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Understanding occupational boundaries is vital in the contemporary economy, in which knowledge-based work is a central feature. The purpose of this paper is to identify and decipher boundary work which affects the cooperation and demarcation between human resource (HR) managers and external organization development (OD) practitioners during organization change processes.

Data are based on in-depth interviews with HR managers and external OD practitioners in the Israeli business sector.

Encounters between HR managers and external OD practitioners are potentially volatile given mutual experiences of occupational threat. Three distinct patterns of boundary work for negotiating OD-HR jurisdiction are identified. These yield differential occupational and organizational outcomes.

This study is based on a medium-sized sample of practitioners of HRM and OD in the Israeli business sector. The data focused on one-sided descriptions of occupational relations.

The findings shed light on boundary work associated with fruitful HRM-OD partnerships. This may greatly advance the success of costly organization change and development interventions which demand the collaboration of both parties. Implications are offered regarding the academic education and practical daily management of both groups of practitioners.

Despite their growing relevance, empirical investigations of daily HRM-OD interfaces are scarce. This exploratory research addresses this gap in the literature and offers theoretical and practical insights.

Over the past 12 years scores of reports and articles have been written about occupational, workforce, or workplace literacy (Workforce 2000 – economic and labour force changes, and skills requirements, impacting on America). Research and published materials have failed to address the impact of these issues for the vast local public sector work‐force. Reports on exploratory research on issues of occupational literacy in a large metropolitan US county government workforce. All of the 32 county departments were surveyed regarding Workforce 2000 and occupational literacy in order to assess employee skills and workplace requirements, literacy issues, leadership awareness and policies and planning. Results show a well intentioned, but poorly prepared, (and preparing) county leadership and workforce, which may well impact on the quality of future service delivery. Makes recommendations for policy and programme changes, and for continuing research.

Sociologists have paid little attention to what people mean when they call themselves “professionals” in their everyday talk. Typically, when occupations lack the characteristics of self-control associated with the established professions, such talk is dismissed as desire for greater status. An ethnography of speaking conducted among several technicians’ occupations suggests that dismissing talk of professionalism may have been premature. The results of this study indicate that among technicians, professional talk highlights dynamics of respect, collaboration, and expertise crucial to the horizontal divisions of labor that are common in postindustrial workplaces, but have very little to do with the desire for occupational power.

The purpose of this study is to investigate patterns in the social construction of occupational jurisdiction and related professional career identity. It examines the agency associated with framing messages that influence perceptions about the professional nature and value of retail management careers. The aim is to identify sources which produce influential messages about perceptions about retail management careers and the content of these messages.

This study utilises a qualitative research methodology (focus-group interviews) to explore the observations of people involved with the monitoring and management of career messages. Two focus groups were conducted with a) nine Canadian retail practitioners and b) seven post-secondary educators from retail management education programmes.

The focus groups identify five sources of influential messages including (1) part-time retail work experience, (2) educational institutions, (3) parents, (4) retail industry/practitioners and (5) media. They also identify three content themes presented by these sources including (1) the importance of educational requirements, (2) the nature of occupational roles and (3) the value of the career.

The significance and generalisability of the results are limited by the size and nature of the sample.

This study makes a practical contribution by identifying potential career awareness strategies.

This research makes a theoretical contribution by expanding understanding of the role of communication with career perceptions and with the related constitution of career professionalisation.

The paper utilises formality-informality modelling to examine occupational change, using commercial service charge management as its case study.

This is a conceptual paper that develops a typology for applying formalisation to occupational change and then utilises historiography to generate a narrative on the evolution of service charge management.

Formality is seen as a method of improving transparency and performance as a “modern” response to a range complaints about professional performance. Whilst real improvement failed to develop, a “snowball” of continued formalisation remained the perceived solution, leading to centralisation of measures of professional performance.

The work is a conceptual paper that develops a historiography on the development of service charge administrative practice. Whilst it relies on objective data and secondary literature, the narrative that is developed is subjective and interpretive.

The conceptual nature of the work offers potential insights into occupational organisation. It suggests that formalising procedures in itself does not improve performance.

Incident sites can be described as the joint work site of the emergency services, where one of their challenges is to interact with the public. The purpose of this paper is to study how this interaction is structured by the emergency personnel's jurisdictional claims.

