Managing Knowledge-Intensive
and Creative Industries
Master’s course (GS Management) Fall 2011
Alexander Styhre
Dept of Business Administration
School of Business, Economics, and Law
University of Gothenburg
Course introduction and outline
• The purpose of the course is to train the students to get an
understanding of the managerial demands in organizations
based on intellectual capital and creativity.
• The course consists of a series of lectures, guest lectures, a
literature seminar, and the presentation of the final exam
paper.
• The lectures are theoretical (by AS) or aimed at introducing
various managerial practices in different industries and
sectors (guest lectures).
• Course literature: journal papers addressing a variety of
aspects covered in the course.
• All slides will be posted on the course homepage.
Schedule
Lecture topic
Date
Time
Room
Lecturer
Reading
1.
Knowledge society, knowledge
capitalism, etc: Setting the
scene
Thursday, Sept 1
14.00-16.00
C23
Alexander Styhre, Dept. of
Business Administration
Nordenflycht (2010),
Townley, Beech &
McKinlay (2009)
1.
Professions, professionalism,
and the creative class
Tuesday, Sept. 6
11.00-13.00
C24
Alexander Styhre, Dept. of
Business Administration
1.
Papers examination assignment: Tuesday, Sept 6
Introduction
14.00-15.00
C24
Alexander Styhre, Dept. of
Business Administration
Kärreman, Dan &
Alvesson, Mats, (2004),
Leicht & Fennel (1997)
Paper template
1.
Managing science-based work
14.00-16.00
C23
Munos (2009)
Sundgren & Styhre, (2003)
1.
Project Management in the
Tuesday, Sept. 13
Event Industry: collective topdown, planned ad-hoc and other
challenges
Managing architect work
Thursday, Sept. 15
14.00-16.00
C24
Mats Sundgren, Senior
Scientists, AstraZeneca
R&D
Göran Lindahl. Chalmers
University of Technology
14.00-16.00
C24
Cohen et al., (2005);
Lymer (2009)
1.
Managing major culture
organizations
Tuesday Sept. 20.
14.00-16.00.
C24
1.
The videogame development
community
Thursday Sept. 22.
14.00-16.00.
C24
Gustav Lymer, School of
Education, University of
Gothenburg.
Helena Wessman, CEO,
Gothenburg Symphonic
Orchestra
Peter Zachariasson, Dept. of
Business Administration
1.
Literature seminar
Tuesday Sept. 27.
14.00-16.00.
C24
Alexander Styhre, Dept. of
Business Administration
1.
Recruiting and leading
management consultants
Friday
Sept. 30.
11.00-13.00.
C24
Ola Bergström, Dept. of
Business Administration
1.
Bridging the culture sector and
industry: Challenges and
opportunities
Final seminar: Paper
presentation (roundtable
presentation)
Monday Oct. 3
14.00-16.00.
C24
Evelina Wahlquist, Dept of
Economic. geography
Tuesday Oct. 4.
14.00-16.00
C24
Alexander Styhre, FEK
1.
1.
Thursday, Sept. 8
Lindahl and Nina Modig
Løvendahl (1995)
Glynn (2000)
Maitlis (2005)
Zackariasson, Styhre and
Wilson (2006); Tschang
(2007)
Owen-Smith (2001)
Bechky (2006)
Bergström & Knights
(2006)
Bergström, Hasselblad &
Kärreman (2009
Flew and Cunningham,
(2010)
Pratt (2009)
Compulsory attendance
Examination
• The examination is based on two papers being submitted. The first paper
for the literature seminarneeds to be written individually. The second can
be written individuallly or in groups of two students. The first paper is
compulsory but gives no grade and is based on the literature seminar
readings (instructions in course PM). The second paper is the examination.
The third, one-hour lecture will introduce the exam assignment.
• Grading of the final paper will be based on the totality of five criterias: (1)
problem discussion, (2) theoretical framework, (3) presentation of the
case/argument, (4) theoretical and practical contributions, (5) overall
readbility and stylistic skills. All five parameters will be graded from 1-10
points. Low pass: 25; High pass: 37,5 points.
• The first paper is handed to AS in at the literature seminar Sept. 27.
• Final paper handed in on the final seminar to AS, Oct. 4.
• More details about the paper writing exam on the third lecture (Sept. 6,
14.00-15.00).
