This document discusses professional service firms and their growth over the last three decades. It makes three key points: 1. Professional service firms apply specialized technical knowledge through interpersonal relationships to solve clients' problems. Major sectors include law, accounting, architecture, advertising, consulting, and financial services. 2. Professional service firms have exhibited rapid growth and spatial clustering in integrated clusters. This clustering enhances firms' learning and innovation processes, which are important to their competitiveness. 3. More recently, some professional service firms have internationalized by sending staff abroad from countries like the US and Europe. This allows insights into emerging global service networks and new international divisions of labor.

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Non Print Items
Abstract
Professional service firms (PSFs) apply specialist technical knowledge to derive customized solutions for clients’
problems delivered through interpersonal relationships by highly educated, professionally trained, and accredited
workers. Major industrial sectors conventionally grouped together under the banner of ‘professional services’ include
those in the long-established, formally regulated professions of law, accountancy, architecture, and real estate, as well as
emergent ‘new economy’ growth sectors of advertising, public relations, business/management consultancy, research,
and financial services. Over the last three decades, professional services have exhibited extraordinarily rapid growth and
pronounced spatial agglomeration in functionally integrated ‘clusters’. This spatial clustering is recognized as en-
hancing the learning and innovation processes on which the economic competitiveness of firms in this sector is based.
More recently however, professional service firms have also undertaken a process of internationalization, achieved in
large part through the expatriation of staff from the USA and Western Europe. Professional services therefore provide
important insights into emerging global service networks and new international divisions of labor, as well as offering an
important analytical window onto the new forms of work and employment which characterize knowledge-intensive
firms in the ‘new economy’ more generally.
Keywords
Cultural economy; Embodiment; Gender; Globalization; Innovation; Knowledge production; New economy; New
international division of labor; Outsourcing; Professional service firms (PSFs).
Author and Co-author Contact Information
A. James
The City Centre
Department of Geography
Queen Mary, University of LondonAU2
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
UK
Email: a.james@qmul.ac.uk
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A0005 Professional Services
A. James, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
& 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary
G0005 Absorptive Capacity A firm’s ability to value,
assimilate, and apply new knowledge to commercial
ends.
G0010 Emotional Labor Workers’ deliberate manipulation of
their emotions and personalities to create a pleasant
experience for the customer/consumer, invariably
involving the public display of an emotion that they may
not necessarily feel privately.
G0015 Expatriation The relocation of workers out of the
corporate core to overseas countries in order to staff
branch offices as firms export their services
internationally.
G0020 Externalities Sources of competitive advantage which
lie outside of firms’ individual boundaries, but which
accrue to firms as a function of their collocation in space.
S0005 Introduction: Professional Services and
the ‘New Economy’
P0005 It is now widely accepted that fundamental changes
within advanced capitalist economies over the last three
decades are representative of a transition to a new era of
capitalist development. Beginning in the early 1980s, we
witnessed a major reorientation in the pattern, form, and
sources of capitalist economic growth, involving – on the
one hand – a sustained decline in the contribution of
heavy industrial manufacturing to national economic
output, employment, and trade (‘deindustrialization’),
combined with a dramatic growth of employment and
output in service activities (‘tertiarization’) on the other.
In large part, these changes have been ushered in by
technological innovations in information and communi-
cation technologies (ICTs), developments which have
also underpinned an ever-increasing functional inte-
gration of economic activities at the international scale.
This major reorientation of the productive structures and
dominant sources of employment within advanced cap-
italist economies has been conceptualized in a number of
different ways, in terms of a transition to: a ‘post-Fordist
regime of accumulation’; the ‘fifth kondratiev wave’;
‘knowledge capitalism’; ‘friction free capitalism’; ‘soft
capitalism’; or most commonly espoused within policy
and media circles, the ‘new economy’. Whatever the
moniker used, all are united in their according central
importance to innovation, learning, and creativity to
economic success; that is, in asserting that the dominant
source of wealth creation lies in the production of ideas,
knowledge, and know-how. In other words, physical
capital and human capital are argued to have been
usurped by ‘knowledge capital’ and ‘creative capital’ as
the primary drivers of wealth creation and prosperity;
that the future depends more on ‘brains rather than
brawn’; and that we are now (according to some com-
mentators at least) ‘living on thin air’.
P0010Despite many of these claims surrounding the ‘new
economy’ having been somewhat exaggerated, nowhere
are they perhaps more valid than within the knowledge-
intensive ‘professional services’ sector, a sector which has
exhibited remarkable growth over the last three decades.
