Social Spaces

Professional scaling work: How professional segments claim new jurisdictions in a world of trans-local connections

“…business economists) and engineering specialties (technology management, management engineering) can legitimately claim. Our analysis shows that the heightened political focus on technology and innovation since the 1990s spurs for an emerging segment of management engineers to challenge and reclaim some of the jurisdictional control of management taken over by business economists in earlier decades (Ellersgaard et al, 2017). Trans-local connections like the establishment and increasing visibility of DTU Business and the open entrepreneurship program via US-based alliances are illustrative of how this engineering segment shifts the inter-professional terrain more strongly toward science and engineering.…”

“…Innovation management as a knowledge specialization resides between technology and factory management, taught at engineering schools, and business school topics like strategy, finance, and organization. Correspondingly, the emerging jurisdiction of innovation management is defined by two professional segments: management engineers increasingly challenge the business economists-segment, the latter denoting business school graduates who occupy a large share of top- and middle-management jobs in private companies and large organizations in Denmark (Ellersgaard et al, 2017). Here, engineers pursue a new professional project, seeking to claim special expertise on innovation management in industrial contexts, as well as in company–university partnerships.…”

Transnational Professional Competition in Fields and Ecologies

“…Bourdieusian analyses of transnational professional spaces have notably employed Correspondence Analysis (CA), Abbottians have rather used Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Sequence Analysis (SA). Importantly, all of these are descriptive, spatial analytical methods, ways to understand social spaces by characterising and relating the actors involved (Ellersgaard et al 2017), but they have tended to be associated with one or the other stream.…”

“…CA provides a structural mapping of social spaces by identifying similar groups of individuals, which has provided Bourdieusians the ability to visualise key orders of difference within a field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992;Lebaron 2008;Ellersgaard et al 2017). SNA provides a similar picture of social space but it is based on connections between individuals rather than their individual attributes, and has primarily been used to show Abbottian professional competition in transnational spaces (Henriksen and Seabrooke 2016;Seabrooke and Henriksen 2017).…”

Assessing the cohesion and disunity of business associations: Towards a socio-economic framework

“…Second, I present two explorative empirical methods that help analyse actors in a given political process without any a priori assumption about their theoretically assumed positions of power. 4 Together, these suggestions can provide a bottom-up approach that connects sociological methods with Gramscian political theory and provides a socio-political economic view of business associations going beyond the IPE-IPS divide.…”