Ecological approaches to professional work, authority, and regulation have seen a resurgence in the sociology of professions, as epitomized in the linked ecologies framework of Andrew Abbott. Alongside this resurgence comes a renewed attention to the way symbolic and material boundaries within and between professions, as well as between professional, university, and political institutions, come to be defined, negotiated, and changed as part of ongoing professional projects. Building on and comparing case studies set in Denmark into three emerging professional "proto-jurisdictions"-of water-related climate adaptation, lifestyle disease prevention, and innovation management-this article identifies three key modes of interprofessional boundary work important for such projects. In doing so, it grounds Abbott's meso-level framework of linked ecologies in more situated accounts of workplace-level boundary interaction, by reconnecting to a wider tradition of symbolic interactionist studies of professions.
PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to pay homage to Dorothy E. Smith (1926–2022), and her lifelong significance for organizational ethnography. Building on Smith, the empirical purpose of the paper is to analyze professional boundary setting on behalf of innovation management as it occurred in the recent International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committees (TC) 279 committee on innovation management.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is an ethnographic study of the drafting and publication of a novel international management standard on innovation management, the ISO 56000-series published in 2019. It is based on fieldwork from the ISO committee and integrates relevant standardization documents, observations and interviews.FindingsThe paper analyzes four occasions for textual professional boundary work ranging from negotiations of content and choice of ISO standard formats to the unprecedented high-level liaison agreements across international organizations. In each instance, the analysis depicts distinct textual features related to ISO standardization. The analysis shows how the standard becomes positioned as extending and complementing the ISO 9001, not as a radical, freestanding alternative to quality management.Originality/valueThe paper presents original data from the ISO standardization committee. It develops Smith's general textual ontology into a theoretical framework for analyzing how professional boundary setting occurs in the textually structured context of ISO standardization. It gives attention to the implications of questions of objectification and standardization as these apply to contemporary research into innovation and organization.
The literature on professions, drawing on both sociological and management approaches, has recently turned its focus to the transnational scale. In this article, building on Andrew Abbott’s work on professional jurisdictions, we analyze the way transnational resources come to play a role in local professional claims-making and work practices in the inter-professional struggle over jurisdiction. Comparing case studies set in Denmark into three emerging professional jurisdictions, our analysis shows that professional segments claiming new work tasks engage actively in scaling work that attempts to ‘rescale’ the jurisdiction to fit their own professional projects and claims. We find that scaling practices consist of three different ways professionals invest in transnational resources: organizational avatars, new work regulations and prescriptions, and symbolic legitimacy. These ways in which professionals transform transnational resources into claims used in local professionals situations result in different outcomes for the professional segments involved.
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