Deadline for Short Papers (3,000 words): January 8, 2018.

For further information please visit: https://www.egosnet.org/2018_tallinn/sub-themes_call_for_short_papers

This sub-theme invites researchers who study the relationship between identity, autonomy, and overwork in professional service organizations. Professionals have traditionally been theorized as enjoying higher levels of autonomy regarding the where, when and how of work (e.g. Engel, 1970; Sandberg & Pinnington, 2009). Yet, research also reveals that most professional workplaces are characterized by a persistent, autonomy-reducing regime of excessive working hours (60–120 hours/week) and escalating availability to clients and superiors (e.g. Lupu & Empson, 2015; Mazmanian et al., 2013; Michel, 2011). Even when firms try to alleviate extra-long hours regimes by promoting work-life balance and flexible work arrangements, overwork usually persists (e.g. Kärreman & Alvesson, 2009; Kellogg, 2011; Reid, 2015).
 
There are many drivers underlying overwork in professional contexts. For one thing, professionals are typically confronted with a highly unpredictable workflow and are expected to respond to surprising and unexpected events at all times (e.g. Perlow, 2012; Wajcman, 2014). Yet, even more importantly, the "totalizing" nature of professional work has been shown to have a significant impact on shaping professionals' identities so that they become "willing slaves" to the organizations they work for, and sometimes own (e.g. Bunting, 2005). Most professional cultures implicitly rely on the normative myth of an "ideal worker", i.e. someone who always prioritizes work, minimizes obligations outside it, and displays loyalty and commitment through long working hours and constant availability (Dumas & Sanchez-Burks, 2015; Reid, 2015). Arguably, many professionals tend to "hyper"-identify with this professional myth, even up to the extent of becoming "corportate clones" (Covaleski et al., 1998), unable to recognize how work takes over their lives (Michel, 2011; 2014).
 
Professional service organizations themselves actively promote such hyper-identification by intentionally selecting "insecure overacheivers" and fostering a work environment marked by competition for scarce promotion opportunities (Alvesson, 2001; Empson, 2017; Galanter & Palay, 1990; Michel, 2007) and engaging forms of normative and peer control that fuel long working hours and overwork (Costas & Grey, 2014; Kärreman & Alvesson, 2004; Muhr et al., 2012). Such control mechanisms rely on more distributed and unobtrusive forms of power that make them difficult to recognize and resist (Ekman, 2013; Kärreman & Alvesson, 2009). Many practices that belong to the standard repertoire of human resource management powerfully contribute to constituting professionals as productive subjects in a Foucauldian sense (Townley, 1994). Examples include time keeping (Anderson-Gough et al., 2001; Coffey, 1994), socialization procedures (Michel, 2007) and management by objectives (Covaleski et al., 1998). More recently, studies have demonstrated how organizations also employ less visible, emobodied forms of control which are experienced as self-chosen by professionals (Mazmanian et al., 2013; Michel, 2011). In such a context, professionals internalise their firms' disciplinary mechanisms, engaging in self-monitoring and self-regulating behaviour that conforms to their organizations' goals, whilst believing themselves to be acting autonomously.
 
This sub-theme seeks to advance current knowledge of this totalizing nature of professional work by more explicitly focusing on the themes of identity, overwork, and the autonomy/control paradox in professional service organizations. More specifically, we argue that, whereas the phenomenon of the autonomy/control paradox in professional service firms has been identified, the literature is still vague as to how and whyprofessionals – who are highly educated, skilled, and individualistic – would be so easily 'culturally doped' (Alvesson & Willmott, 1996) into perceiving themselves as autonomous if in fact they are not (Robertson & Swan, 2003). We believe that much can be gained from problematizing how the totalizing nature of professional work is constructed and explicitly addressing the processes and mechanisms that sustain and fuel excessive working hours in professional service organizations. In particular, we want to extend previous emphasis on organizational control and identification, by also exploring how professionals' bodies (Costas et al., 2016; Michel, 2011), reified occupational identities (Ashcraft, 2013), and the use of communication technologies (Mazmanian, 2012; Wajcman, 2014), among others, are also entangled in reproducing the totalizing nature of professional work.
 
The sub-theme particularly invites empirical and theoretical papers that focus on one or more of the following questions: