The HR world is abuzz with talk of big data and the transformative potential of HR analytics. This article takes issue with optimistic accounts, which hail HR analytics as a 'must have' capability that will ensure HR's future as a strategic management function while transforming organisational performance for the better. It argues that unless the HR profession wises up to both the potential and drawbacks of this emerging field and engages operationally and strategically to develop better methods and approaches, it is unlikely that existing practices of HR analytics will deliver transformational change. Indeed, it is possible that current trends will seal the exclusion of HR from strategic, board-level influence while doing little to benefit organisations and actively damaging the interests of employees.

It is often assumed in the literature on public management reforms that radical changes in values, work and organization have occurred or are under way. In this paper our aim is to raise questions about this account. Focusing on three services in the UK, each dominated by organized professions -health care, housing, and social services -signifi cant variations in the effectiveness of reforms are noted. The available research also suggests that these outcomes have been inversely proportional to the efforts expended on introducing new management practices. The most radical changes have been in housing, where, paradoxically, successive UK governments focused least attention. By contrast, in health and social services, management restructuring has been less effective, despite the greater resources devoted to it. This variation is attributed to professional values and institutions, against which reforms were directed, and the extent to which different groups became locked either into strategies of resistance or accommodation.Stephen Ackroyd is in the Lancaster University Management School, University of Lancaster . Ian Kirkpatrick in the Leeds University Business School . Richard M. Walker is in the

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This collection seeks to reconnect two separate streams of work on professional organizations and professional occupations. In particular the articles collected here identify two key themes: (1) the challenges and opportunities that professional organizations pose for established and emerging professionalization projects and (2) the extent to which professional organizations create, institutionalize and manipulate new forms of professionalism and models of professionalization. To this effect, this collection brings together a number of articles from a broad range of disciplines (sociology, management, healthcare, accountancy, law and geography), theoretical backgrounds and national contexts which explore the complex connections between professional occupations and organizations.

In health systems around the world the current trend has been for doctors to increase their participation in management. This has been taken to imply a common process of re-stratification with new divisions emerging between medical elites and the rank and file. However, our understanding of this change remains limited and it is open to question just how far one can generalise. In this paper we investigate this matter drawing on path dependency theory and ideas from the sociology of professions. Focusing on public management reforms in the hospital sectors of two European countries -Denmark and England -we note similarities in the timing and objectives of reforms, but also differences in the response of the medical profession. While in both countries new hybrid clinical management roles have been created, this process has advanced much further and has been more strongly supported by the medical profession in Denmark than in England. These findings suggest that processes of re-stratification are more path dependent than is frequently acknowledged. They also highlight the importance of national institutions that have shaped professional development and differences in the way reforms have been implemented in each country for explaining variation.