Abstract This paper explains how corporate and organizational professionals reach top positions, emphasizing organizational careers—the history of organizational experiences throughout an individual’s work life—as a key status dynamic. Trajectories to the top traverse not only in-house career ladders but operate across multiple status orders, specifically as exchanges between hierarchical status (rank within an organization) and organizational status (rank of an organization in the field). I theorize three ideal-type trajectories to the top: fidelity (hierarchical status accumulation in high-status organizations), conversion (trading organizational for hierarchical status), and regulatory capital (exploiting regulatory knowledge and networks for high-status positions). Analysing a novel database of elite careers in the global tax field—a domain marked by corporate and organizational professionalism—I find evidence for the centrality of these three trajectories, with their distribution marked by both general and field-specific dynamics, notably the power of the Big Four firms and the distinctive importance of regulatory experience. Conceptually, the study extends research on contemporary knowledge-based professionals by specifying and showing how status dynamics vary across career pathways and fields; methodologically, it advances a personnel-flow-based measure of organizational status that is applicable across heterogeneous fields.

Abstract In this study, we analyse the discursive strategies of professionalization used by psychology in Spain during its professionalization phase in the health sector in the early twenty-first century. Our primary focus is the conflict with political regulators and other healthcare professions after the Ley de Ordenación de Profesiones Sanitarias (Healthcare Professions Act) came into effect, since this Act calls into question the extent to which psychology can be viewed as health care. We use discourse analysis to determine the discursive structure of the conflict, which has an interprofessional dimension, as well as the professionalization and social closure strategies of psychology within the framework of professional relationships (boundary work). We argue that understanding this conflict requires viewing it as part of the European and international regulation context of healthcare professions. Highlighted in the analysis is the emergence of two psychology discourses divided into four modes of enunciation (professionalizing, cultural, scientific, and political–economic). Among other aspects, the conclusions focus on the dual interprofessional and intraprofessional nature of the conflict and evidence of a dual closure in psychology. The latter’s professionalization strategies in the sector occasionally resemble those employed by nursing, although at other times they are similar to those followed by some paramedical professions.

Abstract This paper examines the complex intertwining of space and (in)visibility practices in professional service firms (PSFs) by drawing on open-ended interviews with thirty architects working in three of the largest and most prestigious architecture firms in Australia. Our findings demonstrate the ways in which space, gender, and inequality are deeply interwoven and played out on an everyday basis. In so doing, we contribute to the scholarship on PSFs, gender and space in two ways. First, we highlight the dynamics of space itself in enabling women to practice (in)visibility as a coping mechanism. Second, we argue that the persistent binaries of mother/worker, home/work invisibilize women’s socio spatial agency, that is, how women strategically (in)visibilize themselves, foregrounding how gender gets done in PSFs. These insights shed new light on why gender norms are perhaps slow to change in architecture and more broadly in PSFs and open-up new possibilities of change by allowing for the traversal of spatial and gender binaries.

Abstract This paper describes and explains how different stories for clinicians and administrators are constructed and how they influence occupational practices in healthcare organizations. To do that, we employed an analytical frame based on research that underscores the role of temporality and placing for organizing processes and professional relations. The enactments and constructions shown in the data carry consequences for behaviours and relations in practice, resulting in two parallel stories being present simultaneously. The stories tell how administrators and clinicians, respectively, are those with prerequisites that can be summarized as being privileged or undervalued. As these stories are in parallel, it becomes impossible for them to meet and converge, meaning that professional knowledge and initiative may be not sufficiently utilized, for both groups.

Abstract This study investigates the professionalization processes that accompany the integration of external mandates into mainstream organizations. In response to evolving societal pressures, organizations often create roles specifically tasked with developing practices that align with these external demands. Using the case of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) analysts in asset management companies, this longitudinal study examines the evolution of the ESG analysts’ occupational mandate through three distinct phases. Our findings reveal that ESG analysts’ mandates have developed along technical and normative dimensions, reflecting shifts in both required skills and professional ethos. This study contributes to the professionalization literature by illustrating how external mandates are reinterpreted and adapted within organizational settings.

