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How do top bureaucrats define, in their own words, their professional identity and the norms they work by? Do they define them in line with a Weberian ideal type of the bureaucrat and bureaucratic norms? Or rather by a modernised entrepreneurial ideal type, often associated with New Public Management reforms? Further, what can such self-presentations tell us about professional norms operating in top bureaucrats’ daily work, and about institutional or wider societal logics guiding the non-elected, administrative side of contemporary government? The top officials, the senior civil servants in central ministries, who take part in policy-making and serve the political leadership, have a specific role distinct from that of the politicians and are guided by professional norms. Scholars focusing on this level of top bureaucrats have described their professional norms as being about serving the elected politicians loyally, but also contributing technical and thematic expertise independent of political considerations and ensuring that policy is developed according to legal standards. This chapter investigates how top bureaucrats themselves define those norms and that role – is it in line with an ideal close to Weberian ideal type characteristics, or not?

How can we explain the development – or equally the non-development – of professional ethics norms in a particular case? And how can we enhance compliance with existing professional ethical norms? In this chapter, I develop a supply/demand theory of professional ethics. That is, I consider the demand-forces and pull-factors that call for the construction, reform or continuance of a professional ethos. These demands may come from various stakeholders, including individual service-providers, the professional community, actual and prospective clients and the general public collectively as interested third parties. The supply-side, on the other hand, constitutes the ethical materiel out of which norms emerge: these are the felt-motivations of individual professionals at the coalface of action that drive them to recognize, acknowledge and act upon a professional norm. This material includes traditions and stories, the conscious application of common-sense ethics, explicit endorsement of public moral codes, internal excellences within the activity, a discrete community capable of cultivating attractive role-identities and so on. As well as considering such ethical-materiel, I canvas the institutional and cultural supports that facilitate the production of these motives.

Purpose – In this chapter, we explore how normalization of exclusionary practices and of privilege for seemingly same professionals and disadvantage for seemingly different professionals in academic healthcare organizations can be challenged via meaningful culturalization in the interference zone between system and life world, subsequently developing space for belonging and difference.

Methodology – This nested case study focusses on professionals’ narratives from one specific setting (team) within the broader research and research field of the Dutch academic hospital (Abma & Stake, 2014). We followed a responsive design, conducting interviews with cultural minority and majority professionals and recording participant observations.

Findings – In the Netherlands, the instrumental, system-inspired business model of diversity is reflected in two discourses in academic hospitals: first, an ideology of equality as sameness, and second, professionalism as neutral, rational, impersonal and decontextual. Due to these discourses, cultural minority professionals can be identified as ‘different’ and evaluated as less professional than cultural majority, or seemingly ‘same’, professionals. Furthermore, life world values of trust and connectedness, and professionals’ emotions and social contexts are devalued, and professionals’ desire to belong comes under pressure.

Value – Diversity management from a system-based logic can never be successful. Instead, system norms of productivity and efficiency need to be reconnected to life world values of connectivity, personal recognition, embodied knowledge and taking time to reflect. Working towards alternative safe spaces that generate transformative meaningful culturalization and may enable structural inclusion of minority professionals further entails critical reflexivity on power dynamics and sameness–difference hierarchy in the academic hospital.

This paper presents an institutional theory framework integrating normative, regulatory and cognitive-cultural pillars (Scott, 2008) to depict an interinstitutional system within which professions operate and develop. The pillars highlight the trade-offs between institutions leading to conflicts of interest that also impact the stability of the system and the ability of the profession to self-regulate. To illustrate the framework, the paper uses selected accounting-based professions and their alignment with the institutional pillars. Drawing from examples emerging from the Enron experience, the paper delves more deeply into the regulatory profession and professionals as agents to explore implications of their role in interpreting and in some instances developing institutions. Further, the paper highlights the potential fissures that emerge in a competitive environment between the public interest and market-based cognitive-cultural pillars that tends to erode public trust and weaken the institutional system, leading to the need for increased regulation to maintain the stability of the pillars. Overall, the framework presents a unique perspective on the role of public interest as a component of the normative pillar in aligning and thereby, stabilizing the functioning of the interinstitutional system. This perspective provides a basis to contextualize and articulate a public interest perspective for the accounting profession in an interinstitutional system.

