Competence Regimes in Professional Service Firm Internationalization and Professional Careers
研究大型律所如何通过四种能力体制（技术员、项目经理、竞争分析师、全球战略家）推动国际化战略，同时影响律师的职业发展，对关注专业服务企业管理和人才发展的读者有参考价值。
Professional service firms (PSFs) are dependent on the competence of their employees to develop and retain new business. We investigate how PSFs utilize professional competence for strategic goals such as business internationalization and simultaneously facilitate professionals’ career mobility. We examine over a 5-year period the careers of 29 lawyers working in a large corporate law firm and identify four different competence regimes: technicians, project managers, competitive analysts, and global strategists. We argue that these competence regimes enable PSFs to pursue organizational business strategies while advancing or constraining or even undermining professional employees’ career goals and aspirations. Specifically, we show how the four competence regimes facilitate the PSF’s strategy to internationalize its business and support high performing employees’ social mobility goals to develop their professional competence and advance their career. We then give suggestions for future research studies on competence regimes in professional organizations.