Politics in professional service firms: discursive control and struggle through the lens of hegemony
Scott Marshall Allan et al.
Abstract
The transformation of professional service firms (PSFs) has attracted considerable scholarly attention, particularly as these organizations navigate tensions between traditional professional values and emerging managerial controls. While prior studies have mapped these shifts using frameworks such as archetypes, logics, and dyads, these accounts tend to understate the internal politics and related discursive struggles through which change is constructed, resisted, and reconfigured. This paper addresses that gap by introducing a discourse-theoretical perspective grounded in Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) theory of hegemony. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a UK law firm, we examine how firm leaders sought to stabilize a managerial framing of professional success through certain metrics and rankings, and how professionals responded by reinterpreting or challenging these framings in ways that reasserted professional values. The analysis reframes PSFs as arenas of ongoing struggle over the meanings and measures of success. In doing so, the paper highlights the discursive struggles that underlie hegemonic projects of organizational transformation in PSFs and calls for renewed attention to how hybrid forms are enacted and contested in professional contexts.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.