Abstract In organizational contexts, professional boundaries serve a dual purpose by distinguishing various professions from one another and regulating access to power, status, and rewards. Individuals operating within professions in which such boundaries are not clearly or explicitly defined face the risk of compromising their status and autonomy. However, they possess the agency to actively define their profession and enhance its standing among both internal and external stakeholders. This study explores how homeroom teachers in the Israeli education system—recognized as a distinct occupation within the broader teaching profession—engage in boundary work to form and define their professional group. Our findings reveal that (1) homeroom teachers employ adaptable boundary work strategies, tailored to their interactions with different key stakeholders. Specifically, they (a) define boundaries to clarify, for themselves, the parameters of their own roles; (b) balance boundaries with partners inside the school (administrators and subject teachers) to facilitate day-to-day collaboration while simultaneously asserting their own roles; and (c) orchestrate boundaries when interacting with external partners (students’ parents), acknowledging the distinction between roles while primarily seeking to foster effective joint work towards the common goal of helping students succeed. (2) Despite the diversity in their approaches, all homeroom teachers exhibit a unique expertise, allowing them to combine boundary-setting with inclusivity, highlighting the dynamic and interactive nature of the boundary work process. This dual nature enhances the effectiveness of communication and collaboration within the educational system, molding the role of homeroom teachers as a distinct professional group.

Abstract The contemporary work environment is characterized by frequent transitions throughout an individual’s career. A relatively recent trend concerns established professionals relocating in newly emerging occupations. Despite the extensive research conducted on the construction of professional identity, there is still a dearth of knowledge regarding how occupational identity is formed. The aim of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of the process through which professionals (re)construct their occupational identity when making a career transition to an emerging occupation. Drawing on twenty-seven interviews with professionals in the accounting and law enforcement fields who have transitioned to the emerging antifraud occupation, we explore how they navigate tensions between different aspirational, professional, and expected identities, and how they employ strategies to establish or blur boundaries to define their emerging occupational identity. This study offers a deeper understanding of the process by which a coherent occupational identity is constructed and shaped by interaction between multiple identities. This research contributes to the literature on career transitions by developing a more nuanced understanding of the occupational boundary strategies that professionals employ to construct a coherent occupational identity during a career transition. Further, our study underscores a pivotal concern regarding the maintenance of professionalism as professionals move into nascent occupational roles. In such circumstances, the definition of occupational identity may be less clearly delineated, and the establishment of rule-setting may be primarily determined by the organization’s management, thus curtailing the autonomy traditionally associated with professionalism.

Abstract The rise of corporate professions reignites a longstanding sociological debate concerning the structure of intra-professional relations within purportedly collegiate entities. However, unlike the classic case of independent professions, research has yet to examine how corporate professions stratify occupationally. The omission is surprising since the motivational prospect of corporate practitioners climbing an embedded career ladder engenders what one might reasonably refer to as ‘stratification by design’. Theoretically, while scholars demarcate several types of intra-professional relations within independent professions (e.g. extraction, protection, and imperialism), how far such arrangements transpose to a corporate professional context lacking occupational autonomy remains uncertain. Addressing the research gap, our study corroborates sequential multi-method Hong Kong and UK data to examine intra-professional stratification in human resource management, a role engendering a distinctly organizational rather than independent professionalizing form. Three discerning research questions guide our investigation. First, how are documented human resources (HR) certification criteria structured by membership level and competency composition? Second, to what extent do the stipulated competencies reflect empirical practice? Third, on what organizational, occupational, and demographic grounds do ‘elite’ HR practitioners claim superordinate status? Across both case contexts, our study finds that while strategic competencies assume a higher certification status than administrative competencies, preserving routine maintenance remains an indispensable organizational activity. The exception concerns a group of predominantly executive-level practitioners abstaining from administrative duties, raising questions about their functional integration, and whether the ascendancy of managerial logics over professional logics produces a compromised form of occupational imperialism.

Abstract Architects’ practice is characterized by a narrative of progressive unease about lack of autonomy coupled with a recent steer from professional figureheads towards the benefits of connected ways of working with other occupations, such as contractors and developers, rather than boundary protection. We explore this through a study of UK architects working on residential facilities for later life, involving semi-structured interviews with architects and ethnographic fieldwork of two building projects followed over time. We show that architects experience key stakeholders in their intersection on two axes: as ‘virtual-embodied’ and ‘individual(s)-collective(s)’. Facility end-users (residents, staff) are encountered more commonly in virtual (abstract) than in embodied (tangible, visible) form, and as collectives rather than as individuals (as ‘virtual collectives’). In juxtaposition, they tend to encounter clients (facility owners, developers), building contractors, and planners in embodied rather than virtual form and as individuals rather than as collectives (as ‘embodied individuals’). We explore the consequences for architects’ ‘practice modalities’, broadly defined as how something happens, is done, or is experienced. We show that ‘embodied individuals’ foster a practice modality of ‘dependency and contingency’ where stakeholders tend to have more sway, whereas ‘virtual communities’ enable a practice modality of ‘autonomy and personal artistry’. However, ‘embodied individuals’ and ‘virtual collectives’ are mutually informing rather than independent sets of relationships; that is, they bear on each other during the architect’s work, sometimes in challenging, even conflicting, ways. An analysis of how architects navigate this helps to understand how a build evolves as it does from architects’ perspectives.