This volume explores the influence of professional service firms on public policy-making from a global perspective. Drawing on cases studies from around the world, researchers from different disciplines—including sociology, political science, geography, anthropology, history, and management studies—examine how professional service firms have generated power in the policy-making process. The chapters further investigate the structure and organization of these firms and their relationship with public agencies. They discuss the impact of strategies, techniques and models promoted by these firms on political decision-making. And they analyze how these firms have contributed to the formation of global policy-pipelines, facilitating the quick diffusion of policy ideas across time and space. Exposing how professional advisors can undermine democratic decision-making, the chapters in this book explore the potential for resistance and regulation of public-private relationships.

Who controls how transnational issues are defined and treated? In recent decades professional coordination on a range of issues has been elevated to the transnational level. International organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and firms all make efforts to control these issues. This volume shifts focus away from looking at organizations and zooms in on how professional networks exert control in transnational governance. It contributes to research on professions and expertise, policy entrepreneurship, normative emergence, and change. The book provides a framework for understanding how professionals and organizations interact, and uses it to investigate a range of transnational cases. The volume also deploys a strong emphasis on methodological strategies to reveal who controls transnational issues, including network, sequence, field, and ethnographic approaches. Bringing together scholars from economic sociology, international relations, and organization studies, the book integrates insights from across fields to reveal how professionals obtain and manage control over transnational issues.

Conceived as the meanings that individuals attach to their selves, a substantial stockpile of theory related to identities accumulated across the arts, social sciences, and humanities over many decades continues to nourish contemporary research on self-identities in organizations. In times which are more reflexive, narcissistic, and fluid, the identities of participants in organizations are increasingly less fixed and less certain, making identity issues both more salient and more interesting. Particular attention has been given to processes of identity construction, often styled 'identity work'. Research has focused on how, why, and when such processes occur, and their implications for organizing and individual, group, and organizational outcomes. This has resulted in a burgeoning stream of research from discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio-cognitive, and psychodynamic perspectives that most often casts individuals' efforts to fabricate identities as intentional, relational, and consequential. Seemingly intractable debates centred on the nature of identities - their relative stability or fluidity, whether they are best regarded as coherent or fractured, positive (or not), and how they are fabricated within relations of power - combined with other conceptual issues continue to invigorate the field. However, these debates have also led to some scepticism regarding the future potential of identities research. Yet as the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, there are considerable grounds for optimism that identity, as root metaphor, nexus concept, and means to bridge levels of analysis has significant potential to generate multiple compelling streams of theorizing in organization and management studies.

This book discusses common management and work practices in professional service organizations. Alvehus opens important discussions on what it means to work, manage, and be managed in such professional organizations, casting light on classic conflicts. He takes everyday work as a starting point and adopts a critical view that focuses on challenges and struggles in both public and private settings. He offers new perspectives and key insights for the future of professionalism. Providing a comprehensive overview of the field, this book is an important guide for understanding how professionalism is maintained in today’s organizations. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of management and leadership.

This Handbook presents a comprehensive and contemporary compendium of the field of cross-cultural management (CCM). In recognition of current trends regarding migration, political ethnocentrisms and increasing nationalism, the chapters in this volume not only cover the traditional domains of CCM such as expatriation, global (virtual) teamwork and leadership, but also examine emerging topics such as bi/multi-culturalism, migration, religion and more, all considered from a global perspective. The result is a Handbook that acknowledges and builds on a variety of research traditions (from mainstream to critical), updates existing knowledge in relation to current challenges, and sets the direction for future research and developments, making this an invaluable resource for researchers in the field, and across related areas of international business, management, and intercultural relations. Part 1: Multiple Research Paradigms for the Study of Culture Part 2: Research Methods in Cross-Cultural Management Part 3: Cross-Cultural Management and Intersecting Fields of Study Part 4: Individuals and Teams in Cross-Cultural Management Part 5: Global mobility and Cross-Cultural Management Part 6: Developing Intercultural Competence

The Routledge Companion to Accounting History presents a single-volume synthesis of research in this expanding field, exploring and analysing accounting from ancient civilisations to the modern day. No longer perceived as the narrow study of how a mysterious technique was used in past, the scope of accounting history has widened substantially. This revised and updated volume moves beyond the history of accounting technologies, accounting theories and practices and the accountants who applied them. Expert contributors from around the world explore the interfaces between accounting and the economy, society, culture and the polity. Accounting history is shown to offer important insights into such disparate phenomena as the evolution of capitalism, control of labour, gender and family relationships, racial exploitation, the operation of religious organisations, and the functioning of the state. Illuminating the foundation and development of accounting systems, this updated, classic book opens the field to a new generation of accounting scholars and historians around the world.

Professions and professionalism have played an integral part in business and society. In this book, Mike Saks provides a thorough overview of this field through an analysis of a range of professions, including, amongst others, accountants, doctors and lawyers. The book offers a critical analysis of such privileged occupational groups in modern societies. Anticipating a positive if changing role for such groups in the years ahead, the book outlines conflicting theoretical perspectives on professions and discusses current developments in an accessible, multi-disciplinary style. The book documents their evolution and contemporary transformation from medieval guilds to fully-fledged professions and international professional service firms, while pointing a path towards their future in the world of work and beyond. With insights into the recent challenges provided by clients, citizens, the state and corporations in neo-liberal societies, Professions provides a concise overview that will be essential reading for students, academics and others interested in the operation of these key occupational groups in business and society.