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

• Author: Janelle Heineke,Jean Harvey,Michael Lewis
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2016.03.005
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016

Editorial

Editorial for Journal of Operations Management special issue on

“Professional Service Operations Management (PSOM)”

1. Introduction

Professional services such as medicine, law, dentistry and edu-

cation 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 contribu-

tions as economies develop. These services, including management

consulting, investment banking, advertising, engineering, architec-

ture, 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, profes-

sional services remain largely under-researched in the Operations

Management field. This special issue represents the multi-year cu-

mulative efforts of a group of scholars who responded to our call to

attempt to better characterize this “distinct environment for man-

aging operations”(Goodale et al., 2008, p. 670). Their work is varied

in approach and focus, ranging from analyses of ‘classic’profes-

sional service settings, such as healthcare operations, to investiga-

tions 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 bound-

ary 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 un-

dertake novel, interesting and, critically, impactful research. In this

editorial, we try to locate the various papers in a broader concep-

tual framework, include some specific additional insights where

appropriate, and to signpost some areas where we feel the SI has

limited coverage.

2. So, what are professional services?

From an operations management perspective professional ser-

vices are typically understood using two principal dimensions:

1. Levels of customer contact (i.e., lots of face to face interactions,

meetings, consultations, etc.) and consequent delivery specifi-

cations (i.e., every condition, case, problem is different) are

understood to be high, and;

2. Operational processes that emerge as a consequence of ‘pro-

fessionals’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 ethough such service character-

izations can be, they leave scope for substantial further reflection/

investigation. Fig.1 builds on insights from Abbott's seminal socio-

logical analysis of professions (1988) to model this process of pro-

fessional judgment.

In both the diagnosis and treatment phases (N.B. the language is

medical in origin but equally applicable to other professional set-

tings, such as law), information is taken from/about the client

into the professionals’knowledge system eitself typically acquired

via extended, multi-year,specialized training in a body of, often ab-

stract, knowledge - and “instructions”are brought out. It is impor-

tant to highlight (cf. Lewis and Brown, 2012)that in manycases 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 treat-

ment 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 un-

certainty and decisions regarding all three are potentially risk-

bearing. Of course, this interaction between abstract knowledge

and “real”problems also endows professional groups with signifi-

cant 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

groupings as explicitly professional is that the body of knowledge

they train with, and subsequently draw on when making judg-

ments is externally (but normally non-governmentally) regulated

and controlled in its content and application (von Nordenflycht,

2010). These professional boundaries create what is, in effect, a se-

ries of knowledge monopolies, with evolving and contested bound-

aries that act to exclude others (for example, you cannot practice

law in a country unless you achieve credentials within that country

legal system) and ensure high relative labor costs (Verma, 2000,p.

14). They are also central in the maintenance of standards. For

example, professional bodies typically maintain explicit codes of

ethics and shape implicit norms that guide appropriate profes-

sional behavior. The American Bar Association, for instance, articu-

lates the ‘core values of the legal profession’to include undivided

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Operations Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jom

Journal of Operations Management 42-43 (2016) 4e8

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2016.03.005

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