Introduction to the Journal of Organizational Behavior's special issue on professional service firms: where organization theory and organizational behavior might meet

✍ Scribed by Roy Suddaby; Royston Greenwood; Celeste Wilderom

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 62 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-3796
• DOI: 10.1002/job.552

✦ Synopsis

The uniqueness of professional service firms (PSFs) has been well established. Accounting, law, engineering, and management consulting firms are known to differ significantly from both traditional manufacturing and service organizations in their organizational and managerial arrangements. Their performance depends heavily on the reputation and status of their workforce. They utilize unique employment practices and leadership behaviors, and typically have unusual structures. They are subject to exhortations from external professional bodies and are expected to balance pressures of commercial success with professional integrity (Scott, 1987;Greenwood et al., 2007). Many professional service firms are governed as partnerships, which, though not unique to these organizations, is highly unusual elsewhere and carries unusually high risks of litigation (Greenwood & Empson, 2003). These distinctive and differentiating features occur because of unique challenges that arise from the PSFs central focus upon intellectual capital and expert knowledge and the delivery of intangible, customized services through highly trained professionals (Alvesson, 1995;Reed, 1996b).

The crucial role that professional service firms play in the global economy is also well established. The professional services sector has grown by more than 10 per cent per year over the past 25 years and currently generates revenues of more than $3 trillion US globally (Riddle, 2002) at a time when traditional agricultural and manufacturing sectors are shrinking. There has been a corresponding growth in the size of firms within this sector, although the large majority of PSFs employ modest numbers of professionals. International accounting firms rank among the worlds' largest organizations, both in measures of size and revenue (Suddaby, Cooper, & Greenwood, 2007). They are also more geographically complex than most other organizations. PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, has 771 offices in 148 countries, which compares to General Motors, which operates in 51 countries, Ford (132), and General Electric (56). More important than their size and scale, however, is the critical role that professional service firms play in mediating and brokering most forms of commercial transactions. PSFs occupy a central position in national economies and in global markets (Lowendahl, 2005;Moulton, 1999).