25 years since ‘P2’: Taking stock and charting the future of professional firms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we introduce the theme of the special issue, reviewing and analyzing 25 years of the professional partnership, or P2, stream of research. We structure our analysis around the three dimensions of control that structured the original P2 paper—strategic, operating, and financial control—and their underlying drivers: knowledge intensity, professionalized workforce, and low capital intensity. We then introduce the five papers selected for the special issue, positioning each relative to the conceptual scheme of the research field as a whole. We then identify a set of themes that are poised to dominate professional firm research for the next quarter century—namely internationalization, changing career and work–life preferences, de/re/regulation, and technology. These analyses lead us to a new set of PSF dimensions, which we present as an emerging picture of this dynamic field of research and practice.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".