Why a course on knowledge-intensive
and creative (KI&C) industries?
• The intellectual content of work has increased during the Post-WWII
period; higher degrees of education and more technology and sciencebased professions. Sectors include technology-based companies, health
care, event management, music industry, and a wide area of other
industries.
• Professional work is more complicated to control as intellectual capital
cannot be fully accessible for managers. Workers ”control their means of
production.”
• Professional work is based on professional ideologies, motivational
aspects, communicative skills, and other behavioural factors.
• Technology and machinery play a key role in contemporary work but
always in association and collaborations with humans and human capital.
• The management of KI&C industries is often indirect and subtle,
concentrating on the joint construction of meaning.
• In general, a need for understanding how knowledge-intensive and
creative organizations function.
Lecture 1: Knowledge-intensive firms
and creative industries (I)
•
•
Growth of knowledge intensive and creative work: (1) in employment
In the UK: “[T]here is little doubt that sectors characterized by knowledge work are growing, in some cases
quite rapidly. For example, the science and technology sector as a whole has been growing on average
between 4% and 16% annually over the last 15 years”. (Robertson & Swan, 2004: 129)
•
In the U.S.: “Lower skilled jobs now account for 16 percent of the workforce, but service employment has
grown only 4 percent since 1960. Nor do managerial and sales work account for most of the increase in
white-collar work. Today 1.5 and 4 percent more Americans work respectively as managers and
salespersons than in 1950. The largest expansion in white-collar employment has occurred among
professional and technical occupations, Since 1950 professional and technical employment more than
doubled, growing from 8 percent to 18 percent of the workforce. In fact, by 1991, professional and
technical workers had become the largest sector surpassing even clerical workers and operatives”.
(Barley & Kunda, 2006: 55-56. Emphasis added)
•
“Non-academic science and engineering (S&E) jobs grew at more than four times the rate of the total U.S.
labor force between 1980 and 2000. S&E employment increased by 159% between 1980 and 2000, an
average annual growth rate of 4,9%, in comparison to 1,1% for the entire labor force”. (Powell and
Snellman, 2004: 205. Emphasis added)
Knowledge-intensive firms and
creative industries (II)
• (2) In patents
• Growth after 1987 from 80,000 to 170,000 patents
annually in the U.S.
• Eightfold increase in university patents in the period
1976-1998 (Powell and Snellman, 2004: 204)
•
• (3) In research interests
• Many studies and publications addressing knowledgeintensive industries , creative industries, and
professional service firms (e.g. accounting firms and
law firms)
Growth of professional and “business services” in the US: (Brynjolfsson and Saunders, 2010: 17. Table 2.2)
Composition
of gross
domestic
product by
industry
grouping
1950 1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2008
Finance,
insurance, real
estate, rental,
leasing
11.4
14.1
14.6
15.9
18.0
19.7
20.0
Professional
and business
services
3.9
4.7
5.4
6.7
9.8
11.6
12.7
Wholesaling
and retail
15.1
14.5
14.5
14.0
12.9
12.7
11.9
20.0
1
6.3
14.5
11.5
Manufacturing 27.0
25.3
22.7
The shifting focus of the economy
• “By 2009, Wal-Mart employed about as many Americans (1.4
million) as the 20 largest U.S. manufacturers combined, and 9 of the
12 largest employers were retail chains.” (Davis, 2009: 30)
• In 2002, “the pharmaceutical industry accounted for 2 percent of
the Fortune 500 companies, but 57 percent of these companies’
total profit.” (Brody, 2007: 57)
• During the 1970s, pharmaceutical companies “averaged 8,9 per
cent profit as a percentage of revenue” in comparison to 4,4 per
cent for all Fortune 500 industries. In the 1980s, 11,1% compared to
4,4% and in the 1990s 15,1% compared to 4.1%. (Lexchin, 2006: 11)
• Pharmaceutical industry has a persistent higher return on
investment than other industries.
