Business Commons^™

The Double-Edged Sword Of Jurisdictional Entrenchment: Explaining Human Resources Professionals’ Failed Strategic Repositioning, Kurt Sandholtz, Daisy Chung, Isaac Waisberg

Faculty Publications

To protect themselves against deskilling and obsolescence, professionals must periodically revise their claims to authority and expertise. Although we understand these dynamics in the broader system of professions, we have a less complete understanding of how this process unfolds in specific organizational contexts. Yet given the ubiquity of embedded professionals, this context is where jurisdictional shifts increasingly take place.Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of human resources (HR) professionals in two engineering firms, we introduce the concept of jurisdictional entrenchment to explain the challenges embedded professionals face when they attempt to redefine their jurisdiction. Jurisdictional entrenchment describes a condition in …