Controls of Knowledge Production, Sharing and Use in Bureaucratized Professional Service Firms
研究通过巴黎一家商业律所的案例，考察官僚化专业服务公司中集中式知识管理系统是否导致权力从专业人员向管理者转移，发现专业人员的社会和自我控制反而被重塑。
One of the main obstacles to the current bureaucratization trend in large professional service firms (PSFs) is the organic nature of professional knowledge production, sharing and use. Centralized knowledge management (KM) systems aimed at codifying ‘best practice’ solutions to recurrent client questions for large-scale reuse are a common strategy increasingly employed to overcome this obstacle. Using a socio-ethnographic case study of a business law firm in Paris, this research examines whether the use of centralized KM systems in bureaucratized PSFs contributes to a shift in power from professionals to managers. More specifically, are administrative controls over knowledge resources increasing, or do professionals retain power (i.e. some level of social and self-control) over knowledge production, sharing and use? The results of this study indicate that, far from losing ground, professionals’ social and self-controls have been reinvented and reformed in a bureaucratized context.