Definitions (I)
•
•
Knowledge economy
“We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive
activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technological and scientific advances as well as
equally rapid obsolescence. The key components of a knowledge economy include a greater
reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources, combined with
efforts to integrate improvements in every stage of the production process, from the R&D lab to the
factory floor to the interface with the customer”. (Powell and Snellman, 2004: 201)
•
•
Knowledge-intensive firms
“The category of knowledge-intensive companies . . . refers to firms where most work is said to be
of an intellectual nature and where well-educated, qualified employees form the major part of the
work force” (Alvesson, 2001: 863)
•
•
•
“Typical examples of companies in this category are law and accounting firms, management,
engineering and computer consultancy companies, advertising companies, R&D units, and hightech companies” (Alvesson, 2000: 1101)
Definitions (II)
•
•
The creative industries defined
“Those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill, and talent, and which have a potential for wealth and
job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. (Task force at Dept. of Culture, Media, and
Sports, 1998, cited in Roodhouse, 2006: 52)
•
Knowledge-intensive work is often specialized, based on university education and the access to professional skills.
•
Creative work is commonly less professionalized, i.e., is less “monopolized” and sheltered by entry-barriers (e.g., the case of
video game developers) and more focused on aesthetic and sensible knowledge.
•
”Attention economy” (Halavais, 2009; Eriksen, 2001), the ”aesthetic economy” (Böhme, 2003)
•
“In information society, the scarsest resource for people on the supply side of the economy is neither iron ore nor sacks of
grain, but the attention of others. Everyone who works in the information field—from weather broadcasters to professors—
compete over the same seconds, minutes, and hours of other people’s lives” (Eriksen, 2001: 21)
•
“The devices that regulate attention are stylistic devices. Attracting attention is what style is about. If attention is now at the
center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style. It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance
trade places”. (Lanham, 2006: xi-xii)
•
“For Google, being in the attention business means it’s of utmost importance for Google to find out what people are paying
attention to. To do that, Google has made a history of giving away services that other companies charge an arm and a leg for.
Even more amazingly, the services that Google gives away is usually better than the services that other people are charging
for . . . In exchange for that free services and software, Google wants to look over your shoulder and take note on what you
are paying attention to and what you are ignoring”. (Mitch Wagner, Google, cited in Beller, 2006: 303)
Shared theme in KI&C industries:
“Competetive advantage through people”
•
“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to
do.” Steve Jobs, Founder, Apple
•
“KIFs [Knowledge-intensive firms] are particularly good examples of contemporary forms of ‘people dependent’
organizations. As such they are said to embrace the ideology of ‘entrepreneurialism’ as the pervasive structure of
governance.” (Robertson & Swan, 2004: 124)
•
•
“[T]he creative process is sustained by inspiration and informed by talent, vitality and commitment (i.e., a need to create
rather than to consume): this makes creative work volatile, dynamic and risk-taking, shaped by important tacit skills (or
expertise) that are frequently submerged (even mystified) within domains of endeavour. Hence, the crucial relationship
between creativity and innovation (i.e., the process of development of original ideas toward their realization/consumption)
remains unruly and poorly understood.” (Jeffcut, 2000: 125. Emphasis added)
•
•
Aesthetic labour
“Aesthetic labour designates the totality of those activities which aim to give an appearance to things and people, cities and
landscapes, to endow them with an aura, to lend them an atmosphere, or to generate and atmosphere to ensembles”
(Böhme, 2003: 72).
•
Examples: Architects, designers, interior decorators, media workers, etc.
•
•
Alt .view
“Aesthetic labour is the employment of workers with desired corporeal dispositions. With this labour, employees
intentionally use the embodied attributes and capacities of employees as a source of competitive advantage.” (Warhurst and
Nickson, 2007: 107)
Examples: Models, air stewardesses, salespeople, etc.
Leading and managing knowledgeintensive and creative work (1)
• How to manage creativity (Elsbach, 2009): (1) Encourage creative
thinking
• “(1) build organizational environments that support creative
thinking (e.g., decentralize supervision, create cross-functional
collaborations, open communication channels) . . . (2) reward
behaviors known to lead to creative output while removing
punishments for these same behaviors (e.g., reward risk-taking, and
learning of information outside of one’s area of expertise, and
remove punishment for failures and non-conformity)” (Elsbach,
2009: 1043)
• Consequences: (1) Novel organization forms (e.g., project-based
organizations), (2) New managerial practices promoting new
thinking (new reward systems, new benefits).
Leading and managing knowledgeintensive and creative work (2)
•
(2) Control through norms and identities (Elsbach, 2009)
•
Management control in KI&C industries commonly a combination of “hard” and “soft” forms of control.
