Constructing “one firm”: discursive identity work and power in a global professional service firm

Abstract

Professional service firms (PSFs) have long pursued a one-firm model promising borderless collaboration and consistent quality. Yet integration typically relies on standardized practices, while those expected to enact them value local autonomy and context-sensitive judgment. Prior research has examined this challenge largely through structural and institutional lenses, showing how dispersed ownership, consensus-based governance, and cross-jurisdictional heterogeneity constrain standardization and coordination across offices. However, less is known about the discursive work by which professionals make sense of—and account for—the integration–autonomy tension in situated accounts. We address this gap by analyzing thirty-one semi-structured interviews with professionals across roles and offices in a global, confederated PSF network through the lens of discursive identity work. We identify three recurring discursive practices—constructing mediated authority, enacting stewardship-and-innovation, and relational positioning—through which participants produce locally grounded framings of the one-firm mandate. Rather than straightforward endorsement or resistance, these practices sustain an ambivalence about integration’s compatibility with professional discretion, configuring commitment, discretion, and entitlement across roles and network positions. This paper contributes to one-firm scholarship by showing how professionals enact “one firm” in talk through the discursive repertoires these practices mobilize. On this basis, we reframe the model’s apparent incompleteness as ongoing discursive negotiation rather than an implementation deficit. The paper also contributes to PSF power research by specifying how these same accounts reproduce, qualify, and sometimes reconfigure center–periphery relations, with hierarchy emerging as a provisional accomplishment rather than a settled property of formal structure alone.