Marion Brivot

Controls of Knowledge Production, Sharing and Use in Bureaucratized Professional Service Firms:

One of the main obstacles to the current bureaucratization trend in large professional service firms (PSFs) is the organic nature of professional knowledge production, sharing and use. Centralized knowledge management (KM) systems aimed at codifying ‘best practice’ solutions to recurrent client questions for large-scale reuse are a common strategy increasingly employed to overcome this obstacle. Using a socio-ethnographic case study of a business law firm in Paris, this research examines whether the use of centralized KM systems in bureaucratized PSFs contributes to a shift in power from professionals to managers. More specifically, are administrative controls over knowledge resources increasing, or do professionals retain power (i.e. some level of social and self-control) over knowledge production, sharing and use? The results of this study indicate that, far from losing ground, professionals’ social and self-controls have been reinvented and reformed in a bureaucratized context.

The challenge of sustaining organizational hybridity: The role of power and agency

Hybrid organizations harbor different and often conflicting institutional logics, thus facing the challenge of sustaining their hybridity. Crucial to overcoming this challenge is the identification process of organizational actors. We propose a theorization of how power relations affect this process. More specifically, we argue that an actor’s power influences their own professional identity: an increase [decrease] in their power, via the heightened [diminished] control that this power provides them over organizational discourse, boosts [threatens] their identity. Our theorization has implications for the longevity of a newly adopted logic within an organization. If the new logic modifies incumbent power relations, the identities of (formerly and newly) powerful individuals are influenced, which may lead these individuals to promote or resist the new logic, thereby affecting the odds that the logic will survive within the organization. We illustrate our theorization with a case study in a professional service firm. Our study contributes to nascent research on hybrid organizations by emphasizing the role of power and agency in the longevity of hybridity.

Internal audit quality: a polysemous notion?

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to characterize how those who perform (internal auditors), mandate (audit committee (AC) members), use (AC members and external auditors) and normalize (the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA)) internal audit work, respectively make sense of the notion of “internal audit quality” (IAQ). Design/methodology/approach - – This study is predicated on the meta-analysis of extant literature on IAQ, 56 interviews with internal auditors and AC members of public or para-public sector organizations in Canada, and archival documents published by the IIA, analyzed in the light of framing theory. Findings - – Four interpretative schemes (or frames) emerge from the analysis, called “manager,” “eminence grise,” “professional” and “watchdog.” They respectively correspond to internal auditors’, AC members’, the IIA’s and external auditors’ viewpoints and suggest radically different perspectives on how IAQ should be defined and controlled (via input, throughput, output or professional controls). Research limitations/implications - – Empirically, the authors focus on rare research data. Theoretically, the authors delineate four previously undocumented competing frames of IAQ. Practical implications - – Practically, the various governance actors involved in assessing IAQ can learn from the study that they should confront their views to better coordinate their quality control efforts. Originality/value - – Highlighting the contrast between these frames is important because, so far, extant literature has predominantly focussed on only one perspective on IAQ, that of external auditors. The authors suggest that IAQ is more polysemous and complex than previously acknowledged, which justifies the qualitative and interpretive approach.

The Construction of Risk Management Credibility within Corporate Boardrooms

Abstract Despite various corporate collapses over the last decades, risk management is increasingly influential across organizations worldwide, as if the apparatus’ credibility was impermeable to scandals that, from critical angles, cast doubt on its efficacy. Relying on a cultural perspective of analysis highlighting the range of social processes that protect prevailing institutions’ legitimacy from aberrations, we examined the sense-making approaches employed by corporate boardroom actors to maintain their confidence in the credibility of the risk management apparatus despite being exposed to a continuous flow of corporate failures pointing to risk management efficacy limitations. Specifically, we conducted 35 interviews with corporate board stakeholders, mostly board members and corporate consultants. Our analysis indicates that actors involved in risk management processes tend to interpret aberration cases through perspectives that put the blame on some implementation deficiency, thereby ensuring that risk managements core assumptions are not questioned. These perspectives point to a defensive system of thought grounded in the director and consultancy communities, whose main referents are subject to intense work and re-conceptualization in the aftermath of aberrations, thereby providing community members with the means to make sense of the frictions of organizational life in ways that maintain the legitimacy of the risk management apparatus.

