Professions, organizations and the state: Applying the sociology of the professions to the case of management consultancy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the recent literature on knowledge-based occupations it is frequently noted that some groups, such as management consultants, have been far less successful than others in developing a system of professional regulation and organization. This is generally attributed to the functional characteristics of their knowledge base, which is too elusive, fuzzy and perishable to sustain traditional professionalization projects. It is also suggested that these groups have little interest in becoming professions and have relied instead on alternative occupational strategies. In this article, drawing on a range of secondary sources, the authors highlight certain limitations of this account and offer an alternative. Focusing on the historical development of professional associations in the context of management consulting in the UK, the authors illustrate the role played by the state and large firms in undermining efforts to professionalize. A key contribution of the article is to highlight the need for a more inclusive approach to understanding why new knowledge-based occupations have failed to professionalize, one that gives more weight to the historical context and the role played by other key actors in shaping change.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it