Transnational organizing of professional practices

Katja Maria Hydle and James Faulconbridge

Chapter 8 in Research Handbook on the Sociology of the Professions, 2025, pp 105-123 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Professionals are well-known for their transnational working. They work across dispersed locations, contribute to performing activities by sharing tasks and knowledge and combine their expertise to develop new products, services and systems. But how is such transnational working organized? This chapter explores transnational working in a transnational professional service firm. We studied Newit (pseudonym), a service firm headquarters in Norway that offers testing, inspection and certification services worldwide. Newit employs about 500 people in 20 different locations in Europe, North America and Asia. Although small compared to several large competitors, Newit is recognized in its industry as a leading supplier of global market access and is ranked among the top three providers of international certification schemes. The case of Newit provides insight into how transnational work is organized when it involves geographically dispersed organization of complex challenges that stretch across different languages, time zones and cultures. We show that three types of interdependent transnational practices are required to allow the organization of work. Work sharing involves the formal organizing and dividing of work, while the practices of knowledge sharing require informal organizing for effective servicing by sharing experiences. The practices of portfolio sharing are a mixture of formal and informal organizing to coordinate responsibilities. Combined, our analysis of the three interdependent transnational practices reveals the social architecture required for the organizing of transnational professional work, with this architecture underlying the influence of transnational professionals’ fields and systems noted by others.

Keywords: Transnational working; Professional services firms; Organization; Social practices; Inter-organizational networking; Knowledge mobilities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035323074
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