•
“Knowledge-intensive firms, which typically draw heavily upon cultural-ideological modes of control, are
specifically singled out as organizational forms that use social identity and the corporatization of the self as a
mode for managerial control”. (Kärreman & Alvesson, 2004: 151. Emphasis added)
•
•
•
•
•
•
“[W]e will use the label socio-ideological control for attempts to control worker beliefs and technocratic control
for attempts to directly control worker behavior . . . In the technocratic type, management works primarily with
plans, arrangements, and systems focusing behavior and/or measurable outputs”. (Kärreman & Alvesson, 2004:
152)
“The basic idea of management, as conventionally understood, that of a separation between the planning and
execution of tasks, is hardly at all a key feature of KIFs. KIFs in this sense by definition are non-managerial: the
more it makes sense to talk about knowledge-intensive activity, the less it becomes relevant to employ a
(conventional) management model of thinking.” (Alvesson, 2004: 121)
“KIFs tend to be characterized by stronger inputs of normative control than is common in most other
organizations. Some KIFs do rely heavily on technocratic form of control—soft rules and procedures as well as
measurements by performance indicators—but these are included in, and fuel, normative control by operating in
a non-mechanical way, influencing the idea, expectations, and subjectivities of people.” (Alvesson, 2004: 137)
Three examples of managerial
challenges in KI&C work
•
•
•
Study of residents: Physicians in training are unwilling to become leaders in their
clinics until they are fully skilled; yet they want physicians as doctors (a ”prisoner’s
dilemma); a need for ”de-paradoxify” the predicament of the physicians and redefine the physicians profession as being both ”scientific” and ”administrative”.
[Professional identities and competing institutional logics]
Study of architects: The profession is considered a ”creative industry” but
architects commonly perceive their own work as being devoid of creative
elements; how can management recognize the creative competence without
making the architects cynical about their work? A few solutions: Seminars, field
trips, joint discussions, etc. reaffirming the architect’s sense of having specialized
skills and competencies. [Professional identities and professional knowledge
sharing]
Study of management consultants: Consultants were running their own ”private
brand” within a well-known consulting firm, yet they needed to learn new things
from their colleagues to further reinforce their expertise and identities but there
were no traditions in the firm to engange in joint thinking and collaborations? How
can management create a sense of community among a group of individual
experts. [professional knowledge sharing]
Literature: Nordenflycht (2010) and
Townley et al. (2009)
• Three characterstics of KIFs: Knowledge intensity, low capital intensity, and
a professional workforce.
• 1. Bonding (punishment for low performance), Reputation (positive
rewards), appearance, ethical codes. The concept of “Cat herding”
• 2. Low capital intensity. (could be disputed! The cases of e.g., Biotech)
• 3. Highly skilled co-workers.
• “I use the term professionalized workforce to refer specifically to the
presence of the other, two institutionally features of professionalization:
ideology and self-regulation.” (Nordenflycht, 2010: 163)
•
• “A professional ideology consists of a set of norms, manifested both in
explicit ethical codes enforced by professional associations and
internalized preferences, often developed during professional training.”
(Nordenflycht, 2010: 163)
Townley et al. (2009)
• Creative industries relies on ”intellectual
property” (British dept. of Culture, Media and
Sport, 1998) (Townley et al., 2009: 939)
• Creative work” deals with ”expressive or
aesthetic tastes rather than utilitarian needs.”
(Townley et al., 2009: 939)
• Distinction between (1) intellectual, (2) social,
(3) creative and cultural capital, and (4)
economic capital.
”Aesthetic knowledge” in creative work
• “Aesthetic knowledge offers fresh insight and awareness and while
it may not be possible to put into words, it enables us to see in a
new way”. (Taylor and Hansen, 2005: 1213. Emphasis added)
•
• “Intellectual knowledge is driven by a desire for clarity, objective
truth and usually instrumental goals. On the other hand, aesthetic
knowledge is driven by the desire for the subjective, personal truth
usually for its own sake”. (Taylor and Hansen, 2005: 1213)
• “Aesthetic knowledge is embodied, It comes from practitioners
understanding the look, feel, smell, taste and sound of things in
organizational life.” (Ewenstein and Whyte, 2007: 689. Emphasis
added)
• Example: Architect work
In summary
• KI&C accounts for a growing part of the aggregated
economy in the West.
