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Little attention has been given in the literature to operating decisions in professional service organisations. A better understanding of the power relationships within a professional service organisation provides insight into the way these decisions are made. A model is proposed which categorises professional service organisations according to the relative power of the major stakeholders: professionals within the organisation; clients; and top management. The major factors which affect each of these are discussed.

To shed some light on the motivational profile of entrepreneurial as opposed to professional CEOs in Greece.

Based on McClelland's motivational patterns, i.e. power, achievement and affiliation, as well as responsibility; interviews with Greek entrepreneurial and professional CEOs were conducted. Then, interviews were content‐analysed, in order to identify differences in motivational profiles of those two groups of CEOs.

Achievement, motivation and responsibility were found to be the most significant discriminating factors between entrepreneurial and professional CEOs.

The current research focuses only on McClelland's typology. Other aspects affecting entrepreneurial inclination are not studied in the current paper.

One of the major implications deriving from the identified characteristics of successful entrepreneurial and professional CEOs has to do with the preparation and training of young leaders for both larger and smaller firms.

This paper studies, for the first time, the leadership profile of CEOs in Greece and identifies differences between professional and entrepreneurial ones. This is of great value in an SMEs dominated economy, such as Greece, where these research findings can be used for the development of entrepreneurship.

This purpose of this study is to understand how the spread of audit culture and the related public sector reforms have affected Finnish universities’ organization principles, performance measurement (PM) criteria and ultimately their reason for being.

Applying extensive qualitative data by combining interview data with document materials, this study takes a longitudinal perspective toward the changing Finnish higher education field.

The analysis suggests the reforms have altered universities’ administrative structures, planning and control systems, coordination mechanisms and the role of staff units, as well as the allocation of power and thus challenged their reason for being. Power has become concentrated into the hands of formal managers, while operational core professionals have been distanced from decision making. Efficiency in terms of financial and performance indicators has become a coordinating principle of university organizations, and PM practices are used to steer the work of professionals. Because of the reforms, universities have moved away from the ideal type of professional bureaucracy and begun resembling the new, emerging ideal type of competitive bureaucracy.

This study builds on rich, real-life, longitudinal empirical material and details a chronological description of the changes in Finland’s university sector. Moreover, it illustrates how the spread of audit culture and the related legislative changes have transformed the ideal type of university organization and challenged universities’ reason for being. These changes entail significant consequences regarding universities as organizations and their role in society.

The purpose of this paper is to describe what it is like to be a midwife in the professionally isolated and marginalised arena of home birth in Ireland and to explore whether the organisation of home birth services and professional discourse might be undermining the autonomy of home birth midwives.

This paper is drawn from auto-ethnographic field work, with 18 of the 21 self-employed community midwives (SECMs) offering home birth support to women in Ireland from 2006 to 2009. The data presented are derived from field notes of participant observations and from interviews digitally recorded in the field.

Home birth midwives must navigate isolated professional practice and negotiate when and how to interface with mainstream hospital services. The midwives talk of the dilemma of competing discourses about birth. Decisions to transfer to hospital in labour is fraught with concerns about the woman's and the midwife's autonomy. Hospital transfers crystallise midwives’ sense of professional vulnerability.

Maternity services organisation in Ireland commits virtually no resources to community midwifery. Home birth is almost entirely dependent upon a small number of SECMs. Although there is a “national home birth service”, it is not universally and equitably available, even to those deemed eligible. Furthermore, restrictions to the professional indemnification of home birth midwives, effectively criminalises midwives who would attend certain women. Home birth, already a marginal practice, is at real risk of becoming regulated out of existence.

This paper brings new insight into the experiences of midwives practicing at the contested boundaries of contemporary maternity services. It reveals the inappropriateness of a narrowly professional paradigm for midwifery. Disciplinary control of individuals by professions may countermand claimed “service” ideologies.

Recent scholarship reveals the imagery of the professional as the “ideal citizen”. The linkage between professionalism and citizenship is here approached from the perspective of democratic social justice in order to examine the persistence of gendered inequalities in the health care system. The paper aims to examine the ideas framing professionalism, both in sociological theory and historically, asking what gendered hierarchies mean in modern health care systems, and why and how they persist in the conditions of liberal democracy.

The question is approached through both sociological literature and an analysis of historical framings of professionalism; the Finnish health care system is employed as a case. The reason for keeping the discussion close to a specific case is that different professional fields, countries and historic contexts differ from each other in democratically relevant respects.

Traditional sociological theory assumed that professional privilege was based on essentially neutral expertise that benefits democracy only if protected from bureaucracy and politics. The recent theoretical turn reframes professional knowledge as socially defined, but the destabilisation of professional knowledge claims is not without problems. The paper refers to the persisting tensions between changing governance and gendered hierarchies in health care and argues for new approaches that suggest ways through which professional expertise can be democratically represented in politics.

The interdisciplinary framework uses political theory on social justice to examine how health care politics frame professionalism.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what role particular new management devices play in the development of the news profession in an organizational setting shifting to new technologies.

