Abstract
Recent research suggests that most professionals are happy to comply with bureaucratic and commercial constraints: the long-standing organizational-professional conflict (OPC) seems to have vanished. Suddaby, Gendron and Lam (2009) propose a tentative explanation for this evolution: professionals socialized in a bureaucratic setting no longer perceive a conflict between professional and bureaucratic/commercial logics. In this paper, we assess and enrich this explanation via a case study in a French business tax law firm. We find empirical support for Suddaby et al.’s (2009) explanation: when our case firm bureaucratized its work processes, its lawyers were more likely to experience an OPC if their early socialization occurred in a professional rather than a bureaucratic environment. Lawyers who do not experience an OPC appear to struggle with a novel, professional-professional, conflict (PPC): they report resentment towards colleagues who, within their profession, operate in a different field of expertise. Our study thus suggests that professionals who, because of their early bureaucratic socialization, do not feel an OPC grapple instead with a PPC.
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