A dynamic model of professional legitimacy: Linking professional logics and jurisdictional threats in the corporate credit rating industry

Abstract

Abstract Research on the professions argues that inference and routinization are key components of professional practice associated with professional legitimacy. However, the literature fails to provide a mechanism linking these practices to legitimacy. The logic of professionalism literature successfully links professional practices to legitimacy via guiding logics, but ignores the importance of routinized practices in the legitimation process. Furthermore, in explaining the prevalence of routinization versus inference in professional occupations, the organizational literature ignores their contributions to legitimacy and exclusively focuses on their contributions to efficiency and effectiveness in the production process. In this article, I propose to resolve all three issues first by interpreting the professional processes of inference and routinization as deriving from distinct professional logics. As such, they provide professionals with unique ideological rationales for legitimacy buffering them from two specific jurisdictional threats. With data from the corporate credit rating industry, I demonstrate that professional firms shift the degree to which they emphasize inference versus routinization in their production process in response to these jurisdictional threats. Finally, I present a model explaining how professional industries rely on a dynamic combination of inference and routinization to maintain a delicate balance over their claimed jurisdictions. This model links the practices of inference and routinization to professional legitimacy via institutional logics, brings greater attention to the importance that routinization plays in the logic of professionalism, and provides a more comprehensive explanation as to why the relative salience of inference and routinization varies within and between professional industries over time.