In the beginning of this book, I dubbed professionals the gold-collar proletarians of our age. Gold collar, as their work is normally associated with high status and high wages. Proletarians, as it is still wages – the ‘free professional’ of old is largely an anachronism. At the same time as the status of professions and professional workers is upheld in society, however, ‘terminal decline has been a feature of many seminal accounts of the professions and remains influential’ (Muzio et al, 2019, p 25). In this book, I have tried to keep to a reasonably non-evaluative view of professionalism. Now of course there is no such thing as a completely value-free social science, but in the context of scholarship on professional service organizations, the problem seems to me that there is sometimes an unnecessary polarization between different camps.

On the one hand we find profession romantics, to whom professionalism is inherently good and the right to secluded professional judgement should always be protected. Control from external stakeholders (clients representing market logic, politicians representing bureaucratic logic, and so on) is from this position always presumed to be negative. In my view, this position blinds itself to the problems inherent in professional monopolies and the power professions hold. Scandals in accounting, in medicine, in finance, and not to speak of the often outrageous and insubstantial claims made by management consultants (a good study to consult [sic!] is Kirkpatrick et al, 2019), should be cause for concern. The much-criticized New Public Management (I have touched upon it occasionally in this book; see Hood, 1991), we must remember, was thought up for good reasons, such as a perceived over-dominance of professions and concerns for ever-increasing costs in for example health care. In short, profession romantics seem to fall prey to the opaque transparency maintaining professional logic. We should also remember that academics are also a profession, and I don't want to point fingers, but it is certainly easier to find comfort in a position that helps to legitimize one's own autonomy. The true cynic would even argue that maintaining theories based on profession romanticism is a key strategy for academics to defend their own jurisdiction. (See also Watson, 2002, who makes a similar observation.)

In the previous chapter, I gave some starting points for the topic of this book regarding professional service work and how such work is managed. In this chapter, I will introduce a few theoretical terms that will reappear throughout the book, and in this I will also point out some caveats with these terms that are perhaps not always apparent. I will to some extent deal with definitions, and definitions are by their nature difficult beasts. On the one hand, we need them in order to know what we are actually talking about. Many concepts in the social sciences have broad use and can thereby become vague: culture, leadership, power, identity, to name but a few. When concepts become too broad and vague, they lose their analytical usefulness, in line with what Geertz (1973) once argued regarding culture: if everything is culture, the term culture no longer helps us to point to something specific and potentially significant.

On the other hand, too precise definitions make us lose sight of what we are looking for. Social phenomena are multifaceted and sometimes ambiguous, and precise definitions risk excluding aspects or instances that might help us learn, or make us see things a bit differently. For example, strict definitions of the term ‘profession’ risk excluding most occupations, leaving very little left to study and also making the definition too far removed from everyday uses of the term. Therefore, the terminology suggested here is best seen as ‘sensitizing concepts’ that ‘suggest directions along which to look’ (Blumer, 1954, p 7). The direction is hopefully clear, yet in empirical instances things will inevitably get a bit blurry.

This chapter takes the form of a discussion between concepts around professions and professionalism, and the abstract theory of institutional logics. I start off by discussing the term ‘profession’, and recognize a need for a more detailed way of discussing the characteristics of professionalism. In order to develop this I first engage with the theory of institutional logics, drawing on Freidson's (2001) framework, to set the stage for a more distinct discussion of professionalism and its relation to markets and bureaucracy.

When wrapping up this book project, I started asking myself: Why did I develop an interest in professional service work and professional service organizations? Of course, it has to do with trying to understand working conditions in today's world of organizations, and the role of professionalism in society – much of what this book is about. But on a personal level there's also another reason: I am basically curious. I have spent my working years at university (an immensely complex professional organization), in academic publishing, and as a consultant, and I have therefore encountered many of the issues covered in this book, skin deep. And, I believe that there exists a professional ethos that should be safeguarded. This does not mean that we should not problematize and question professionalism – quite the contrary. And that is what I do in this book.

