Politics in professional service firms: discursive control and struggle through the lens of hegemony

What is it about?

The transformation of professional service firms (PSFs) has attracted considerable scholarly attention, particularly as these organizations navigate tensions between traditional professional values and emerging managerial controls. While prior studies have mapped these shifts using frameworks such as archetypes, logics, and dyads, these accounts tend to understate the internal politics and related discursive struggles through which change is constructed, resisted, and reconfigured. This paper addresses that gap by introducing a discourse-theoretical perspective grounded in Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) theory of hegemony. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a UK law firm, we examine how firm leaders sought to stabilize a managerial framing of professional success through certain metrics and rankings, and how professionals responded by reinterpreting or challenging these framings in ways that reasserted professional values. The analysis reframes PSFs as arenas of ongoing struggle over the meanings and measures of success. In doing so, the paper highlights the discursive struggles that underlie hegemonic projects of organizational transformation in PSFs and calls for renewed attention to how hybrid forms are enacted and contested in professional contexts.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

In professional service firms, ongoing waves of managerial and organizational change have increasingly centred on how ‘success’ is defined and measured. This study shows why such change often remains contested even when performance measures are formally accepted. The conflict is not about using metrics, but about what those measures are made to mean and what they imply for autonomy, ownership, and participation. As a result, definitions of ‘success’ remain the object of continuing struggle rather than a settled foundation for organizational alignment.