Editorial for Journal of Operations Management special issue on “Professional Service Operations Management (PSOM)”

摘要

Professional services such as medicine, law, dentistry and education clearly sit at the center of our societies but, perhaps less obviously, knowledge-intensive services of various kinds also make increasingly important economic and employment contributions as economies develop. These services, including management consulting, investment banking, advertising, engineering, architecture, etc., also provide critical inputs for other public and private sector organizations as they seek to create high value products and services. Yet despite this societal and economic significance, perhaps in part because of their typically ‘supporting’ role, professional services remain largely under-researched in the Operations Management field. This special issue represents the multi-year cumulative efforts of a group of scholars who responded to our call to attempt to better characterize this “distinct environment for managing operations” (Goodale et al., 2008, p. 670). Their work is varied in approach and focus, ranging from analyses of ‘classic’ professional service settings, such as healthcare operations, to investigations of other advisory services, such as global engineering networks, to explorations of how bodies of professional knowledge emerge and the dynamics of how value is appropriated by boundary keepers, knowledge workers, and clients. Taken together we believe these papers better detail the shape of what we are convinced remains a significant opportunity for OM scholars to undertake novel, interesting and, critically, impactful research. In this editorial, we try to locate the various papers in a broader conceptual framework, include some specific additional insights where appropriate, and to signpost some areas where we feel the SI has limited coverage. Levels of customer contact (i.e., lots of face to face interactions, meetings, consultations, etc.) and consequent delivery specifications (i.e., every condition, case, problem is different) are understood to be high, and; Operational processes that emerge as a consequence of ‘professionals’ making judgments about both ends (what constitutes an adequate/appropriate outcome) and means (the content and sequence of process steps) are essentially fluid/flexible in character. Interesting - and broadly valid – though such service characterizations can be, they leave scope for substantial further reflection/investigation. Fig. 1 builds on insights from Abbott's seminal sociological analysis of professions (1988) to model this process of professional judgment. The process of knowledge work (adapted from Abbott, 1998). In both the diagnosis and treatment phases (N.B. the language is medical in origin but equally applicable to other professional settings, such as law), information is taken from/about the client into the professionals’ knowledge system – itself typically acquired via extended, multi-year, specialized training in a body of, often abstract, knowledge - and “instructions” are brought out. It is important to highlight (cf. Lewis and Brown, 2012) that in many cases this diagnosis/treatment process can be almost automatic, connecting a series of essentially standardised inputs and outcomes but in those circumstances “when the connection between diagnosis and treatment is obscure” (Abbot, 1988: 49), the professional will engage in a process of inference. This is where reflection and creativity are applied, inputs, process and outputs are subject to significant uncertainty and decisions regarding all three are potentially risk-bearing. Of course, this interaction between abstract knowledge and “real” problems also endows professional groups with significant strategic flexibility because, as Abbott (1988: 9) suggests: “only a knowledge system governed by abstraction can redefine its problems and tasks, defend them from interlopers and seize new problems.” Although these ‘abstraction-inference’ characteristics apply to most knowledge-intensive services, what defines some of these grou