Laura Empson

Laura Empson
Bayes Business School (formerly Cass), University of London

PhD, MBA, BSc (Econ)

About

58
Publications
30,072
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,666
Citations
Introduction
For the most up to date information about my research activities and for access to my publications please check my personal website www.lauraempson.com before sending me direct requests for text via Resesarchgate.
Additional affiliations
January 2007 - December 2021
Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) City, University of London
Position
  • Managing Director
January 1998 - May 2007
University of Oxford
Position
  • Reader in the Management of Professional Service FIrms
Education
September 1993 - December 1997

Publications

Publications (58)
Article
Full-text available
For leading law firms in the City of London, diversity and inclusion has become an important human resources strategy over the past 15 years. A recent focus on social class within the sector has been encouraged by increasing governmental concerns relating to social mobility, which acknowledge that elite professions, particularly the law, have becom...
Article
Full-text available
Our paper investigates the dynamic interplay of narratives of individual and collective leadership within a professional service firm, where an organizational narrative of collective leadership prevails. We explain how it is possible for ‘everyone’ to claim a leadership identity for themselves while simultaneously granting a leadership identity to...
Research
Full-text available
This one-day masterclass brings together early career researchers and doctoral students with leading scholars of professionals, professional organizations, and the professions, to discuss their research and develop publications. The theme of the masterclass and selection of panellists is deliberately wide-ranging to encourage the participation of s...
Article
This paper reviews the past 28 years of scholarship on management consulting to synthesize the field and establish more broadly its contribution to management research. Through a systematic review of 219 articles, we identify three core conceptual themes – knowledge, identity, and power – that have dominated the literature to date. Through a themat...
Article
This study represents a detailed analysis of collective leadership in an elite professional service firm, examining the distinctive power dynamics revealed among professional peers as they attempt to act decisively in response to an acute organizational crisis. It identifies how professional peers deliberately construct and amplify ambiguity in bot...
Article
Full-text available
Professional service firms (PSFs) are characterized by contingent and contested power relations among an extended group of professional peers. Studies of such firms can therefore yield important insights for the literatures on collective leadership and leader–follower relations. Yet to date PSF scholars have neglected the topic of leadership, and l...
Article
This article records a panel discussion at the Organizational Working Time Regimes conference on 31 March 2017 at the University of Graz, Austria. The discussion was moderated by Sara Louise Muhr and the panelists were Jana Costas, Susanne Ekman, Laura Empson and Dan Kärreman. The discussion both departed from yet centred on the concept of time its...
Article
Full-text available
Interviewing elites presents distinctive methodological challenges, which are exacerbated when interviewing elite professionals. These individuals (i.e. senior professionals and professionals in elite professional organizations) are typically relatively powerful, highly educated, and self-assured, and work in organizations which guard their externa...
Article
Full-text available
This essay is a tribute to the scholarly career of Huseyin Leblebici, specifically his contribution to the field of the professions and organizations. We start from the premise that Huseyin's work over the past generation in many ways characterizes the development of this field-an idea that struck us when we began preparing to write this essay. We...
Article
Full-text available
Prior research generally presents work‒family decisions as an individual's rational choice between alternatives, downplaying the crucial role that upbringing plays in shaping work and parenting decisions. This paper emphasises how habitus – historically constituted and embodied dispositions – structures perceptions about what is 'right' and 'normal...
Book
Full-text available
Over the past three decades the Professional Service Firm (PSF) sector has emerged as one of the most rapidly growing, profitable, and significant in the global economy. In 2013 the accountancy, management consulting, legal, and architectural sectors alone generated revenues of US$ 1.6 trillion and employed 14 million people. PSFs play an importan...
Article
Full-text available
This article explores social exclusion in elite professional service firms (PSFs) through a qualitative study of six legal, accounting, investment banking and consulting firms. Employing a Bourdieusian perspective we find that all six firms privilege candidates with the same narrow forms of cultural capital, while acknowledging that this contradict...
Chapter
Full-text available
Expressions of support for diversity are nearly ubiquitous among contemporary law firms and corporations. Organizations back these rhetorical commitments with dedicated diversity staff and various diversity and inclusion initiatives. Yet, the goal of proportionate representation for people of color and women remains unrealized. Members of historica...
Article
Full-text available
We draw on comparative research conducted at three leading UK accountancy firms to ask, is the business case for diversity fatally flawed in relation to gender and flexible work? The business case has proved controversial in the academic literature, where it is said to have displaced the moral case and justified the enactment of ritual around diver...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand: how and why do experienced professionals, who perceive themselves as autonomous, comply with organizational pressures to overwork? Unlike previous studies of professionals and overwork, the authors focus on experienced professionals who have achieved relatively high status within their firms and...
Chapter
Full-text available