In professional service firms (PSFs), it is the embodied
knowledge, skills, and expertise of highly educated,
trained, and accredited employees that comprise firms’
most valuable assets, and which are used to deliver cus-
tomized solutions to clients’ specific problems. Pro-
fessional services are characterized, therefore, by
intangible products delivered through intangible per-
sonal relationships with clients buttressed by intangible
reputations, experience, and trust. In the subsequent
sections of this article, the causal drivers of recent growth
in professional services are sketched out, along with a
discussion of the distinctive (emotional) labor process
that lies at the heart of wealth creation within this sector.
Two distinctive features of the emergent geographies of
professional services are then analyzed in terms of their
implications for knowledge production and management:
namely, localized agglomeration in functionally inte-
grated ‘clusters’ versus the internationalization of pro-
fessional service firms. The article concludes with some
possible directions for future geographical research on
professional services and on employees’ experiences of
working in this sector.
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S0010 Professional Services: How Do We Know
Them When We See Them?
P0015 When geographers talk about ‘professional services’ they
are referring both to the long-established, formally
regulated professions of law, accountancy, architecture,
and real estate, as well as emergent ‘new economy’
growth sectors of advertising, business and management
consultancy, market research, public relations, financial
services, data processing, and computing services. These
various sectors are recognized as exhibiting a number of
distinctive commonalities by which ‘professional service
firms’ might usefully be characterized as a coherent en-
tity, centered on the nature of their workforce, the labor
process, corporate ‘product’, and firm–client relation-
ships. These unifying characteristics, then, are: (1) a well-
paid, highly educated workforce whose entry into the
labor market is controlled and sanctioned by a formal
institutional body which authorizes accredits particular
forms of professional competence achieved through
prolonged training; (2) a corporate dependence on the
embodied skills, idiosyncratic knowledge, creativity,
trustworthy reputations, and social connections of staff as
firms’ most valuable assets; (3) wealth creation through
largely autonomous employee engagement in task-based,
symbolic-analytic problem identification, problem solv-
ing, and strategic brokering activities on behalf of clients;
(4) customized ‘product’ delivery at the point of demand
through interpersonal relationships with clients in which
expert workers exercise a high degree of personal
judgement; and (5) professional practice is governed by a
code of ethics.
P0020 Scholars continue to disagree on which of these five
characteristics of professional services should lie at the
heart of a single overarching definition of this sector
(with consequent implications for which sectors are in-
cluded under this banner heading in the first place!).
Thus for some scholars, it is the degree of contact and
interaction with the client that ultimately defines pro-
fessional services; for other scholars it is the degree of
product customization; and for yet others, it is the in-
tensity and duration of professional training that matters.
At the same time, scholars also distinguish between
professional service ‘firms’ (the corporate enterprises that
comprise this industrial sector); professional service ‘oc-
cupations’ (forms of work involved in the production of
professional service products); and professional service
‘functions’ (the uses that clients obtain by consuming
products from professional service firms)! Despite this
definitional and classificatory complexity, however, it
remains a truism that ‘all’ professional services are fun-
damentally based on highly intangible knowledge inputs
to, and outputs from, the production process. At the same
time, the clients of professional service firms are typically
other firms, organizations, or government departments,
such that the outputs of PSFs invariably constitute
intermediate inputs to the production processes of client
organizations. In this way, professional services differ
significantly from other (personal) service industries
whose outputs are used for final consumption by private
individual consumers.
S0015On the Historical Growth and
Development of Professional Services
P0025Professional services have attracted considerable atten-
tion from economic geographers in recent years as they
have grown in economic significance and scale of oper-
ations. Indeed, professional services are among the fastest
growing sectors within advanced capitalist economies
over the last three decades, exhibiting an average 10%
growth per annum in revenues since the early 1980s, with
current revenues of over US$1000 billion globally. Em-
ployment in this sector has exhibited a similar rate of
growth over the same time period and, according to
OECD data, professional services now account for
around 20% of all employment in the US and Western
Europe. This growth dynamic can be explained in a
number of ways. One explanation concerns post-Fordist
strategies of externalization or outsourcing of many ser-
vice functions previously carried out in-house by large
vertically integrated manufacturing firms in the pursuit
of enhanced flexibility, efficiency and competitiveness,
and shared market risk. However, practices of sub-
contracting and externalization are not exclusive to
manufacturing firms; recent years have also witnessed
increased subcontracting of in-house service functions by
large service firms. A second set of drivers of professional
services growth concerns the ever-growing demand for
such expertise in relation to a new macroeconomic en-
vironment. Specifically, as widespread state practices of
de-regulation have increased the uncertainty faced by
many firms, this has prompted them to develop more
elaborate administrative bureaucracies and to engage the
assistance of financial, advertising, sales, legal, marketing,
and management experts in order to make sense of, and
respond appropriately to, an increasingly complex de-
cision making environment. Third, globalization pro-
cesses facilitated by new developments in information
and communication technologies continue to intensify
the degree of international competition between firms,
further reinforcing corporate concerns to (re)assess the
ways in which they produce goods, and to extend their
incorporation of external professional service expertise
during the pre-production, during-production, and post-
production phases.
