Professional Organization Research: Methodological Issues, Challenges and Opportunities
Organizers: Hüseyin Leblebici (Chair), David Brock, & Daniel Muzio
Panelists: 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 (Simon Fraser University) 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 (University of Calgary) 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 (York University) 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.
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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