The double-edged sword of jurisdictional entrenchment: Explaining HR professionals’ failed strategic repositioning

To protect themselves against deskilling and obsolescence, professionals must periodically revise their claims to authority and expertise. Although we understand these dynamics in the broader system of professions, we have a less-complete understanding of how this process unfolds in specific organizational contexts. Yet given the ubiquity of embedded professionals, this context is where jurisdictional shifts increasingly take place. Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of HR professionals in two engineering firms, we introduce the concept of jurisdictional entrenchment to explain the challenges embedded professionals face when they attempt to redefine their jurisdiction. Jurisdictional entrenchment describes a condition in which embedded professionals have accumulated tasks, tactics, and expertise that enable them to make jurisdictional claims in an organization. We show how such entrenchment is a double-edged sword: instrumental to the ability of professionals to withstand challenges to their authority, but detrimental when expertise and skills devalued by the professionals remain in high demand by clients, thus preventing the professionals’ shift to their aspirational jurisdiction. Overall, our study contributes to a better understanding of how embedded professionals renegotiate jurisdictional claims within the constraints of organizational employment

Power, norms and institutional change in the European Union: the protection of the free movement of goods

How do institutions of the European Union change? Using an institutionalist approach, this article highlights the interplay between power, cognitive limits, and the normative order that underpins institutional settings and assesses their impact upon the process of institutional change. Empirical evidence from recent attempts to reinforce the protection of the free movement of goods in the EU suggests that, under conditions of uncertainty, actors with ambiguous preferences assess attempts at institutional change on the basis of the historically defined normative order which holds a given institutional structure together. Hence, path dependent and incremental change occurs even when more ambitious and functionally superior proposals are on offer

Human resource management as a profession in South Africa

Orientation: Various countries recognise human resource (HR) management as a bona fide profession. Research purpose: The objective of this study was to establish whether one could regard HR management, as practised in South Africa, as a profession. Motivation for the study: Many countries are reviewing the professionalisation of HR management. Therefore, it is necessary to establish the professional standing of HR management in South Africa. Research design, approach and method: The researchers used a purposive sampling strategy involving 95 participants. The researchers achieved triangulation by analysing original documents of the regulating bodies of the medical, legal, engineering and accounting professions internationally and locally as well as the regulating bodies of HR management in the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (USA) and Canada. Seventy- eight HR professionals registered with the South African Board for People Practices (SABPP) completed a questionnaire. The researchers analysed the data using content analysis and Lawshe’s Content Validity Ratio (CVR). Main findings: The results confirm that HR management in South Africa adheres to the four main pillars of professionalism and is a bona fide profession. Practical/managerial implications: The article highlights the need to regulate and formalise HR management in South Africa. Contribution/value-add: This study identifies a number of aspects that determine professionalism and isolates the most important elements that one needs to consider when regulating the HR profession

Forming conjectures within a spreadsheet environment

This paper is concerned with the use of spreadsheets within mathematical investigational tasks. Considering the learning of both children and pre-service teaching students, it examines how mathematical phenomena can be seen as a function of the pedagogical media through which they are encountered. In particular, it shows how pedagogical apparatus influence patterns of social interaction, and how this interaction shapes the mathematical ideas that are engaged with. Notions of conjecture, along with the particular faculty of the spreadsheet setting, are considered with regard to the facilitation of mathematical thinking. Employing an interpretive perspective, a key focus is on how alternative pedagogical media and associated discursive networks influence the way that students form and test informal conjectures