P0030In turn, the result of these various drivers is a pro-
fessional services sector that is increasingly polarized into
a dual economy comprised of a small number of giant
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firms operating in conjunction with a mass of smaller
companies. The decline of medium-sized firms is popu-
larly explained in terms of their not possessing the
economies of scale, international office network and
range of expertise offered by large firms, nor the flexi-
bility, speed, and personal attention to customers as
provided by their smaller competitors.
S0020 Understanding the Professional Services
Labor Process: Embodied Work and the
(Gendered) Performance of Emotional
Labor
P0035 The nature of the labor process within professional ser-
vice work has provided economic geographers with a
very fertile research agenda, not least because it has
helped force a fundamental rethinking of previous ‘cul-
ture’/‘economy’ binaries within the discipline. In contrast
to manufacturing where the production and consumption
of ‘hard’ physical goods occurs at different points in time
and space, in professional services, the spheres and pro-
duction are merged. That is, production and con-
sumption of the service occur simultaneously, such that
the cultural identity, personality, appearance, embodied
personality, and social characteristics of the worker be-
come ‘part of ’ the product consumed. Consequently, a
central task within professional service occupations in-
volves workers using their emotions and personalities (as
well as their physical and intellectual capacities) to create
a pleasant experience for the client. Arlie Russell
Hochschild has described this phenomenon, in which
workers actively and consciously manage their feelings
and emotions to create a publicly observable facial and
bodily display as ‘emotion management’. The term
‘emotional labor’ refers to these activities when they are
done for a wage in the public sphere. Thus, for example,
the daily work activities of lawyers, solicitors, manage-
ment consultants, stock brokers all involve personal
interaction and face to face contact with clients. Business
success is crucially dependent on employees’ presen-
tation of self, negotiating skills, and relationship man-
agement in ongoing personal encounters, on the basis of
which workers develop and maintain client portfolios.
Moreover, professional service workers invariably must
display publicly an emotion that they may not necessarily
privately feel. As such, management of feeling shifts from
being a strictly private act performed almost un-
consciously, to a public act performed consciously ac-
cording to others’ guidelines. A number of geographical
studies in the professional services sector have demon-
strated how the performance of emotional labor cannot
be regarded as a gender neutral phenomenon; rather, that
the gendered construction of social identities funda-
mentally controls access to, and success within, many
professional service occupations. Most notably, Linda
McDowell’s work on professional service work within the
merchant banking sector in the city of London has
demonstrated how women continue to be concentrated
within secretarial and clerical grades with little oppor-
tunity for career movement into professional occupations
(save for a select group of ‘honorary male’ female tra-
ders). This is explained in terms of a set of accepted
workplace norms and everyday behaviors within this
sector which emphasize a particular version of mascu-
linity based on ‘competitive spirit’, ‘self-confidence’, and
‘toughness’ as required attributes for worker’s success. As
such, dominant notions of the ideal worker are socially
constructed as inherently masculine; in contrast, women
are cast as ‘other’.
S0025On PSF Clustering: From Transaction
Cost Reductions to Interfirm Knowledge
Spillovers, Collective Learning and
Innovation
P0040One of the most distinctive features of the geography of
professional services is a tendency toward spatial ag-
glomeration in functionally integrated ‘clusters’, charac-
terized by exceptional levels of external networking and
interfirm linkages. On one level, scholars have explained
PSF clustering tendencies in terms of beneficial trans-
action cost reductions that accrue to firms as a function of
their spatial proximity. This thesis is based on a threefold
argument. First, instability of markets and an accelerated
pace of technological change are met by a disintegration
of the production process, and hence a deepening in the
social division of labor between firms. This then allows
firms to maximize the benefits of specialization and to
minimize exposure to risks of overcapacity, labor force
hoarding, and dangers of technological lock-in, and
hence to become more flexible. Second, as interfirm
transactions become more important, so the costs of
transport, communication, information exchange, search,
scanning, and so forth, become more significant. The
increased costs associated with increased external trans-
actions are argued to create a ‘spatial pull’; that firms will
seek to agglomerate to minimize the costs of those
transaction costs through external economies of scale.
