Journal of Professions & Organization, Oxford (2026)

Intra-professional collaboration and organization of work among teachers: How entangled institutional logics shape connectivity

12/03/2024

See the latest JPO paper by Karolina Parding, Mihajla Gavin, Rachel Wilson, Scott Fitzgerald, Mats Jakobsson, & Susan McGrath-Champ -- now published online, at https://academic.oup.com/jpo/advance-articles,
It is forthcoming in JPO 11(1), due in a few weeks.
Credit to JPO Editor Ronit Dinovitzer for shepherding the paper through the review processes.
The paper's reference as well as a very brief summary can be found below.
Enjoy!
David

Reference:
Parding, K., Gavin, M., Wilson, R., Fitzgerald, S., Jakobsson, M., & McGrath-Champ, S. (2024). Intra-professional collaboration and organization of work among teachers: how entangled institutional logics shape connectivity. Journal of Professions and Organization, 11(1): 83-98, https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joae003

Brief summary:
Connectivity and interconnectedness are a crucial part of professional work. Intra-professional collaboration is essential as it enables professionals to learn, develop and define the terms of the profession in their own way. Intra-professional collaboration provides an intersubjective path by which professionals engage in sense-making so as to interpret, enact and reproduce institutions (Everitt, 2013). Yet conditions for collaboration are shaped by how work is organized and governed. This article examines how conditions for intra-professional collaboration, where work takes place with colleagues within the same profession in same or similar roles, are perceived by teachers, in relation to how work is organized, by drawing on empirical insights from a study on teachers working in education systems defined by market-driven reforms. We take teaching as a distinct form of professional work, one defined by professional connectedness and where intra-professional collaboration is both valued and sought by teachers and is a policy goal. Yet, we show how interconnections within a profession are being affected through entangled institutional logics which undermine the type of collaboration valued and sought.

This article investigates the following research questions:

1. What are teachers’ views of the benefits of intra-professional collaboration?
2. What organizational conditions shape teachers’ views on the benefits of intra-professional collaboration?
3. How can intra-professional collaboration be perceived in relation to current institutional logics?

To address these questions, we draw on unique survey data collected in two countries and educational settings – Sweden and Australia. Both countries have seen similar system level reform efforts, guided by market-driven governance reforms, which have shaped their schooling systems (Fittock et al., 2021). As few studies have examined teacher collaboration enacted in different national systems of education (Milner et al., 2020), this article offers value in analysing teachers’ professional work across different contexts, as well as helping to erode the scarcity of comparative and international studies in the sociology of professions field. Our study also responds directly to calls for more empirically grounded analyses of how professional fields are changing and understanding how organizational contexts shape types and forms of connectivity (see Adams et al., 2020a; Alvehus et al., 2021: 201; Kanon and Andersson, 2023: 62; Noordegraaf and Brock, 2021: 234).

Our findings nuance ideas of professional connectedness by showing how the organization of work, affected by ‘entangled institutional logics’ (Alvehus and Andersson, 2018; Blomgren and Waks, 2015) and market-based governance reforms, shapes intra-professional collaboration. Our contribution is thus to take departure from established understandings of connectivity, that is, ‘related to others and outsiders’ (Noordegraaf, 2020) by examining connectivity within professions, showing how there continues to be a struggle between the profession, organization and market which shapes conditions for intra-professional work within the teaching profession. Our analysis of intra-professional collaboration holds significance for emergent understandings of connectivity (see Adams et al., 2020a; Alvehus et al., 2021: 201; Kanon and Andersson, 2023) by underscoring how the contemporary organization and management of work shape the conditions that enable, or augment, inwards connectivity and the ability for professionals to collaborate in meaningful ways.

Intra-professional collaboration and organization of work among teachers: How entangled institutional logics shape connectivity Abstract. Intra-professional collaboration is essential as it enables professionals to learn, develop, and define the terms of the profession in their own way.

19/02/2024

See the latest JPO paper by Jacob Apkarian -- now published online, at https://academic.oup.com/jpo/advance-articles,
It is forthcoming in JPO 11(1), due in a few weeks.
Credit to JPO Guest Editor Len Bierman for shepherding the paper through the review processes.
The paper's reference as well as a very brief summary can be found below.
Enjoy!
David

Reference:
Apkarian, J. (2024). A Dynamic Model of Professional Legitimacy: Linking Professional Logics and Jurisdictional Threats in the Corporate Credit Rating Industry. Journal of Professions and Organization, 11(1), https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joae002

