The knowledge economy has been characterised by the proliferation of new forms of expert labour such as IT (Marks and Scholarios, 2007), advertising (Alvesson, 2004), and as discussed in this paper, project management (Hodgson and Muzio, 2010), management consultancy (Fincham, 2006; Kirkpatrick et...

Despite its rapid growth in recent years, Project Management has received very little critical attention, particularly when compared to the more 'hyped' managerial fashions such as TQM (cf. Wilkinson and Willmott, 1995) and BPR (cf. Grey and Mitev, 1995; Grint, 1994). My intention in this paper is...

In this paper, we explore the standardization of contemporary management knowledge, focusing in particular upon the role of standards in creating and reifying organizational objects, with powerful consequences and with often unrecognized ethical implications. It is our argument that modernist...

Through a historical case study of the internationalization of large English law firms in Italy, this paper uses Scott’s three pillars approach (2005) to look at how local institutions constrain and mediate the strategies and practices of professional services firms (PSFs). In doing so, it...

We investigate institutional change as the co-occurrence of deinstitutionalization and institutionalization, while accounting for its determinants at multiple levels of analysis to further our understanding of how individual characteristics aggregated at the organizational level and...

In this essay we describe the growing importance of professions and the organizations in which they work, and we trace some trends in relevant scholarly research on this topic. We start by noting a dearth of recent publications in leading management and organization journals that address the...

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,...

In discussions of the globalization of professional service firms there is an increasing recognition that understanding the quot;social constructionquot; of organizational architectures is essential. In this paper we argue, using the management of transnational law firms as an example, that to...

This paper examines 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 semi-structured interviews, semiotic and content...