Professional Organization Research: Methodological Issues, Challenges and Opportunities
Organizers: Hüseyin Leblebici (Chair), David Brock, & Daniel Muzio
Panelists: John Flood, Matthias Kipping, Peter Sherer, Andrew von Nordenflycht
When and where: Friday, August 7, 10:15-11:45am, at Vancouver Convention Centre, Room 212.
Furtherer details on the PDW:
Andrew von Nordenflycht is an Associate Professor of Strategy at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He studies the historical evolution and performance effects of forms of employee involvement in corporate governance, such as professional partnerships, ESOPs, and high-commitment employment systems. Much of Andrew's research focuses on professional services, including advertising, law, securities brokerage, and consulting. Andrew's empirical work centers on the compilation and statistical analysis of large-sample longitudinal data on firms. In recent work he has used samples of firms across five different professional services to theorize about the cross-industry differences in ownership structures. He will discuss the challenges as well as the opportunities for quantitative and cross-industry research, in particular exploiting trade journals and industry associations for detailed information about many firms over time.
Peter Sherer is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Organizations at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. He has studied professional service firms, looking at how these firms organize to execute their strategy, how they overcome institutional barriers to change, and how firms come up with innovations that go against the mainstream technology. Peter approaches such research with a quantitative-qualitative historical methodology, by piecing together both types of data. This view is not always acceptable for researchers who see themselves as quantitative or qualitative. This session seeks to find the common ground between quantitative and qualitative researchers interested in history.
Matthias Kipping is Professor of Policy and Chair in Business History at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. He has researched and published extensively on management consulting, including The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting (edited jointly with Timothy Clark, Oxford University Press, 2012). He has in particular shown how consulting has been been a somewhat "hollow" profession from the outset, drawing on the reputation and imagery of other professions (Kipping, 2011). In his presentation, he will point out the advantages of taking a historical approach towards the study of the professions and their evolution, focusing mainly on qualitative archival research, the available sources and how they should be analyzed. A historical approach seems well suited to examine the transformation of professional fields and professional firms over a longer time period (e.g. Kipping and Kirkpatrick, 2013) and to situate this transformation within field-specific and broader developments. As sources, the archives of the various professional associations appear particularly useful, because these associations tend to observe the profession as a whole (not only the larger firms) and also keep abreast of economic, societal and political trends. Suggestions will be made how to increase the validity of the findings through the use of historical methods of analysis, namely source criticism, triangulation (with other sources) and hermeneutics.
John Flood is the McCann FitzGerald Professor of International Law and Business in the UCD Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, Ireland. His research encompasses the legal profession, law firms, the new regulation of legal services and the globalisation of law. For John the sustained observation of organisational practices through ethnographic research is key to understanding how everyday professional and organisational life is played out. Surprisingly the micro-qualitative approach, following Everett Hughes (1971), enables us to draw generalisations from singular instances. John will expand on the belief that ethnography is the fundamental, basic method for understanding social life. Most other methods are, at best, palimpsests in that they create approximations of sociality for which there are many problems of verification. One of the main problems we have is reinvesting professions, and PSFs, with a new sense of ethics in the neoliberal age. Thus ethnographic research becomes even more important in helping us carry out this program as it is able to see how ethics is being done.
In general this PDW will be an opportunity for prospective authors to learn more about these research methods and about research in the professions in general. Prospective participants are welcome to contact the organizers, David Brock (dmb@bgu.ac.il), Hüseyin Leblebici, (hleblebi@illinois.edu) and Daniel Muzio (daniel.muzio@newcastle.ac.uk) in advance with any questions at all concerning the PDW, research in professional organizations, or queries about the Journal of Professions and Organization (http://jpo.oxfordjournals.org/).
David M. Brock
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Editor-in-chief | Journal of Professions and Organization
Professor | Guilford Glazer Faculty of Management | Ben-Gurion University | Tel: +972-525-491-351
International Research Fellow | Centre for Professional Services Firms | Saïd Business School | University of Oxford
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http://jpo.oxfordjournals.org/
http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/community/people/david-brock
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