A Dynamic Model of Professional Legitimacy: Linking Professional Logics and Jurisdictional Threats in the Corporate Credit Rating Industry
Summary:
This paper proposes a novel theory of professional legitimacy that incorporates leading theories of the professions with theories of institutional logics. The proposed theoretical model assumes that the logic of professionalism is more complex than currently understood in the literature. It illustrates how maintaining professional legitimacy is like walking a tightrope, whereby firms in professional industries must simultaneously draw on two distinct rationales or logics guiding the professional production process or risk losing legitimacy if they come to rely too heavily on one logic over another. The logic of inference guides professional production by prioritizing the use of interpretative information by experts engaged in a holistic and discretionary approach. In contrast, the logic of routinization also guides professional production by centering the value of formally trained professionals using reproducible information in a codified and formalized fashion. The former provides a rationale for why professional work is necessary and valid, i.e. legitimate, due to the ability of professionals to bring unique, exclusive knowledge to the production process based on their specialized experience in the field. The latter provides a rationale legitimizing professional work due to the ability of professionals to draw on a unified, abstract school of thought to provide valid and objective knowledge to professional production.
Through an examination of the corporate credit rating industry—an industry that relies on the discretion of financial professionals to generate rating products—the paper demonstrates that the degree to which a professional industry relies on one professional logic relative to the other is a function of the intensity of specific jurisdictional threats to the industry: the redundancy threat and the invalidity threat. Professional industries that rely too heavily on a logic of routinization become subject to claims that industry professionals are redundant and that their work can be delegated to non-professionals. When facing an intense redundancy threat, professional industries will increasingly embrace the logic of inference to guide their practice and to make jurisdictional claims over their domain of production. However, if professional industries rely too heavily on the logic of inference, they become subject to criticism regarding the validity and objectivity of their production processes. In this case, professional industries should increasingly embrace the logic of routinization to shore up legitimacy.
Scholars of professions have argued that inference and routinization are key components of professional practice associated with professional legitimacy. However, the literature fails to provide a mechanism linking these practices to legitimacy. The logic of professionalism literature successfully links professional practices to legitimacy via guiding logics, but ignores the importance of routinized practices in the legitimation process. By incorporating routinization into the logic of professionalism, the theory presented in this paper resolves these discrepancies. In addition, existing organizational literature explains the degree to which professions employ inferential or routinized practices exclusively in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness these features provide to the production process. This paper demonstrates that inference and routinization are also employed to varying degrees as a means to maintain legitimacy above and beyond the efficiency and effectiveness they might bring to professional production.

academic.oup.com

‘Unleash the tiger within your soul’: Interplays among professionalism, socializing discourses, and work–life management in adventure work

19/02/2024

"Unleash the tiger within your soul"

See the latest JPO paper by Michael Coker, Emily Godager and Kari Pink now published online, at https://academic.oup.com/jpo/advance-articles,
It is forthcoming in JPO 10(2), which will be a special issue on Communication, due in a few weeks.
Credit to JPO Guest Editor Stephanie Fox for shepherding the paper through the review processes.
The paper's reference as well as a brief summary can be found below.
Enjoy!

Reference:
Coker, M., Godager E., & Pink, K. (2024). “Unleash the tiger within your soul”: Interplays among professionalism, socializing discourses, and work-life management in adventure work. Journal of Professions and Organization, https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joad021

