The aim of this book is to understand the way in which the logic of professionalism is maintained in professional service organizations, taking everyday work as a starting point. In the preceeding chapters, I have explored four topics: the role of ambiguity in professional service work; control over control; the politics of leadership; and superficial hybridity. I have drawn on Freidson (2001)'s typology of market, bureaucracy, and professionalism to highlight the way in which different logics become manifest in everyday work and management. The logics represent different ways of managing work and as should be clear at this stage, a distinct classification of different patterns of activities as belonging to a single logic is a rather futile effort. The main consequence of such an effort is that we zoom out too much and fail to see the way in which agency continuously reshapes patterns of action.

There has over the years been an extensive and sometimes heated discussion about changes in professionalism (often in terms of various threats to professionalism), and about changes in the way in which professional service organizations are managed. The direction and speed at which these changes are happening seems to be more determined by which assumptions about the relationships between logics are held by observers, and at which level of abstraction we look. We are still able to recognize professionalism as a dominant logic in many organizations. Again, this may be due to image work by organizations and occupations trying to obtain or maintain professional status, or it may be due to slowly changing ideas of what professionalism is all about. Yet, it also points towards professional logic being rather resistant to change. The mere fact that we can point to a wide range of organizations, classify them as professional service organizations, and draw clear similarities to organizations of the past, indicates a fairly strong resilience of the professional logic.

Perhaps the question we need to ask is not how professional service organizations change, but why they do not change. As I noted in Chapter 2, change is an inherent part of how social practices work.