Towards corporate professionalization: The case of project management, management consultancy and executive search

The knowledge economy has been characterised by the proliferation of new forms of expert labour such as IT (Marks and Scholarios, 2007), advertising (Alvesson, 2004), and as discussed in this paper, project management (Hodgson and Muzio, 2010), management consultancy (Fincham, 2006; Kirkpatrick et al, 2011) and executive search (Faulconbridge et al., 2008). Many of these occupations would lay claim to the mantle of ‘professionalism’; interestingly, however, they have adopted strategies, tactics and methods which depart in significant ways from the example of established professions such as law, chartered accounting and medicine. The relevant literature has explained this situation with reference to the peculiarities of an occupation’s knowledge-base (Reed, 1996; Fincham, 2006) and to the historical challenges of a context which is increasingly sceptical of professional claims (Hanlon, 1999; Muzio and Ackroyd, 2005). In this context, professionalisation, with its emphasis on monopolistic market closure, restrictive practices and self-regulation is, in some quarters, seen as neither desirable nor achievable; rather new knowledge intensive occupations are expected to succeed through innovation, entrepreneurship and active engagement with the markets. Indeed, the success of these new occupations has been presented as evidence of the crisis of professionalism as an occupational template and its displacement by more entrepreneurial and managerial forms of organization (Brock, et al, 1999; Dent and Whitehead, 2002).