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Professional services are increasingly seen as an important foundation for future economic growth and prosperity. Yet research on innovative and entrepreneurial processes in professional services has been surprisingly scarce. This Handbook provides a collection of original contributions from leading scholars outlining the current stock of knowledge in the area as well as providing directions for further research. The expert contributors discuss entrepreneurship and innovation from a number of different perspectives, including the entrepreneurial professional team, the entrepreneurial firm and the institutional environment. The first part of the book looks at the challenges of entrepreneurship specific to the professional service firm while the second explores the creation and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities in the professional service team. Part three turns to the organization and part four to the management and growth of the entrepreneurial professional service firm. The final section discusses the interplay between professions, firms and the institutional environment.Researchers, scholars and PhD students in the areas of entrepreneurship and professional service firms along with advanced students of management will find this volume of great value.

As experts and fashion setters of the business community, management consultants have a strong position in modern society. We argue that the basis of this position is the size of the rhetorical space of legitimate arguments open to consultants. In legitimating their activities, consultants produce a great array of arguments based on two contradictory myths or master-ideas recurrent in the business discourse—the normative/pragmatic myth and the rationalistic myth. These two myths are in turn viewed as a variation of the deeply institutionalized western dichotomy of nature vs. culture. Although these myths officially are incommensurable, management consultants freely mix arguments based on both myths when translating organizational change. Herein lies the potential invincibility of the consultants' rhetoric—the possibility of transforming that which earlier was treated as `objective' and given into something negotiable and changeable, and vice versa, thereby increasing the possibility of satisfying ever-changing and contradicting needs.

AbstractPublic organizations increasingly rely on management consultants to access expertise, impose reforms, and drive organizational change, and spend large sums each year on their services. Despite this, we know little about the antecedents of public organizations' use of management consulting services. Drawing on upper echelon theory, a longitudinal hypothesis‐testing study of the hiring of management consultants in 72 Swedish public organizations, and interviews with Swedish chief executives (CEs), we find an inverted U‐shaped relationship between CE tenure and public organizations' use of management consulting services. We also find that this relationship is moderated by CEs' previous experience and managerial discretion. These findings contribute to theorizing on the use of management consulting services and the influence of CEs in public organizations.

AbstractStudies of emerging professions are more and more at the crossroad of different fields of research, and field boundaries thus hamper the development of a full-fledged conversation. In an attempt to bridge these boundaries, this article offers a 'generative dialogue' about the redefinition of the professionalization project through the case of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners. We bring together prominent scholars from two distinct academic communities—CSR and the professions—to shed light on some of the unsolved questions and dilemmas around contemporary professionalization through an example of an emerging profession. Key learnings from this dialogue point us toward the rethinking of processes of professionalization, in particular the role of expertise, the unifying force of common normative goals, and collaborative practises between networks of stakeholders. As such, we expand the research agenda for scholars of the professions and of CSR.