مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The contemporary research area of professions and organizations can be considered both as a branch of the sociology of professions (Saks, 2016 forthcoming) and of the organizational theory that studies the managerial aspects of professional work (Brock, Leblebici, & Muzio, 2014). In the literature these two aspects have all too rarely been brought together, but this article attempts to do so in a blended manner in overviewing key aspects of professions working in organizations. It focuses particularly on the European context from which some of the most exciting work is now emerging. This paper outlines the growth of the European contribution in these two traditions from what were originally heavily North American roots. It then goes on to discuss the notion of professions and their organizational setting and how they may most helpfully be analyzed, building on these traditions. Finally, the paper considers European research published in English-speaking sources on specific professions in their organizational context e illustrating this in more depth through a case study of work on the health professions, before drawing the paper to a conclusion. From the standpoint of sociological theories of professions, the field of professions and organizations was heavily based on work from the United States, with a range of contributors spanning from Talcott Parsons at Harvard University to Eliot Freidson at New York University. This work was paralleled by an increasing range of literature on professions and their organizational context from Britain, the early span of which was overviewed by Millerson (1964). This initial research was taken forward in new directions in Britain by such contributors as Terry Johnson at the University of Leicester and Michael Burrage at the London School of Economics. At this stage, there was little work on professions and organization in the sociological tradition emerging from continental Europe, but this was to expand greatly especially around the start of the twenty-first century. At this time, as Adams (2015) points out, there was a burgeoning amount of published research on this subject in journals, books and book chapters e with a particular Western European and Canadian interest in stateeprofession relations and professional regulation. As Adams has also helpfully shown in her review of the sociological literature, the focus in the United States has shifted to a large degree from regulatory issues to the organizational challenges faced by professional groups e no doubt because of the increasingly strong corporatist environment that has prevailed there.

In the case of the parallel strand of more managerially oriented organizational theory, the literature has centered on an interest in such areas as professional service firms, public sector professionalservice organizations, multinational and transnational private corporations, together with the organizational implications for the expert knowledge workers that we term professionals. Here the field also has strong North American origins, with most of the early concepts, theories and empirical findings published by scholars based in Canada and the United States. For example, here important advances developed around writers like Richard Scott at Stanford University, Henry Mintzberg at McGill University, and Royston Greenwood and Bob Hinings at Alberta University. The initial dominance of the field by North America is indicated in the seminal review chapter by Powell, Brock, and Hinings (1999), where scarcely a reference is cited from European based scholars. However, fast-forwarding to the more recent overview of this area by Empson, Muzio, Broschak, and Hinings (2015), about one third of the references are by scholars currently based in Europe e even though much of the foundational material harks back to North American work from the latter half of the twentieth century.

Further evidence of this more recent trend in both the sociological and organizational literature towards a more Euro-centered focus on professions and organization is that some two-thirds of the twenty competitively peer-reviewed articles published by the new Journal of Professions and Organization in 2014 and 2015 have first authors based in Europe. And while these trends may or may not be significant, it is claimed in this paper that the contribution of European scholars to the field of professional organization is not only substantial, but also distinctive (Chia, 2014). Here Adams (2015) has indicated that the European concentration on regulation and policy represents the most marked difference from the United States literature on professions and organization e although Canadian scholars, as well as those in Australia, have also prioritized this area. However, in all these countries there are many overlapping fields of study of professions e ranging from considerations of gender and ethnicity to discussions on organizational autonomy and inter-professional working. Nonetheless, there seems to be somewhat less commonality with Eastern European societies like Russia where the study of professions is only slowly establishing itself following their disestablishment after the Bolshevik Revolution and their current gradual, and by no means inevitable, re-emergence under President Putin (Saks, 2015b).