Purpose: As specific emotional arenas, hospitals are characterized by the interweaving of various emotional requirements, arising from different sources of norms, rules, or guidelines. This study aims to highlight an often-overlooked dimension of emotional labor in healthcare by describing the coexistence of emotional rules (i.e. feeling and/or display rules) through a multilevel perspective (institutional level, cluster/department level, service level, ward level, professional level). Study Design/Methodology/Approach: These emotional requirements for nurses and nursing assistants are investigated through three sets of data (observation, interviews, and internal documents) in a French public hospital, focusing on two hospital services: three long-term care units (primary field of investigation), and five adult medical emergency wards (secondary field of investigation). Findings: The results of the analysis show the pervasive nature of emotional requirements which are intertwined and more or less implicit/explicit according to the level analyzed. In addition to organizational rules, professional and social emotional rules contribute to shaping emotional requirements, particularly through rules of “empathetic expression” and those of retenue bienveillante. Research Limitations/Implications: This research has contributed to showing the dynamic nature of emotional requirements and their appropriation and modulation by healthcare professionals. The qualitative methodology used allows for unique insights but limits the generalization of results. Originality/Value: This research has addressed various gaps in the existing literature by describing emotional requirements through a multilevel analysis, by outlining a set of rules that had not been previously described (retenue bienveillante) and by including the population of nursing assistants as well as nurses in a study on hospital emotional labor. Future research could envisage spatial analysis of emotional labor to help better understand emotional requirements' variability according to emotionalized zones.

The literature suggests that women are less committed to and less successful in their careers than men because of family responsibilities. I examine whether mothers practicing law are less committed to their legal careers than other women. Mothers acknowledge that they violate certain time and career norms associated with practicing law and work in different settings, which may be interpreted by others as indicators of their lack of career commitment. The survey results reveal that, despite these violations, mothers report greater career commitment than other women in law. I conclude by examining possible explanations for these findings.

The continuance of gender inequity has dominated most of the discourse on diversity in organisations. Few studies, particularly in the Australian context, deal with the racialised nature of many professional workplaces. This chapter critically examines immigrant Indian professionals’ experiences of perceived discrimination, exclusion after inclusion, and bias in Australian organisations. It focuses on the complexities of emotional labour, since concealing true emotions and displaying the emotions necessitated by the job can be difficult. Job burnout and stress are possible outcomes of this conflict between required and true emotions. There is a rapidly growing Indian community in Australia. In 2020, there were over 7.6 million migrants living in Australia. This was 29.8 percent of the population that were born overseas. One year earlier, in 2019, there were 7.5 million people born overseas. Those born in India (721,000) were in second place, with an increase of 56,300 people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2020a). This chapter examines the challenges and adjustments experienced by immigrant Indian professionals, as well as whether these factors play a role in their workplace integration.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

“Academic values” is one of the most popular terms used in the higher education literature. But how do we study academic values? Besides autonomy, freedom, and collegiality, the “values” in “academic values” often remains implicit, leaving a conceptual gap in the literature. Moreover, autonomy, freedom, and collegiality may reflect the shared normative expectations as part of the value system of a profession, rather than the value orientation at the individual level. To examine the latter, this chapter proposes a conceptual framework adapted from the studies of work values in applied psychology. As a heuristic device, the academic work value framework consists of six ideal-typical value orientations belonging to three dimensions: work autonomy, social orientation, and value of knowledge. The framework's relevance and usefulness are evaluated by revisiting relevant literature on academic orientations. The result shows a spectrum of value positions in academic work, from the “old school” values to the “entrepreneurial” ones to the hybrid orientations. Overall, this framework provides a potential approach to operationalize the concept of academic values for empirical research. At the same time, as a heuristic device, it is open for reflection, critique, and further development.