This paper rests upon qualitative method and in-depth interviews. In total, 28 people have been interviewed, out of which 13 are emergency personnel and 15 are unaffiliated volunteers. The interview material has been analysed qualitatively and thematically by the authors.

The findings show that the interaction between emergency personnel and unaffiliated volunteers can be described in terms of three different boundary practices: cordoning off, division of labour and conversation, varying in degrees of inclusion and exclusion. The result shows that the emergency personnel's relationship to volunteers is ambivalent, as they are both seen as an uncertain element at the incident site in need of control and as a valuable source of information.

While most other studies have been focusing on the interaction between emergency organizations, the authors have investigated the interaction between emergency organizations and a group previously unstudied: unaffiliated volunteers. While sociologists in the field of boundary work normally describe boundary practices in terms of negotiation, sympathizing with the concept of negotiated order, the results point to the fact that boundaries are not necessarily a subject for negotiation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore unintentional learning through an examination of the practical implications of it as experienced in the field of occupational health and safety, and the role of government in addressing those implications by way of learning at the level of culture change. The paper examines various learning models and assumptions and challenges the application of these assumptions in the workplace as evidenced in the field of occupational health and safety. The paper posits that a large body of “unintentional” learning exists within the workplace which is not the result of conscious decisions and lacks critical reflection on the possible outcomes. These learnings may have negative consequences that are at odds with stated or intended policy. It suggests actions which can be taken to identify and mitigate unintentional learnings and their outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to consider a challenge to an occupational jurisdiction in the British police. Historically, street cops have defended the importance of operational credibility as a way of sustaining the value of experience, and inhibiting attempts to introduce external leaders. This has generated a particular form of policing and leadership that is deemed by the British Government as inadequate to face the problems of the next decade.

The project used the High Potential Development Scheme of the British police to assess the value of operational credibility and the possibilities of radical cultural change. Data are drawn from participants on the program, from those who failed to get onto the program, and from officers who have risen through the ranks without access to a fast-track scheme.

Most organizational changes fail in their own terms, often because of cultural resistance. However, if we change our metaphors of culture from natural to human constructions it may be possible to focus on the key point of the culture: the lodestone that glues it together. Operational credibility may be such a cultural lodestone and undermining it offers the opportunity for rapid and radical change.

The scheme itself has had limited numbers and the research was limited to a small proportion of the different categories outlined above.

If we change our metaphors for culture and cultural change – from natural to constructed metaphors – (icebergs and webs to buildings), it may be possible to consider a much more radical approach to organizational change.

Most assessments of cultural change focus on those charged with enacting the change and explain failure through recourse to natural metaphors of change. This paper challenges the convention that cultural change can only ever be achieved, if at all, through years of effort.

Scholars of race and work have shown that social categories shape how individuals interact with coworkers and clients. Social categories also inform the creation of roles within an organization when nonwhites are hired to interact with other nonwhites. This study examines these roles, or racialized labor, and illustrates how racial categories govern organizational behavior. By studying immigrant-serving providers at a range of nonprofits, this chapter shows how the assumed relationship between racial category and knowledge is evidence of ethnoracial logics, or the practice of using racial categories to organize work because of assumptions about the inherent racial ethnic knowledge an employee possesses. To make the case for these logics, the chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Latino, Latina, and White nonprofit professionals to show how expertise is developed and differentiated along racial lines.

Professionals often dislike dirty work, yet they accommodate or even embrace it in everyday practice. This chapter problematizes Andrew Abbott’s professional purity thesis by examining five major forms of impurities in professional work, namely impurity in expertise, impurity in jurisdictions, impurity in clients, impurity in organizations, and impurity in politics. These impurities complicate the relationship between purity and status as some impurities may enhance professional status while others may jeopardize it, especially when the social origins of professionals are rapidly diversifying and professional work is increasingly intertwined with the logics of market and bureaucracy. Taking impurities seriously can help the sociology of professions move beyond the idealistic image of an independent, disinterested professional detached from human emotions, turf battles, client influence, and organizational or political forces and towards a more pragmatic understanding of professional work, expertise, ethics and the nature of professionalism.