professional service firms is, above all, a process of interaction among professionals seeking to exercise influence at the individual,organizational, and strategic level. It is manifested explicitly through professional expertise, discretely through political interaction, and implicitly through personal embodiment. We suggest that these resources are rarely combined in single individuals, which gives rise to the prevalence of collective forms of leadership, supported by embedded mechanisms of social control that channel professional activity
Recommended from our members
Collective leadership dynamics among professional peers: Co-constructing an unstable equilibrium
Professional service firms (PSFs) are characterised by contingent and contested power relations among an extended group of professional peers. Studies of such firms can therefore yield important insights for the literatures on collective leadership and leaderâfollower relations. Yet to date PSF scholars have neglected the topic of leadership,and leadership scholars have neglected the context of PSFs.Based on 102 interviewsacross the consulting, accounting, and legal sectors, we identify three relational processesthrough which professional peers co-construct collective leadership:legitimising, negotiating, and manoeuvring. We demonstrate how the relational processes taken together constitute an unstable equilibrium, both in the moment and over time, emphasising how leadership in PSFs is inherently contested and fragile. Our model contributes to theories of collective leadership and leaderâfollower relations by foregrounding the power and politics thatunderlie collective leadership. We highlight the significance of the individual leader within the collective. We challengeassumptionsconcerning the binary nature of leadership and followership,by showing how colleagues may grant leadership identities to their peers without necessarily granting them leadership authority, and without claiming follower identities for themselves
Recommended from our members
Researching the postâpandemic professional service firm: Challenging our assumptions
Recommended from our members
Your partnership - Surviving and thriving in a changing world: the special nature of partnership
Recommended from our members
The Emperorâs New Clothes: How Our Fear of Seeming Stupid Became a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Recommended from our members
Beyond dichotomies: A multi-stage model of governance in professional service firms
This study asks: how does governance change over time as a professional service firm (PSF) increases in size and complexity? Governance has long been a central theme in the literature on PSFs. Previous studies have presented dichotomized models of organizational archetypes and legal forms: professional partnership versus managed professional business, adhocracy versus professional bureaucracy, partnership versus corporation, private versus public corporation. The current study argues that this approach ignores the variety of governance forms within the PSF sectorâ in reality a PSF will adopt multiple forms of governance over time as it increases in scale and complexity. Adapting Greinerâs classic model of the stages of organizational growth, this study presents a multi-stage model of governance in PSFs. The study highlights the crises and reversals that may occur during this process of evolution by presenting two cases: a small, young corporation and a long-established, large global partnership. The chapter concludes by analyzing the key conceptual differences between Greinerâs generic model and this studyâs PSF-specific model and argues that these differences are associated with the distinctive nature of power dependencies within a PSF
- âŠ