Rescripting Client Action: Emotion Work and the Boundaries of Professional Jurisdiction

Abstract

This paper addresses a major gap in the study of professions, which is the absence of clients in research on the boundaries of professional jurisdiction. To do so, it shifts the standard analytical focus in two important ways: from inter-profession relations to the professional?client relationship; and from a profession-centered perspective to a client-centered one. Numerous empirical studies of client movements in professionalized fields such as health care, education and religion show that clients organize in many ways to redraw service arrangements and the boundaries of professional jurisdiction. Yet, one wouldn’t learn much about this phenomenon by reading existing organizational research on professionalized fields, which largely explains service arrangements and jurisdictional boundaries as resulting from inter-professional struggles for epistemic control over domains of activity, while all but ignoring client action. Building upon insights from Hirschman’s exit, voice, and loyalty framework, Mannheim’s theory of ideology and utopia, and organizational research informed by Goffman’s idea of an “interaction order”, we develop a six-part typology of client action scripts. We then elucidate how different forms of emotion work carried out in framing contests between ‘incumbent’ professionals and ‘challenger’ clients can evoke distinct felt emotions that, in turn, rescript client action toward different boundary projects.