The Double-Edged Sword of Jurisdictional Entrenchment: Explaining Human Resources Professionals’ Failed Strategic Repositioning

Abstract

To protect themselves against deskilling and obsolescence, professionals must periodically revise their claims to authority and expertise. Although we understand these dynamics in the broader system of professions, we have a less complete understanding of how this process unfolds in specific organizational contexts. Yet given the ubiquity of embedded professionals, this context is where jurisdictional shifts increasingly take place. Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of human resources (HR) professionals in two engineering firms, we introduce the concept of jurisdictional entrenchment to explain the challenges embedded professionals face when they attempt to redefine their jurisdiction. Jurisdictional entrenchment describes a condition in which embedded professionals have accumulated tasks, tactics, and expertise that enable them to make jurisdictional claims in an organization. We show how such entrenchment is a double-edged sword: instrumental to the ability of professionals to withstand challenges to their authority but detrimental when expertise and skills devalued by the professionals remain in high demand by clients, thus preventing the professionals' shift to their aspirational jurisdiction. Overall, our study contributes to a better understanding of how embedded professionals renegotiate jurisdictional claims within the constraints of organizational employment.

Rapid Relationality: How Peripheral Experts Build a Foundation for Influence with Line Managers

“…Scholarship on experts in peripheral or staff roles in organizations has extensively documented the resistance they face from line managers and has largely accepted the inevitability of conflict that is often managed in suboptimal ways, such as when experts are ignored or coopted by line managers (e.g., Dalton, 1950; Edelman et al, 1991; Briscoe, Maxwell, and Temin, 2005). Meyer (1968) proposed raising the status of peripheral experts so they are not dominated by line managers (i.e., “strategic HR”), but this strategy often fails in practice (Sandholtz, Chung, and Waisberg, 2019), as line managers refuse to treat experts in peripheral roles as equals (Sandholtz and Burrows, 2016). Given the rise of professional groups working in organizations (e.g., Anteby, Chan, and DiBenigno, 2016), it is imperative to determine how peripheral experts can elicit cooperation from line managers so organizations can benefit from their expertise.…”

Overcoming Conflict Between Symmetric Occupations: How “Creatives” and “Suits” Use Gender Ordering in Advertising

“…In studies that do report gender composition, the occupations in question are often vertically gender segregated. For example, in relationships between waitresses and chefs (Whyte 1951), human resource professionals and engineers (Sandholtz, Chung, & Waisberg, 2019), psychotherapists and army commanders (DiBenigno, 2017(DiBenigno, , 2019, and 911 dispatchers and policemen (Karunakaran, 2018), the former are members of lower-status or peripheral female-dominated occupations finding ways to 54 manage conflict with members of higher-status or core male-dominated occupations. In these cases, gender and occupational status are mutually reinforcing, making it difficult to see how gender influences occupational conflict.…”

“…Another potential site for gender ordering could be asymmetric occupations with status inconsistency-i.e., ranked inconsistently in hierarchies such that one occupation has, for example, more formal authority while the other has more occupational status-because status inconsistency can inspire jurisdictional conflict; for example, when members of lower-status occupations try to direct members of higher-status occupations. Though studies of such occupations have not focused on gender, they have hinted that tactics used to elicit cooperation and defend jurisdiction are not gender neutral (e.g., DiBenigno, 2019;Karunakaran, 2018;Kellogg, 2014;Sandholtz et al, 2019). As such, gender ordering may also appear in these settings, although future research is needed.…”

Transforming human resources management in the age of Industry 4.0: a matter of survival for HR professionals

“…Some believe that HR is out of date and has no place in the future without transforming itself and accommodating to the challenges faced by organizations in the 21st century (Hecklau et al , 2017). Particularly, since the early 1980s, HR professionals have been criticized for their tendency to focus mostly on traditional administrative tasks and compliance, despite recurring calls to play a more strategic role within organizations (Sandholtz et al , 2019).…”

“…However, this is an unprecedented moment for HR professionals to create greater strategic value as the potential for meaningful people analytics is now within reach (DiClaudio, 2019). Indeed, contrary to the success the profession has had in moving from a purely administrative positioning to one that also ensures legal compliance within the organization, efforts to advocate or adopt strategic positioning within the organization have largely failed (Sandholtz et al , 2019). According to Ulrich’s (1996) seminal four-role model, the vast majority of HR professionals to date have only been able to successfully play the two roles that we describe as “traditional”: administrative expert and employee champion .…”