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Introduction / Royston Greenwood, Roy Suddaby, Megan McDougald -- Leading change in the new professional service firm : characterizing strategic leadership in a global context / Evelyn Fenton, Andrew Pettigrew -- Partnership versus corporation : implications of alternative forms of governance in professional service firms / Laura Empson, Chris Chapman -- Markets, institutions, and the crisis of professional practice / Kevin T. Leicht, Elizabeth C.W. Lyman -- Variation in organizational form among professional service organizations / Namrata Malhotra, Timothy Morris, C.R. (Bob) Hinings -- Professional service firms as collectivities : a cultural and processual view / Mats Alvesson, Dan K(c)·arreman -- Professionals, networking and the networked professional / Fiona Anderson-Gough, Christopher Grey, Keith Robson -- Professional ethics in formal organizations / Hugh P. Gunz, Sally P. Gunz -- Can women in law have it all? : a study of motherhood, career satisfaction and life balance / Jean E. Wallace -- Computer-mediated knowledge systems in consultancy firms : do they work? / Markus Reihlen, Torsten Ringberg -- Marketing marketing : the professional project as a micro-discursive accomplishment / Peter Svensson -- Social structure, employee mobility, and the circulation of client ties / Joseph P. Broschak, Keri M. Niehans -- The internationalisation of professional service firms : global convergence, national path-dependency or cross-border hybridisation? / Glenn Morgan, Sigrid Quack -- The strategic positioning of professional service firm start-ups : balance beguiles but purism pays / Jennifer E. Jennings, P. Devereaux Jennings, Royston Greenwood -- Are consultants moving towards professionalization? / Claudia Gro, Alfred Kieser

Research on the lived experience of organisational temporalities has thus far overlooked the potential significance of what happens in the interstices that arise between temporal structures. To address this gap, we examined how individuals in three occupations experienced one such interstitial temporal form: waiting. Our analysis of waiting time uncovers two distinct and overarching temporal macro-structures that govern how workers use and experience time in organisations: intensified-organisational – the speeded-up, intensified temporality of modern forms of work organisation – and adaptive-organic, that represents natural and human temporalities. Waiting emerges as a paradoxical temporal experience which individuals simultaneously welcome yet seek to eliminate; one that stands outside temporal structures yet serves to reinforce them. From a human perspective, waiting furnishes moments during which time can be 'undone', affording us micro-moments to reclaim and re-centre time in organisations as human time.

This study unpacks the construct of theorization – the process by which organizational ideas become delocalized and abstracted into theoretical models to support their diffusion across time and space. We adopt an institutional work lens to analyse the key components of theorization in contexts where institutional work is in transition from changing institutions to maintaining them. We build on a longitudinal inductive study of theorization by the Fair Labor Association – a private regulatory initiative that created and then enforced a code of conduct for working conditions in apparel factories. Our study reveals that when institutional work shifts from changing to maintaining an institutional arrangement of corporate social responsibility, there is a key change in how the Fair Labor Association theorizes roles and practices related to this arrangement. We observe that theorization on key practices largely remains intact, whereas the roles of different actors are theorized in a dramatically different manner. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the work involved in the aftermath of radical change by demonstrating the relative plasticity of roles over the rigidity of practices.

This article explicates the causal connections between changes in professional jurisdictions and changes in organizational fields. The authors argue that professional projects carry within them projects of institutionalization. They focus attention on the critical but often invisible role that professionals play in institutional work, or the creation, maintenance and transformation of institutions. The key contribution of this article is to explicate the professional project as an endogenous mechanism of institutional change. Based on a review of prior research on institutional change in which professionals play a central role, the authors observe four essential dynamics through which professionals reconfigure institutions and organizational fields. First, professionals use their expertise and legitimacy to challenge the incumbent order and to define a new, open and uncontested space. Second, professionals use their inherent social capital and skill to populate the field with new actors and new identities. Third, professionals introduce nascent new rules and standards that recreate the boundaries of the field. Fourth, professionals manage the use and reproduction of social capital within a field thereby conferring a new status hierarchy or social order within the field.

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 discursive struggle that ensued between proponents and opponents of the new organizational form. We observe that such rhetorical strategies contain two elements. First are institutional vocabularies, or the use of identifying words and referential texts to expose contradictory institutional logics embedded in historical understandings of professionalism, one based on a trustee model and the other based on a model of expertise. A second element of rhetorical strategies is theorizations of change by which actors contest a proposed innovation against broad templates or scenarios of change. We identify five such theorizations of change (teleological, historical, cosmological, ontological, and value-based) and describe their characteristics.

This paper provides a field level analysis of the process by which management knowledge is produced. Two linked dynamics are identified as important components of this process. The first is the commodification of management knowledge, or the tendency to reduce knowledge to a routinized and codified product. We argue that the commodification of management knowledge is a cyclical process that has been institutionalized by the interests of distinct categories of social actors. The second dynamic, termed colonization, refers to the migration of Big Five professional service firms into adjacent professional jurisdictions. Colonization is the result of intensification of commodification and has produced intense conflict and change in the organizational field of management knowledge production.