• KI&C hires highly specialized co-workers, being
committed to their work and having strong
professional beliefs.
• While traditional industries have used direct
(inspection of work speed) or bureaucratic control
(e.g., output control) of co-workers In KI&C industries
are indirectly control through attitudes, beliefs, norms,
professional identities etc. It is a form of ”soft control”
or ”unobtrusive control.”
Input variables
Traditional industries
Knowledge-intensive work
Financial resources
High
Ranging from high (e.g.,
pharmaceutical industry) to
basically covering labour costs
(e.g., the university)
Intellectual resources
Of some importance in specialist or
expert professions located in certain
functions
Basic production factor
Tangible resources
(e.g., technology,
laboratory equipment)
Determines the production system (as in
the process industry)
Plays a key role but always in
collaboration with expertise (e.g., in
the case of CAD systems in
architecture)
Forms of control
Direct or bureaucratic control
Leadership practice
Monitoring activities through key
performance indicators and planning
Indirect and based on identities and
motivation
Motivation and symbolic
management; indirect control
through input variables such as
time in project work.
Organization forms
Divisionalised and bureaucratic
organizations
Network-based organizations,
project work, and flexible
organization arrangement
(“postbureaucratic organizations”)
Managerial challenges
Maximize output at any given stock of
resources (ROI); avoid conflicts with coworkers
Motivate co-workers to contribute
to the shared activities.
Lecture 2: The concepts of professionalism and
“intellectual capital”
• Definitions
• “[P]rofessionalism is a set of institutions which permits the members of an
occupational to make a living while controlling their own work.” (Freidson,
2000: 17)
•
• “The ideological core of professionalism is its claim to a discretionary
specialization.” (Freidson, 2000: 109)
•
• “Profession/Professional: (1) used as a folk concept to signify (a) prestige,
respect; (b) full-time work for pay; (c) to perform some task with great skill
or proficiency; (2) used as a sociological concept of study: (a) elite classes
of occupations with a focus on the characteristics or attributes of such
occupations as a taxonomy (the attribute model of professions) . . . or,
more recently, as (b) process model, to study the processes through which
certain occupations come to acquire power, develop monopolies, and/or
lay claim to the status of a profession.” (Leicht and Fennell, 2001: 8)
Professional work
•
•
•
•
•
“We define professional work as occupational incumbents: (a) whose work is defined by the
application of theoretical and scientific knowledge to tasks tied to core societal values (health,
justice, financial status, etc.), (b) where the terms and conditions of work traditionally command
considerable autonomy and freedom from oversight, except by peer representatives of the
professional occupation, and (c) where claims to exclusive or nearly exclusive control over a task
domain are linked to the application of the knowledge imparted to professionals as part of their
training” (Leicht and Fennell, 2008: 431. Emphasis added)
“Professionalization: The result of a successful professional project; an occupation is
professionalized to the extent that it successfully defines a set of work tasks as their exclusive
domain, and successfully defends that domain against competing claims.” (Leicht and Fennell, 2001:
8)
In professional work ”[T]he ratio of indeterminacy to technical rules in professional work has to
remain at a high level.” (Malhotra and Morris, 2009: 899)
•
Three types of professional work: normative (lawyers), technical (engineers) and syncretic
(accountants) (Malhotra and Morris, 2009)
•
“In fact, profession is more often defined as an occupation which tends to be colleague-oriented,
rather than client oriented”. (Larson, 1977: 226)
History of professionalism (1)
•
•
Forerunner: The medieval guild
“The craft guild was a formal association of specialized artisans, the masters, whose authority was
backed by superior political sanctions” (Epstein, 1998: 685)
•
“Economic explanations of the craft guild assume that it performed one or more of the following
functions:
it acted as a cartel, both as buyer of raw materials ad as a seller of its products;
it enforced quality standards which lowered asymmetries in information, particularly outside the
local marketplace where the products were little known;
it provided members with intertemporal transfers of income in highly unstable markets, smoothing
the trade cycle and it served as a bargaining unit in narrow markets in which agents held market
power;
it supplied cheap credit in underdeveloped financial market with high information costs;
it operated as a political and administrative unit that protected its members from expropriation by
opportunistic urban elites, who in exchange demanded that it collect capital tax and tie apprentices
so as to provide cities with a ready military force;
or finally and most noxiously, it was rent-seeking organization that lobbied for economic privilege
from the state”. (Epstein, 1998: 685-685. Emphasis added)
•
•
•
•
•
•
History of professionalism (2)
•
Professionalism tied to formal education and interest organizations
•
“All the learned professions were tied, in principle, to one organizational base for the transmission of knowledge:
The traditional university. Until its reform was achieved, the university hindered rather than helped the production
of systematic scientific and technical knowledge . . . It appears, in fact, that the number of large hospitals in Paris
was one of the main reasons why Paris became the world’s capital of medical science in the first half of the
nineteenth century. Overcoming the ancien régime of guild barriers, these hospitals brought together surgeons
and physicians, thus allowing physicians to incorporate the localized structural pathology, which surgeons had
spontaneously applied, and to start the scientific study of specific diseases”. (Larson, 1977: 24)
•
A ”Weberian view” of profession: the ”monopolization of power”
•
“[T]he professional project is an organizational project; it organizes the production of producers and the
transaction of services for a market; it tends to privilege organizational units in the system of stratification; it
works through, and culminates in, distinctive organizations—the professional school and the professional
association”. (Larson, 1977: 74. Emphasis added)
•
Professions in-between markets and democratic institutions.
