explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore twofold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a threepart framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of "becoming", "doing", and "relating". We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.

The upward voicing of ideas is vital to organizational performance. Yet power differences between voicers and those with authority may result in valuable ideas being overlooked. In this ethnographic, 31-month longitudinal study of a multi-disciplinary team in the healthcare sector, we examine how upwardly voiced ideas can endure to reach implementation. Of 208 upwardly voiced ideas, most were rejected in the moment, but 49 reached implementation despite appearing to be initially rejected. These ideas were kept alive by other team members who later drew upon and revived the initial ideas through what we call the voice cultivation process. We detail this process and describe five pathways through which voiced ideas stayed alive to reach implementation by overcoming different forms of resistance. We illustrate how the allyship of others can help voice live on beyond its initial utterance to reach implementation and generate change, even when the person who initially spoke up is no longer on the team or advocating for the idea. By reconceptualizing voice as a collective, interactional process rather than a one-time dyadic event, this paper develops new theory on how employees can help one another’s voice be heard to positively impact their teams and organizations.

Organizational life is rife with conflict between groups that pursue different goals, particularly when groups have strong commitments to professional identities developed outside the organization. I use data from a 30-month comparative ethnographic field study of four U.S. Army combat brigades to examine conflict between commanders who had a goal of fielding a mission-ready force and mental health providers who had a goal of providing rehabilitative mental health care to soldiers. All commanders and providers faced goal and identity conflict and had access to similar integrative mechanisms. Yet only those associated with two brigades addressed these conflicts in ways that accomplished the army’s superordinate goal of having both mission-ready and mentally healthy soldiers. Both successful brigades used what I call “anchored personalization” practices, which included developing personalized relations across groups, anchoring members in their home group identity, and co-constructing integrative solutions to conflict. These practices were supported by an organizational structure in which professionals were assigned to work with specific members of the other group, while remaining embedded within their home group. In contrast, an organizational structure promoting only anchoring in one’s home group identity led to failure when each group pursued its own goals at the expense of the other group’s goals. A structure promoting only personalization across groups without anchoring in one’s home group identity led to failure from cooptation by the dominant group. This study contributes to our understanding of how groups with strong professional identities can work together in service of their organization’s superordinate goals when traditional mechanisms fail.

explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore twofold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a threepart framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of "becoming", "doing", and "relating". We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.