Summary:
Socializing messages shape individuals’ perceptions of work, professionalism, and meaningfulness. For individuals in the U.S., many anticipatory socialization messages consist of normative notions of work (e.g., securing a high-paying/stable job, constructing work-life boundaries). Socializing discourses are cyclical, often drawing on and perpetuating dominant ideologies (e.g., professionalism, an enduring discourse that shapes work-life enactments in Western society). However, not all workers align their understandings and enactments of work with socializing discourses and/or dominant ideologies, and a growing number of workers are turning to nontraditional work experiences. In light of this growing population and the Journal of Professions and Organization’s special issue on opening up the meanings of “the professional,” this study sought to understand how dominant discourses are perceived and (re)shaped by a population of nontraditional workers who seemingly sidestep enduring discourses and professional enactments. This study explores how adventure workers, nontraditional workers who pursue adventure-filled positions that invoke personal fulfillment, experienced professionalism as a constraint/resource and pushed back against this form of organizational and social control through their work-life enactments, disrupting contemporary meanings of professionalism. Drawing on 14 in-depth interviews, we examined how socializing messages interplayed with adventure workers’ conceptualizations of meaningful work and professionalism and shaped their work-life management. We found that adventure workers received socializing messages from multiple sources that juxtaposed notions of professionalism and meaningful work (e.g., pursuing passions, integrating work and life). Divergent socialization messages necessitated processing dominant meanings of work alongside nontraditional work experiences. For example, socialization played an important role in how adventure workers constructed narratives about professionalism and meaningful work, which, in turn, shaped how they ascribed value to work and enacted work-life boundaries. Adventure workers and their personal contacts ascribed value to work in different ways, illustrating how perceptions of work-life management, notions of meaningfulness, and enactments of professionalism are co-constituted. Whereas family members and friends viewed adventure work as rigidly separate from life (e.g., working long hours in off-the-grid locations), adventure workers saw their work/life as integrated (e.g., experiencing work as personally meaningful despite spatiotemporal demands). Adventure workers simultaneously resisted and retooled professionalism depending on the value they associated with work (e.g., collecting experiences versus prioritizing family or stability), illuminating ways that professionalism can be a resource and constraint in particular contexts. Together, our findings highlight the pervasive nature of dominant societal discourses even in radically non-normative populations that seek to free themselves from professional constraints. We demonstrate how interpretations of meaningfulness, professionalism, and nontraditional (not “real”) work are subjectively experienced across contexts; individuals experience dualities and inconsistencies between what they perceive as meaningful, how they interpret socializing discourses, and how they enact their work and life. As recent phenomena like “quiet quitting” and The Great Resignation might complicate meanings of “the professional,” we invite scholars and practitioners to continue exploring how meanings of work, personal experiences, and socializing discourses are co-constituted, especially in experiences that challenge dominant discourses and longstanding work/life practices.

‘Unleash the tiger within your soul’: Interplays among professionalism, socializing discourses, and work–life management in adventure work Abstract. Socializing messages shape individuals’ perceptions of professionalism and meaningful work. For individuals in the USA, many anticipatory socializatio

The importance of being privileged: Digital entrepreneurship as a class project

07/02/2024

See the latest JPO paper by Grant Murray, Chris Carter & Crawford Spence -- now published online, at https://academic.oup.com/jpo/advance-articles,
It is forthcoming in JPO 11(1), due in a few weeks.
Credit to JPO Editor Daniel Muzio for shepherding the paper through the review processes.
The paper's reference can be found below.
Enjoy!
David

Reference:
Murray, G., Carter, C., & Spence, C. (2024). The importance of being privileged: Digital entrepreneurship as a class project. Journal of Professions and Organization, 11(1), https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joae001

The importance of being privileged: Digital entrepreneurship as a class project Abstract. Established professional occupations can become the preserve of elites when fitting in is driven by class-based criteria. In contrast, digital entrepr

17/09/2021

JPO Best Paper Award, 2020/21

Dear members of the JPO community.

We are excited to announce the winners and runners up of JPO Best Paper Award for 2020/21:

Winner:

 ten Dam, E., & Waardenburg, M. (2020). Logic fluidity: how frontline professionals use institutional logics in their day-to-day work. Journal of Professions and Organization, 7(2): 188-204. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joaa012

Runners up (alphabetical order):
 Bryan, A. & Lammers, J. (2020). Professional fission in medical routines: Medical scribes and physicians in two U.S. hospital departments. Journal of Professions and Organization, 7(3), 265–282, https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joaa023

 Cohen, L. & Duberley, J. (2020). Women in extraordinary times: The impact of external jolts on professional women’s careers. Journal of Professions and Organization, 7(3), 247–264, https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joaa019

Congratulations to the authors of these great papers!

We are grateful to Michael Smets and the Oxford PSF Hub for sponsoring and enabling the award.
See this link for details of the award.

Many thanks to my fellow editors for shepherding all the excellent JPO papers though the review process – special credit to Beth Goodrick, AE of the winning paper as well as the Bryan/Lammers paper; and to Sabina Siebert, AE of the Cohen/Duberley paper.

And a special thanks to the Sub-committee of JPO editorial board members who vetted the shortlisted papers:
Paul Adler, Len Bierman, Forrest Briscoe, James Faulconbridge, Royston Greenwood, Brooke Harrington, Matthias Kipping, Ellen Kuhlmann, Seok-Woo Kwon, Bob Nelson, Amalya Oliver, Mark Pickering, Mike Saks

With all my best wishes,
David

Advance articles | Journal of Professions and Organization | Oxford Academic

02/09/2021

See the latest JPO article by Karin Kee, Marieke Van Wieringen and Bianca Beersma at https://academic.oup.com/jpo/advance-articles

Reference:
Kee, K., Van Wieringen, M., & Beersma, B. (2021). The relational road to voice: How members of a low-status occupational group can develop voice behavior that transcends hierarchical levels. Journal of Professions and Organization, 8(3), https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joab011