Recently, there has been an increased focus on finance as a form of control in corporations. In this paper, we explore financialization as an employee control strategy in a Big Four accountancy firm, and more specifically how it affects the everyday lives of the professionals within the firm. We found financialization involved attempts to transform employees working lives into an investment activity where work w hope of a high future pay-off. Employees sought to increase the value of their investment by skilful manipulation. If wisely managed, this investment could yield significant benefits in the future. We argue that financialization involves active employee participation and is a way of binding other forms of control together.

HRM is considered of vital strategic importance in professional service firms, but professionals generally resist these managerial initiatives. In this article, I report on an in-depth case study of a tax

The case in this study is the introduction of a new more prominent position for teachers. The aim is to contribute to the literature on stratification and organizing of professions. This is done by addressing the question how division of labor is affected by enhanced organization of a profession? The paper illustrates how stratification took place and a new division of labor emerged. Not much conflict was observed regarding the new division of labor and it is proposed that this is because the new division of labor did not challenge the dominance over the core domain of teachers or of principals. The increase in organization did not lead to an increase in control of the profession but an increase in control by the profession. In addition, stratification in fact led to a de-hybridization of the roles of teachers and principals.

The aim of this article is to contribute to the literature on how stratification affects professions. Our case study is the ‘first teacher reform’ in Sweden, which introduced a more prominent position for some teachers. In this article, we elaborate six different first teacher types and analyse how these affect the profession. While elites are generally described as hybrids, we conclude that several of our types rather led to a de‐hybridization of roles, where managers became more administratively focused, and elites more anchored to professional tasks. We conclude that elite roles reveal various potentials in being strengthening/weakening or shattering/integrating to the profession, but, in contrast to other studies on professional elites, the majority of roles studied here are both strengthening and integrating to the profession. The study is qualitative and is based on 111 interviews, 12 weeks of shadowing and 53 observed meetings.

Professional service firms (PSFs) are characterized by contingent and contested power relations among an extended group of professional peers. Studies of such firms can therefore yield important insights for the literatures on collective leadership and leader–follower relations. Yet to date PSF scholars have neglected the topic of leadership, and leadership scholars have neglected the context of PSFs. Based on 102 interviews across the consulting, accounting and legal sectors, we identify three relational processes through which professional peers co-construct collective leadership: legitimizing, negotiating and manoeuvring. We demonstrate how the relational processes taken together constitute an unstable equilibrium, both in the moment and over time, emphasizing how leadership in PSFs is inherently contested and fragile. Our model contributes to theories of collective leadership and leader–follower relations by foregrounding the power and politics that underlie collective leadership. We highlight the significance of the individual leader within the collective. We challenge assumptions concerning the binary nature of leadership and followership, by showing how colleagues may grant leadership identities to their peers without necessarily granting them leadership authority, and without claiming follower identities for themselves.