The Professional Partnership: Relic or Exemplary Form of Governance?
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
The creation of the public corporation in the 19th century drove out the partnership as the predominant form of organizational governance. Yet, within the professional services sector, partnerships have survived and prospered. Moreover, professional services firms that chose to abandon the partnership form tended to become private rather than public corporations. Drawing upon several theories, we compare the efficiency of the partnership relative to corporate forms of governance in the context of the professional services sector. We argue that the professional partnership minimizes agency costs associated with both the private and public corporation. We also argue from tournament theory and property rights theory that partnerships have superior incentive systems for professionals in particular and knowledge workers more generally. However, drawing upon structural-contingency theory, we identify limiting conditions, which affect the relative efficiency of the partnership. We argue that the corporation, especially the private corporation, will be the preferred form of governance where the limiting conditions are prevalent. Nevertheless, we also argue that under specific conditions the partnership form of governance will persist and prosper because it remains unusually suited to the management of knowledge workers.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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