•
“The professions, neither democratic nor capitalist, played an important role in efforts to shape and (at times) to
constrain capitalist development in relation to standards of a broader social well-being.” (Brint, 1994: 16)
History of professionalism (3)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
(1) “Origin” in the ancient or medieval world (e.g., medicine).
(2) “transition” in the seventeenth century including a.) service occupations, and b.) scientific and
scholarly occupations,
(3) “Collective mobility” around the last centuries of the nineteenth century and the first decades
of the twentieth. Change from “status professionalism” to “occupational professionalism.”
“Collective mobility” refers to the large-scale formation of professional organizations. (the birth of
engineering societies and business schools in the end of the 19th century).
(4) “Consolidation”. (Brint, 1994: 26-39)
Most recent period:
“Beginning in the 1960s, social trustee professionalism fell under increasingly attack for its
apparent lack of correspondence to the organizational realities of professional life.” (Brint, 1994:
39)
“The rise of expert professionalism” (Brint, 1994): Expertise plus market value.
e.g., the university: From “elite institution” (the “ivory tower”) to a production factory:
“In 1900, there were about three tertiary education students per 10,000 worldwide. By 1950, this
number had increased eight-fold to 25. By 2000, it had increased another six-fold to 166”. (Frank
and Meyer, 2007: 289)
Physicians: From “professional elite” to “health care managers”.
Professional jurisdiction
•
In order to operate as legitimate professionals, actors need domains of jurisdiction. i.e.,
domains of legitimate expertise.
•
In many cases, domains of jurisdiction are sites for struggle between groups of professional
workers (e.g., obstetricians and midwives, surgeons and radiologists, scientists and nonscientists, etc.).
•
The higher the boundary between domains of jurisdiction, the more “successful” the
professionalization (e.g., the case of being a “medical doctor” and an “author”)
•
“Jurisdiction is contested through public, legal, and workplace claims, for control over task
areas . . . These jurisdictional claims act to shift both relations between professional groups
and the boundaries of their core work domains.” (Bechky, 2003: 721)
•
Boundary work (Gieryn, 1983); draw the line between domains of responsibility and
authority.
•
“Boundary work also a useful ideological style when monopolizing professional authority
and resources in the hands of some scientists by excluding others as ‘pseudoscientists.’”
(Gieryn, 1983: 787-787)
Expert professionalism and
managerialist governance
• Managerialism
• “Managerialism is a mode of thought and action based on a desire to
control, enhance efficiency, normalize and suppress conflict and promote
the universalization of sectional managerial interests.” (Kuhn, 2009: 685686)
•
• “Professionals operating under managerialism are thus subject to both the
normative control of the profession and the bureaucratic control of the
corporate enterprise, leading to both a continual self-surveillance and a
narrow technical rationality.” (Kuhn, 2009: 685-686)
• Case: health care
• Two logics: (1) medical professionalism, (2) business-like heath care.