This is studied through of observations of work practices in the newsroom and through documentary research and qualitative interviews with managers, editors, and other professionals.

It is shown that management devices such as the news table and the news concept are central to the reorganization of news work, as they realize managers’ strategies, just like they produce new practices and power relationships. It is shown that the devices produce increased collaboration among journalists and interaction between managers and output journalists, that mundane work and power is delegated to technological devices and that news products are increasingly standardized.

The wider implications of these findings seem to be a change in the journalistic profession: TV news journalism is becoming less individualistic and more collective and professionalism becomes a matter of understanding and realizing the news organization’s strategy, rather than following a more individual agenda.

The paper’s originality lies in showing that profession and management are not opposed to each other, but can be seen as a continuum on which journalistic and managerial tasks become intertwined. This is in contrast to previous research on news work. Furthermore, the paper’s focus on devices opens up for conceptualizing power in the newsroom as distributed across a network of people and things, rather executed by managers alone.

This study aims, first, to explore and analyze if and how organizational members’ professions or occupations influence perceptions of internal crisis communication. The second, related, aim is to discuss the role of internal communication in creating a strong organizational identity during a prolonged crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

This study is mainly conceptual but uses quantitative data from a survey conducted in a health-care organization in late 2020 to illustrate the theoretical reasoning.

The results show that the administrative groups perceive factors in the internal crisis communication more favorably than the professional groups. The study suggests that organizational members perceive internal crisis communication differently depending on which intra-organizational group they belong to. This further points to the absence of a “rally-around-the-flag” effect and highlights the importance of working proactively with professionals and in internal crisis communication.

This study highlights the role of professionals in crisis communication, which is an aspect that so far has been ignored. The internal professionalization processes and an intriguing power struggle between professions have obvious consequences for crisis communication. As shown in the overview of earlier research on internal communication, leadership and professional organizations, the prerequisites for creating an increased organizational unity among coworkers are challenging. The idea that a crisis may, as in certain political situations in society, create a “rally-around-the-flag” effect is still relevant, even if the case study is an example of how this did not happen.

The paper aims to analyse the meaning and extension of discretionary power of social service professionals within network-based interventions.

Empirically, the paper is based on a case study of a network-based policy involving private and public organisations in the Northeast of Italy (Province of Trento).

The paper identifies netocracy as a social policy logic distinct from bureaucracy and professionalism. What legitimises netocracy is neither authority nor expertise but cooperation, the activation of connections and involvement, considered “good” per se. In this framework, professionalism and discretion acquire new and problematic meanings compared to street-level bureaucracy processes.

Based on a case study, the research results cannot be generalised but pave the way to further comparative investigations.

The paper reveals that the position of professionals in netocracy is to some extent trickier than that in a bureaucracy because netocracy seems to have the power to encapsulate them and make it less likely for them to deviate from expected courses of action.

Combining different literature streams – street level bureaucracy, professionalism, network organisations and welfare governance – and building on an original case study, the paper contribute to understanding professionalism in welfare contexts increasingly characterised by the combination of bureaucratic, professional and network logics.

The purpose of this paper is to study four cases of the adoption of co-production and compare them according to the type of user involvement, contextual factors and the organizational structure.

In total, 30 interviews were conducted in four mental health organizations which are implementing co-production in the North of Italy. Interviews were conducted with clinicians, nurses, patients and family members. The data collected was triangulated with further sources and official documents of organizations. The results have been compared by means of a validated international framework (IAP2) regarding the contextual factors and the level of co-production adopted.

The adoption of co-production in the four cases differs by the activities implemented and how organizations involve informal actors. It seems to be influenced by the contextual factors specific to each organization: power, professionals’ opinions and leadership. Organizations whose practitioners and leaders are willing to distribute their power and value informal actors’ opinions seem to facilitate the systematic involvement of users. Overall, the results highlight the importance of considering contextual factors when evaluating and describing co-production activities.

This paper contributes to describing how mental health organizations are implementing co-production. It examines the influence of contextual factors on the type of co-production adopted.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship of highly skilled work and (collective) power. It develops an institutional logics perspective and argues that highly skilled workers’ propensity to join trade unions varies by institutional order.

Data from two occupational fields in Austria, university professors and management consultants, representing two different institutional orders were collected via questionnaires. Stepwise logistic regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses.

The results show that over and above organisational level variables, individual's background and employee power variables institutional logics significantly add to explaining trade union membership of highly skilled workers. Prevalence of a professional logic in a field makes collective action more likely than market logic.

Highly skilled workers are overall described as identifying themselves more with the goals of their employer or client and with their professional peers than with other corporate employees or organised labour. They are thus expected to develop consent rather than conflict orientation vis-á-vis their employers and clients. This paper supports a differentiated view and shows that within highly skilled work there are groups engaging in collective action. By developing an institutional logics perspective it provides a useful approach to explain heterogeneity within the world of highly skilled work.