Parts of this book are based on my 2012 Swedish book 4 myter om professionella organisationer (4 Myths about Professional Organizations) but the changes in terms of both theoretical angle, and in terms of the literature covered, is different to the extent that this is a completely different work. In other words, the way I now understand these topics has changed quite a bit over the last ten or so years. And so it should.

In working on this book, I have had great help from my academic colleagues. A very warm thank you to Susanna Alexius, Mats Alvesson, Thomas Andersson, Olof Hallonsten, Gustaf Kastberg, and the anonymous reviewer for reading and commenting on this manuscript. Without you, many flaws would still be there. Thank you, Mehdi Boussebaa and Justin Waring, for engaging discussions on parts of the book. Thank you, Laura Empson, for constant dialogue.

Another very warm thank you goes to Paul Stevens at Bristol University Press, for believing in this project from the beginning, and for helping me push myself through it.

Recently, the notion of the ‘hybrid organization’ has become rather popular, especially in the context of professional service organizations. It is hard to trace the origins of the term, and its meaning is somewhat unclear – in the context of discussions of professions, the earliest use I have been able to trace was Wilensky (1964). Whatever hybrid means in this context it is however hard to argue that it is something fundamentally new, despite often being marketed as such – the standard ‘everything is changing so fast and becoming so complex that organizations have to find new solutions’-rhetoric. The newness probably lies in the term rather than the phenomenon, as is all too often the case in the social sciences. Judging from the literature on professional service organizations in the last few years, these organizations have seemingly undergone a tremendous shift in the way they are managed, governed, and structured. Previously, it is said, they were dominated by a professional logic. Increasingly, however, this logic has been challenged by bureaucratic logic or market logic (or other logics), and this has given rise to new, hybrid organizational forms. Professionals in such hybrids are in one way or another forced to deal with several, possibly inconsistent or conflicting, institutional logics in their everyday work.

I will, at the end of this chapter, return to whether this view has merit – I am generally sceptical. But first, we need to look into what this whole notion of hybridity means, and how it has been dealt with in theorizing. After this I discuss three dominant hypotheses on how hybridity plays out in organizations: the degradation hypothesis, the harmony hypothesis, and the loose couplings hypothesis. After this I start problematizing the notion of hybridity more fundamentally, explicitly drawing on the way I theorized institutional logics in Chapter 2. I then continue by suggesting a fourth hypothesis with which to understand hybridity: superficial hybridity, and I finish the chapter by suggesting that conflicts between institutional logics should primarily be understood in terms of redundancy.

What is hybridity?

Hybrid organizations, broadly speaking, are organizations that encompass several, potentially conflicting, institutional logics and blend these. This leads to the assumption that such organizations have to deal with a certain, and unique, set of organizational problems, that do not appear in ‘pure’ organizational forms.

In the first chapter, I argued for a view of professional service organizations where work takes the centre stage. In this chapter, I ask: How can we describe professional service work processes? What is it that is going on when lawyers, teachers, and physicians do what they do on a day-to-day basis? I take work processes as the starting point for my discussion but as I am interested in organizational questions, I will of course also, at the same time, discuss the organization of professional service work. My starting point is a common assumption about professional service work: that it is, by its nature, ambiguous, and that this inherent ambiguity has profound consequences for how professional service work is organized and managed. In the subsequent discussion I will problematize this assumption and suggest another view – that ambiguity is an outcome of the way in which professional service work is organized, just as much as it is a cause of it. A key theme running through the discussion is division of labour, and already at this point I want to emphasize that when I discuss division of labour in this chapter, I refer to ‘detailed division of labour’, that is, the division of labour taking place between workers, in practice, on an everyday basis. In discussions about professions, division of labour between different professions is often the topic (Freidson, 2001). We can of course also discuss division of labour at a societal level, for example in terms of gendered division of labour (a wonderful example is Gibson-Graham, 1996). Here, though, I am concerned with the detailed division of labour.