We begin by examining the significance of professional service firms (PSFs) in terms of their scale and influence from an economic and societal perspective, and the insights they offer for academic theory. We examine how PSFs have remained “in the shadows”, in terms of their visibility within the economy and within scholarly research, and how and w...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past three decades the professional service firm (PSF) sector has emerged as one of the most rapidly growing, profitable, and significant in the global economy. In 2013 the management consulting, accounting, legal, and architectural sectors alone generated revenues of US$ 1.6 trillion and employed 14 million people. PSFs, whether through t...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter examines the foci, resources and mechanisms of leadership in professional service firms, a context where traditional conceptions of leadership and followership are problematic given the importance of individual autonomy to knowledge-based work. We argue that leadership in professional service firms is, above all, a process of interacti...
Article
Full-text available
This symposium aims to: 1) showcase scholarship in the developing area of professional service firms (PSFs); 2) challenge assumptions and bring new insight about how institutions, organizations and individuals operate in today’s economy; 3) examine the potential for contributing to key theoretical debates within OB, Strategy, and OT; and 4) inspire...
Article
This study presents an empirical analysis of the micro-dynamics of institutional work. Examining the ‘corporatization’ of large international law firm partnerships, the study identifies the dyadic relationship that develops between two different types of professionals, the managing partner and management professional, and demonstrates how their rel...
Article
Full-text available
The extent of the divide between management research and practice is now widely accepted but debate persists about the desirability and feasibility of attempting to bridge the divide. This article introduces an individual-level perspective to this literature by asking, how is a management academic’s identity affected by sustained engagement with ma...
Article
Full-text available
Governance has long been a central theme in the literature on professional service firms (PSFs). Previous studies have presented dichotomized models of organizational archetypes and legal form: professional partnership versus managed professional business, adhocracy versus professional bureaucracy, partnership versus corporation, private versus pub...
Article
This paper explores how organizational identity is constructed in four very different management consulting firms. The study suggests four broad dimensions that organizational members refer to in constructing their organizational identity: Knowledge Work, Management and Membership, Personal Orientation, and External Interface. We identify multiple...
Chapter
The last ten years have been a period of extraordinary change for law firms. The rapid growth of corporate law firms and the emergence of global mega-firms such as Clifford Chance, Linklaters, and Freshfields, have strained the traditional partnership model of management. Some managers of law firms are appalled at the creeping 'corporatism' that th...
Article
The last ten years have been a period of extraordinary change for law firms. The rapid growth of corporate law firms and the emergence of global mega-firms such as Clifford Chance, Linklaters, and Freshfields, have strained the traditional partnership model of management. Some managers of law firms are appalled at the creeping 'corporatism' that th...
Book
Full-text available
Book available for purchase via Oxford University Press at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/managing-the-modern-law-firm-9780199589647?cc=gb&lang=en&#
Article
For professional service firms (PSFs) the partnership form of governance is the most effective means of reconciling the potentially competing claims of three sets of stakeholders: shareholders, professionals, and clients. Increasingly, PSFs are abandoning this traditional form of governance in favour of incorporation and flotation. Very little is k...
Article
This study creates a framework for analysing organizational identity change and examines the process in the context of a global accounting firm's acquisition of a UK mid-market accounting practice. It identifies the parallel processes which facilitate organizational identity change: identity regulation on the part of senior management and de-and re...
Article
Books reviewed in this article: T.H.Davenport, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know G.von Krogh, J.Roos, and D.Kleine (eds), Knowledge in Firms: Understanding, Managing and Measuring Knowledge R.C.Huseman and J.P.Goodman, Leading with Knowledge: the Nature of Competition in the 21st Century Various authors, Harvard Business Re...
Article
Accountants, lawyers, consultants and advertising agents have all been merging as their clients demand global and diversified services from their professional advisors. This article reports on a three-year study of three such mergers. Notwithstanding the widespread belief that business now moves @ the speed of thought, the author concludes that, in...
Article
The creation of the public corporation in the 19th century drove out the partnership as the predominant form of organizational governance. Yet, within the professional services sector, partnerships have survived and prospered. Moreover, professional services firms that chose to abandon the partnership form tended to become private rather than publi...
Article
Full-text available
Previous studies of knowledge transfer have identified a variety of impediments that derive from the knowledge base and the organizational context. However such explanations do not take account of the central role that individuals play in the knowledge transfer process, specifically in articulating and legitimizing the knowledge base and in shaping...
Article
Research on mergers and acquisitions focuses almost exclusively on manufacturing and retail services firms. Professional services firms (PSFs) have been largely ignored, yet they present a distinctive managerial challenge. In PSFs, the key value-creating resources (technical knowledge and client relationships) are often proprietary to individuals,...
Article
Existing theories have recognised the importance of expert knowledge in the formation and survival of professional service firms (PSFs), such as accounting and consulting firms, but have not fully explained its role. We argue that knowledge is a key determinant of the organisational structure and performance of PSFs. We examine forms of knowledge a...

Network

Cited By