James Faulconbridge

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.

The Journal of Economic Geography (JoEG) is 23 years old in 2024. Since its birth in the early years of this century, the journal has continually evolved as successive disruptive forces that have transformed the economy and academic research in economics and economic geography. The journal was conceived during and born in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble and has lived through and reported on global shocks, including economic and financial crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the current climate emergency. It has reflected and documented the local manifestations of such global disruptions and witnessed the increasingly uneven geographical distribution of opportunities and costs of economic globalization and technological progress. During this time, the editorial team has also evolved. Most recently, the year 2023 was a year of change, with three new editors—Jorge De la Roca and Amanda Ross (economics) and James Faulconbridge (economic geography) joining Stephen Gibbons (economics) and Simona Iammarino (economic geography).

Below we provide responses to the ongoing debate sparked by Mirko Noordegraaf’s intervention in suggesting that we are moving toward forms of ‘connective professionalism’. Critics in this debate have objected to Noordegraaf in a number of ways. Some object to a conflation of ideal types and empirical description. Others assert that Noordegraaf suggests a staged process of moving from protective to connective types of professionalism does not ring true; that we can finds forms of connection and protection in contemporary professionalism and in professional action. Our companions in this issue (Alvehus, Avnoon, and Oliver) suggest that greater connectiveness also permits new forms of protection as part of professionalism. Our short essays contribute to the Noordegraaf debate by focusing less on professionalism and more on how forms of professional action lead to mechanisms of connection and protection.