I will first start by accounting for the ambiguity assumption in professional work, and from this I continue with reflections over the way in which professionals talk about work. After this, I introduce different models for professional problem-solving, one traditional with ‘cases’ at the centre, and one with clients at the centre. Then, I discuss a common theme in discussions about professional service work: that it bears great resemblance to craft work and the ethos of craft work. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the division of labour in professional service work.

This chapter takes us into some of the most contested terrain in all of management and organization studies: leadership. On the one hand, we find an almost constant demand for leadership: In society we are said to need leadership in order to manage climate change, poverty, innovation, and all various kinds of problems; in organizations we are said to need relational leadership, coaching leadership, change leadership, authentic transformative leadership – not mere management and administration. And academics produce a seemingly endless stream of studies of the benefits of leadership. Leadership seems to provide a solution to most problems – at least in Western society, we seemingly have a romance with leadership, that is, the term is loaded with positive values, and it is also so vague it can be used to explain almost anything (Meindl et al, 1985; Bligh and Schyns, 2007; Collinson et al, 2018). And on the other hand, when things go wrong, we hear the Queen of Hearts within us demanding the heads of the leaders.

Leadership becomes significant in a professional service context for three reasons. First, the one just mentioned: professional service organizations are no exception to demands for more and better leadership. Quite on the contrary, in fact. As I have shown in the previous chapters, ambiguity plays a key role in professional service work, and ambiguous situations tend to generate calls for clarity – something leadership purportedly provides. Second, leadership in professional service organizations is often of a particular kind: Traditionally, professional service organizations have often had various collective solutions to the ‘problem’ of leadership, involving shared leadership and different forms of collegial decision-making. Third, leadership in professional service organizations is often referred to as ‘herding cats’, implying its futility.

In the following, I first highlight common assumptions about leadership in professional service organizations – the idea of ‘cat herding’. I will then address the romance of leadership, followed by a discussion on leadership theory. These are necessary in order to set a theoretical stage for the further discussion: how leadership is accomplished in professional service organizations through legitimizing, negotiating, and manoeuvring. Finally I will, once again, come back to the role of ambiguity, this time in leadership processes.

The chapter introduces State-owned entities (SOEs) and frames the reminder of the monograph. This chapter also provides the necessary definitions and carves out the monograph's sphere of applications to entities such as state-owned multinational enterprises, state-owned enterprises, national oil companies, sovereign wealth funds, export credit agencies and other types of entities that are State-owned. A short history of the State as an economic actor follows next then the focus turns to some of the traditional concerns associated with SOEs such as unfair competition, national security and resource security. The discussion then moves on to address the human rights dimension of State corporate ownership. Several case studies demonstrate concretely how SOEs become involved in human rights violations. The last section of this chapter provides an overview of human rights in international law, the most fundamental human rights instruments, a general introduction to the 'respect, protect and fulfil' framework, the nature of State's obligations to 'respect, protect and fulfil' human rights and the relationship between international law, human rights and State ownership.

SOEs have had a significant and long-lasting influence upon the development of international law and international law currently plays a key role in the shaping of SOEs as participants on the international plane. The current period of revival in State corporate ownership has brought with it a new set of challenges which go beyond some of the classic concerns associated with SOEs. The firmly entrenched duty of States to ‘respect, protect and fulfill’ human rights and the special link that exists between States and their SOEs supports a conclusion that State corporate ownership could have an important regulatory function in a human rights context. From this vantage point, international law has a key role to play in the shaping of SOEs as actors on the international plane and various types of instruments have been created to address the human rights challenges associated with State corporate ownership. In this complex and dynamic regulatory framework, the interplay between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ instruments and between the various levels of regulation has a continuous influence on State practice, which could ultimately lead to the development of customary norms in this area.