Episodic and Systemic Power in the Transformation of Professional Service Firms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
abstract We examine the roles of episodic and systemic forms of power in radical organizational change. Drawing on a study of three attempted transformations in professional service firms from traditional professional partnerships into managed professional businesses – one relatively complete and two incomplete – we identify two key mechanisms that link episodic and systemic forms of power and show how those mechanisms affect the likelihood that organizations will be able to successfully undergo radical change. We find that episodic power is able to initiate and energize radical change when it represents a significant break from traditional authority structures and is legitimated through appeals to traditional organizational values. We find that systemic power is able to institutionalize radical change when the systems associated with it are legitimated by the skilled use of language by key actors and then left to operate independently by those actors. By articulating the specific mechanisms that link episodic and systemic power, our study provides a more complete model of the role of power in radical change, enabling better prediction of the likelihood of successful transformation and a fuller theoretical explanation of change outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".