• “The two logics continue to co-exist and neither in can be considered
dominant.” (Reay and Hinings, 2009: 630)
Managing professions
•
Professional work is characterized by different situations that needs to be evaluated and individually
handled:
•
“In actuality, the assumption of relative homogeneity within the profession is not entirely useful: there are
many identities, many values, and many interests . . . We call these groupings within professions
‛segments’ . . . We shall develop the idea of professions as loose amalgamations of segments pursuing
different objectives in different manners and more or less delicately held together under a common name
at a particular period in history.” (Bucher and Strauss, 1961: 326)
•
•
•
•
•
•
Professional work is often based on professional ideologies rather than distinct practices:
“Collins (1979) found a surprisingly weak correlation between the requirements of educational credentials
and the skills/knowledge requirements of jobs. On the basis of empirical observation he argued that
education serves to socialize prospective professionals into status cultures by drawing a line between
insiders and outsiders”. ”. (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 178)
Ideology and self-regulation
“I use the term professionalized workforce to refer specifically to the presence of the other, two
institutionally features of professionalization: ideology and self-regulation.” (Nordenflycht, 2010: 163)
“A professional ideology consists of a set of norms, manifested both in explicit ethical codes enforced by
professional associations and internalized preferences, often developed during professional training.”
(Nordenflycht, 2010: 163)
“Ideologies provide frameworks for judging both how patients should be helped and what is harmful for
patients”. (Strauss, et al., 1964: 365)
Becoming a professional: The role of
identity and ideology
•
Professional ideology: The totality of belief guiding the professional in his or her day-to-day work
•
Professional ideologies are learned in tertiary training (at the university) and when being socialized into the trade.
•
“Student contestation of dominant ideologies is integral to the transformation that occurs during elite professional
socialization . . . the process of becoming professional includes learning to think critically and to question
assumptions. Far from being unwilling dupes of ideological indoctrination, students are self-reflective, and they
strategically accommodate and resist the ideologies of their education. During professional socialization, they
must confront and rationalize their future status as a means of facilitating and thus legitimizing the reproduction
of elite privilege”. (Schleef, 2006: 4)
•
•
Danielle, a law schools student at “Graham university” who “firmly believed during her first year of law school that
most lawyers were overpaid and took advantage of their powerful position in society, now says without criticism:
‘Lawyers work really, really hard . . . the money is deserved. I think lawyers are really, really smart. I think they are
very articulate and on top of things’”. (Schleef, 2006: 2)
•
“Elites-in-training” “contest, rationalize, and ultimately enthusiastically embrace their dominant position in
society”. (Schleef, 2006: 4)
•
“The most important audience for professional ideology . . . is the professionals themselves—they need to believe
in the higher mandate that the professionals are alleged to embody”. (Schleef, 2006: 5)
Case: Management consultants
• Management consultants represents a ”new professional
field”.
• Management consulting is not highly institutionalized, i.e.,
there are low formal entry barriers to the profession
• Causality between formal competence and effects is weak
or precarious. Consultants need to have a belief in their
methods or tools.
• Management consultants are recruited from ”elite schools”
(business schools and engineering schools)
• Symbolic resources play a key role in performing the
manageemnt consulting services.
• Systems for knowledge sharing becomes of key importance.
Professional and occupational groups
covered in the course
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Pharmaceutical researchers (Mats Sundgren)
Event projects managers (Göran Lindahl)
Game developers (Peter Zachariasson)
Architects (Gustav Lymer)
Symphonic orchestras (Helena Wessman)
Management Consultants (Ola Bergström)
Artists (Evelina Wahlgqvist)
In summary
• Professions and professional ideologies
structure specific fields of expertise.
• Professionalization is a social process aimed at
imposing entry-barriers and controlling
domains of expertise.
• The management of professions is mostly
indirect and through norms and beliefs.
Social and human capital
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•
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•
•
Social capital
“[T]he knowledge embedded within, available through, and utilized by interactions
among individuals ad their networks of interrelationships” (Subramaniam and
Youndt, 2005: 451),
Human capital
“[T]he knowledge, skills, and abilities residing within and utilized by individuals”
(Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005: 451)
Social capital is demanded to fully exploit human capital:
“To effectively leverage investments in human capital, it may be imperative for
organizations to invest in the development of social capital to provide the
necessary conduits for their core knowledge workers to network and share their
expertise. Organizations that neglect the social side of individual skills and inputs
and do not create synergies between their human and social capital are unlikely to
realize the potential of their employees to enhance organizational innovative
capabilities”. (Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005: 459)