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Why is it that HR specialists appear to have difficulty applying their knowledge, systems and techniques in a systematic way when it comes to professional services firms (PSFs)-particularly when the drivers for developing powerful HRM practices within such businesses seem more pressing than ever? This paper analyzes the ways HR specialists and PSF managers/partners differ in their understanding of organizations and their management. The analysis supports the argument that, while HR specialists and the discipline of HRM are governed by bureaucratic logic in their approach to management, PSF managers by contrast are driven by professional logic. This creates a number of subtle as well as explicit tensions and disconnects that will have to be tackled if the practices of HRM are to prevail in PSFs. This paper contributes to HRM literature as well as institutional theory, by applying an analysis of institutional logics to HRM practice in PSFs. The paper builds on interviews with five HR managers who have held positions in PSFs, as well as a longitudinal case study of PSF managers in one of the 'Big Four' accounting firms. The paper offers a number of tentative proposals around how HRM and PSFs might transcend the described gulf between the two approaches to management.

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Professions have been traditionally understood as an alternative way of organizing work that stands in opposition to the corporate or bureaucratic organizational form. Increasingly, however, corporations are seen to be the source of new forms of expert knowledge and occupational categories. Yet we have little understanding of how expert judgement forms and is legitimated inside a large organization. In this study, we examine the emergence of standards of professional judgement in a government organization. Using archival and interview data between 2000 and 2012 we examine how experts in the Danish Film Institute generated professional standards of decision making against the backdrop of intense bureaucratic control. Our analysis demonstrates that norms of professional judgement emerge in a process that is inextricably linked to the emergence of professional role identities. Our core theoretical contribution is the discovery that the legitimacy work of managerial professions operates in two spheres; by first grounding claims of professional legitimacy in broad societal norms, and second, by grounding claims of professional identity in localized but increasingly abstract expressions of professional expertise.

The Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, stand out as comparably affluent, competitive, low-inequality, and highly regulated welfare societies. This is not least the case in the unique way labor markets are regulated in highly collaborative arrangements in which employers, employees, and the state historically have found balances of power and interests. The chapter discusses how this specific institutional context affects the evolution of human resource management (HRM) practices. Arguably, many HRM areas are affected directly by this context: for example, questions of employment, education, and healthcare are often solved at a societal level rather than at the organizational HRM level. First, the Nordic social model and HRM ideology are reviewed. Then, the limits of the claim that the Nordic countries form a cluster with very similar attributes in relation to HRM is discussed by examining some of the characteristics and differences for each country. Furthermore, data from the International Cranet survey are used to compare and highlight commonalities and differences characterizing HRM practices in the Nordic countries. Nordic HRM operates on the back of an existing collaborative labor market and a social model where deep-rooted egalitarian values and harmony of interests thrive. The chapter shows how this context affects the status of HRM and HRM practices in the five Nordic countries.