This paper examines the proposition that the traditional archetype of the professional partnership is said to have changed into a more ‘business-like’ entity, the managed professional business. It broadens the restricted case sample base on which much of the evidence has been adduced, by...

The adoption of the incorporated form of ownership in preference to partnership is linked to the shift to a more modem organizational archetype in professional firms. Yet existing empirical research offers insufficient insight into the organizational processes of this transformation in different...

A shift away from "up-or-out," the conventional promotion system in professional service firms, has been explained as part of a wider set of changes in internal labor market arrangements and management methods. This is investigated empirically in a sample of large partnerships in one profession....

Policy fit is a central plank of much of the prescriptive and strategic HR literature because of the assumed performance benefits deriving from it (Guest, 1997: 264-266). Fit refers to the alignment of organisational policies with the requirements of the environment and alignment of second order...

Strategic management controls in professional partnership firms are different from controls in companies. A recently developed model of strategic management controls in the partnership firm was applied in a modified form to a sample of 60 firms in three traditional professions—law, accounting...

Paradox — the simultaneous existence of two inconsistent states — has become orthodox. The orthodox is now the paradox. The orthodox world of ordering, controlling and organizing is increasingly opposed to a normalizing world of disordering, disrupting and disorganizing. And organization...