This paper describes the role of rhetoric in legitimating profound institutional change. In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm purchased a law firm, triggering a jurisdictional struggle within accounting and law over a new organizational form, multidisciplinary partnerships. We analyze the...

To consider the argument presented in Stubbart and Knight's paper (see, Stubbart C. I. and Knight M. B. (2006), "The Case of the Disappearing Firms: Empirical Evidence and Implications", Journal of Organizational Behaviour, Vol. 27, pp. 79-100) that, since the majority of organizations have...

Our conception of the ideal organization has changed from the machine-like efficiency of Weberian bureaucracy to a post-industrial ideal (Bell, 1973) in which organizations spurn the bureaucratic form to become more adaptive, receptive and generative. Such ideal organizations, we are told, will...

The uniqueness of professional service firms (PSFs) has been well established. Accounting, law, engineering, and management consulting firms are known to differ significantly from both traditional manufacturing and service organizations in their organizational and managerial arrangements. Their...

This study examines change initiated from the center of mature organizational fields. As such, it addresses the paradox of embedded agency — that is, the paradox of how actors enact changes to the context by which they, as actors, are shaped. The change examined is the introduction of a new...