Reinventing organizational control: Meaning contest surrounding reputational risk controllability in the social media arena

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into how a constellation of actors seek to define, shape, and reinvent the notion of organizational control at the confluence of social media (SM) and corporate reputational risk. Design/methodology/approach - Following the approach suggested by Janesick (1998) and Denzin and Lincoln (1998), the authors undertook an in-depth qualitative analysis of a large number of data sources including interviews, best-selling books by renowned SM specialists, relevant press articles drawn from a Factiva search, and documents published by the Big Four firms and professional accounting institutes in Canada on how organizations should use SM to protect their reputational capital. Findings - Four competing SM reputational risk control perspectives inductively emerged from the analysis: the Beyond Control frame, the Subveillance frame, the De-territorialization frame, and the Re-territorialization frame, with large accounting firms and professional accounting institutes especially promoting the latter. Originality/value - The control literature has been criticized by many scholars as being in urgent need of updating. By inductively theorizing four original control frames in the SM arena, the research aims to move management control research in new directions.

Constructing, Contesting, and Overloading: A Study of Risk Management Framing

Abstract In this study, we examine the ways in which actuarial consultants attempt to motivate their clients to see pension-related accounting regulations and market volatility as ‘risks’ that need to be managed through particular risk-mitigating technologies. This study is predicated on 23 interviews conducted with actuarial consultants and their clients and consulting agencies’ publically available documents. Taking framing theory and the sociological literature on risk as conceptual starting points, we find that consultants engage in specific framing strategies to persuade clients by rhetorically weaving a series of financial risk objects, financial de-risking strategies, and calls for action. We also find that current and prospective clients sometimes contest consultants’ prescriptions, despite the pervasiveness of risk management as the ultima ratio of organizational governance. This contestation occurs, ironically, because adopting de-risking solutions in one area is perceived by some clients as triggering new risks in areas unforeseen by consultants. This research increases our knowledge of how new risk objects and de-risking solutions come into existence and why some risk management practices fail to be diffused within organizations despite the staggering success of the risk management rationality. We explain the latter through the concepts of frame diffraction and overload.

Book Review: Andrew Sturdy, Christopher Wright, and Nick Wylie Management as Consultancy: Neo-bureaucracy and the Consultant Manager

Albeit not originating from Sturdy, Wright and Wylie (2015), the above quotation nicely summarizes the main thesis developed in Management as Consultancy and echoes the title of Grey’s (1999) article, some fifteen years ago: “We are all managers now.” The authors explicitly pose the following research question: what might neo-bureaucratic management look like, how does it emerge and with what outcomes? The same answer is repeated three times: management consulting. They conclude that (a) neo-bureaucratic management has become almost similar to management consulting activities; (b) management consulting is a means through which neo-bureaucracy is diffused; and (c) neo-bureaucracy encourages work relationships, identities and careers typically found in management consulting firms. The book comprises two parts. The first part is a theoretical reflection on neo-bureaucracy as an organizational archetype and as a new style of management (chapters 1 and 2). The second part is informed by 136 interviews in over 50 organizations ranging from multinational financial services, communications and manufacturing firms, to local and national government departments and health care institutions in the UK and Australia. These interviews document how both internal management consultants and what the authors call “consultant managers” (e.g., project managers, heads of business improvement, etc.) define their work and make sense of the difficulties that they face in their day-to-day activities (chapters 3 to 7). We know, based on the work of Clegg (2012), Courpasson (2000), Farrell and Morris (2003), Vie (2010) and many others, that there has been a shift away from Weber’s bureaucracy: less rule adherence, fewer hierarchical controls, less standardization, and more flexibility, increased trust and more self-directed controls, to the point that some have begun using the phrase “post bureaucracy.” Yet, we cannot fail to notice that bureaucracies have not disappeared and remain a widespread organizational form today, in the public sector, obviously, but not exclusively. Bureaucracies have however metamorphosed into soft, light, hybrid, customer-oriented, autopoietic and selectively heterarchical systems of organizing. The authors of Management as Consultancy thus find it more relevant to speak of neo(rather than post-) bureaucracies. Neo-bureaucracies, in their view, are organizations where traditional top-down, centralized systems of control are juxtaposed with areas of delegated autonomy, where functional teams coexist with multidisciplinary project teams, and where bureaucratic management tools and standardization processes do not preclude a certain level of improvisation. 631715OSS0010.1177/0170840616631715Organization StudiesBook Review research-article2016