Organizing for Professional Judgment: Bureaucracies and Heterarchies

In the contemporary economy where various forms of specialist work are playing a more significant role (for example, Brynjolfsson and Saunders, 2010; Barley and Kunda, 2006), there are also new demands on the organization of work. While the functionally organized and hierarchical bureaucratic organization form has traditionally served as the principal site for professional work (Blau, 1956), at least outside the domain of legal practices and physicians’ clinics where only or few or even single professionals conduct their work, there is today a strong orientation towards either temporal organization forms (for example, project organization) or network-based organizations wherein firms, departments, and professional communities share information and collaborate across organization boundaries (Powell, 1998). In general, in the information economy or the creative economy, professionals are influenced by other professionals or “creatives” who have the ability to stimulate new innovative thinking. The economic geographer Richard Florida (2002) speaks of a “creative class” that is fuelled by contact with members of other professional communities and that looks for creative environments (in, for example, cities like Austin, Seattle, Amsterdam, or Berlin). While Florida’s thesis is evocative, not all creative companies are located in such “creative hotspots.”