Mass-Production of Professional Services and Pseudo-Professional Identity in Tax Preparation Work

Abstract

This paper investigates a mechanism that sustains mass- production of professional services. The replacement of professionals with a combination of non-professional workers and expertise-encapsulating technology, characteristic of contemporary expert work, allows firms to reduce the cost of labor and to access the benefits of scale. But the very absence of professionals at the point of service delivery may result in devaluation of the services as non-professional by consumers. To avoid that, frontline workers delivering professional services need to project a genuine professional identity, which is problematic, given the workers’ lack of professional training and the low economic incentives of their deprofessionalized jobs. By analyzing rich qualitative and experimental data from large U.S. tax services firms, this paper builds on critiques of the agency theory and proposes a “reverse crowding out” mechanism that sustains professional identity in non- professional low-wage workers. When firms engage in strategic image professionalism, the poor job conditions that ostensibly contradict and inhibit workers’ professional identity may instead sustain and promote it. The resulting professional orientation of workers allows the firms to engage in low-cost mass-production of professional services. Implications for theories of worker motivation are discussed.