How Professionals’ Moral Enactments Shape Intra-Professional Segmentation

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 11: Higher Education and Occupations

Abstract

Professional standards create pressure for “who does what” to look broadly similar across comparable workplaces. Yet similar organizations often diverge in how they reorganize the same profession’s work. We address this puzzle through an abductive, multiple case study of five organizational units within the same life-science profession in one national university system (based on 95 interviews) facing the same shift toward competitive external funding. Across cases, managers and professionals repeatedly negotiated how research, teaching, and service were assembled into jobs. In some units, grant success became a legitimate basis for professional privilege and discretion, producing distinct research-heavy versus teaching- and service-heavy roles. In other units, most professionals continued to combine research with teaching and service; two cases fell in between as these arrangements remained contested. These differences are not well explained by technology adoption, demographics, or client differentiation. Instead, they hinge on local moral orientations regarding when differences in performance among otherwise similar professionals warrant differences in privileges and obligations at work. We identify an entrepreneurial moral orientation that legitimates differential privileges and a communal moral orientation that treats professional obligations as broadly shared regardless of individual performance. We show how these orientations are enacted through recurring allocation decisions that shape who receives time, support, and discretion for particular tasks, where work is anchored, and who has primary responsibility for it. Over time, these decisions stabilize divergent patterns of within-profession segmentation under similar pressures.

Authors

• Søren Lund Frandsen, Copenhagen Business School

• Jane Bjørn Vedel, Copenhagen Business School