Many analysts have sought to explain the development and growth of management ideas and discourse in recent years, using notions such as the diffusion and consumption of ideas, and analogies with the fashion industry. These frameworks have a number of weaknesses that inhibit their value. Conceptualizing management knowledge or ideas or thinking as a form of discourse leads us to alternative frameworks for examining developments in this field. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be used to explore the social processes and structures from which discourse emanates and which discourse in turn underpins. Bernstein's concept of recontextualization can be employed to analyse the discursive relations between different social spheres or conjunctures within which human action takes place and how discourse is changed as it moves between conjunctures to meet the needs of different social agents. In this respect it can be used to analyse how management discourse unfolds as it is produced, distributed and acquired by agents within the academic, consultant and practitioner conjunctures. By doing so we can explore: the intertextual relations between the discourses; how the management discourse becomes technologized; and how hybrid forms of discourse, which mix genres and styles, emerge.

The conceptualization of professions and professionalization is once again a significant theme in the social sciences. The position of professions seems increasingly complex as relations with other occupational groups develop in ways that seem uncertain, ambiguous and complex. We present a discourse-based framework for the analysis of professional change, drawing on Chouliaraki and Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (CDA), and their adaptations of the work of Laclau and Mouffe, and Bhabha. The model focuses on the articulation process within conjunctures of social practice, and in particular how social actors endeavour to make advantageous articulations which achieve a degree of permanence in an inherently changeable world. It also considers how discourses are articulated together to create hybrid forms of professional discourse. We apply the framework to recent changes in the role and autonomy of general medical practitioners in the United Kingdom following the implementation of the clinical governance system, to assess the value of the framework in addressing the negotiated nature of professionalism and, more specifically, to explore the relationship between managerialism and professional autonomy and status.

The development of HR analytics, the growing dominance of positivistic approaches in academic HRM, and the increasing influence of evidence-based approaches on HR represent a convergence of contextual factors that have the potential to influence HR practice significantly. In this context, we examine how the HR analytics "project" may unfold base on a reflective analysis of a number of data-rich wellbeing projects and empirical evaluations. We focus on the ways in which participants may become enrolled and mobilised in such projects and the implications this has for perceived value and effects of "data" generated by HR analytics. In particular, we draw attention to the social, political, and onto-epistemological processes of the analytics project and draw conclusions about the way in which the analytics project may influence professional practice.

No abstract

This article explores the work and career of law firm partners in the context of a financialised organisational regime, highlighting the effects of performance measures and metrics on the ways partners see themselves and their careers. The empirical analysis reveals a sense of fear and anxiety as partners experience the scrutiny and pressure of financialised performance management. Furthermore, it reveals partners face contradictory demands as they are pushed to meet financial and 'citizen' objectives within the firm. The result is a career as a 'project of the self' that relies on various protection strategies and which results in professionals captured by 'financialization' and unable to assimilate its demands in ways that protect traditional professional values.