Third, spatial agglomeration is also argued to create
specialized institutions which further lower transaction
costs and hence increase economic efficiency, as labor
and other factors of production are pooled among large
numbers of specialist producers, and which firms would
otherwise not be able to afford individually.
P0045However, while this explanation goes some of the way
to explaining why PSFs cluster, it is but part of a bigger
picture. For professional service firms, competitiveness is
sustained by becoming a moving target through
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continuous technological learning and the rapid devel-
opment and commercialization of new ideas: those firms
that can learn and innovate faster become more com-
petitive because their knowledge is scarce and therefore
cannot be immediately imitated or transferred to new
entrants. Accordingly, scholars have been keen to
examine how spatial clustering also enhances processes of
knowledge creation, information dissemination, learning,
and innovation on which the economic competitiveness
of professional service firms is founded. A number of
concrete mechanisms of knowledge transfer and spillover
between professional service firms within clusters have
been identified, based on the fundamental premise that
innovation is an ‘interactive’ learning process in which
complementary forms of information and knowledge are
combined, to create new forms of knowledge greater than
the sum of their constituent parts.
P0050 First, in addition to formal cooperation agreements
between professional service firms, personal contact
networks between individual employees have been
widely identified as important conduits of interfirm in-
formation exchange, reinforcing more formal types of
interaction. While this may mean losses of proprietary
knowledge for individual firms, allowing other firms to
appropriate returns on their investment, such personal
contact networks also allow firms to learn of new tech-
nologies, opportunities, and market challenges more
quickly because of higher densities of interaction within
these networks. Such informal social interactions are
found both within work settings (so-called ‘cafeteria ef-
fects’) and nonwork settings within PSF clusters, the
latter being premised on a porous division between work,
social and leisure activities. Employees frequently meet
at industry seminars, talks and other social activities or-
ganized by local business organizations, as well as in more
informal venues such as bars, clubs, pubs, cafes, and
coffee shops. In these social contexts, personal contacts
are established and maintained, providing workers with
access to a wider diversity of ideas and bases for com-
parison with ideas and practices from other firms, often
leading to new, often unexpected, ideas or synergies.
Indeed, intricate social networks based on personal
contacts offer potentially ‘the’ most efficient organiza-
tional arrangement for sourcing information given that
information is difficult to price in a market and difficult
to communicate through a hierarchy.
P0055 Second, as communications technologies have im-
proved the transfer of codified (formal) knowledge be-
tween professional service firms, so economic
competitiveness is increasingly dependent upon their
ability to access sources of new ‘tacit knowledge’, which
is highly personal, context-specific, and difficult to for-
malize (or as Karl Polanyi summarized it, that ‘we know
more than we can tell’). However, tacit knowledge is
difficult to transfer between firms in the absence of labor
mobility, given its embodiment in individuals. It is
therefore significant that scholars have documented
higher rates of skilled labor mobility within professional
services clusters. These interactions are advantageous at
two levels: (1) acting to transfer knowledge once and for
all by taking expertise and knowledge with them to
competitor firms; or (2) establishing an ‘ongoing’ link
between the firms via the personal relations maintained
between the various employees. Either way, as new em-
ployees interact and engage with new colleagues with
partially overlapping knowledges, comparisons of evolv-
ing ideas are made with other practices in the firm that
are not internally generated. Thus, there is an increased
potential for new unexpected ideas, interpretations, and
synergies to develop, that is, for increased learning and
innovation. Indeed, interfirm spillovers of embodied ex-
pertise through labor mobility are particularly significant
in the professional services sector as firms seek to poach
workers in order to access their personal client portfolios
and established reputations as discussed in the previous
section.
P0060In sum, continuous technological learning and in-
novation within professional service firms are widely
recognized as highly dependent on firms’ abilities to
‘access’ external sources of information and knowledge,
abilities which are enhanced through spatial agglomer-
ation. Fundamentally however, successful innovation and
learning within professional service firms is also
dependent on firms’ abilities to assimilate, reconfigure,
transform, and apply new information to commercial
ends once it enters the firm, that is, on their ‘absorptive
capacities’. Different absorption rates are not random but
depend upon both the social and cultural structures
within firms, because the ability to absorb new know-
ledge within a firm will always depend on sociocultural
constructions of what is acceptable and desirable. The
innovation literature has thus consistently highlighted a
set of cultural norms that, if widely shared by the
members of a firm, actively promote the generation of
new ideas and help in the implementation of new ap-
proaches. These norms include a climate of openness in
which debate is encouraged; a willingness to listen to
other people’s ideas; creative dissent or the right of em-
ployees at all levels to challenge the status quo; and
multiple advocacy, that learning requires more than one
‘champion’, if it is to succeed. Successful innovation
within professional service firms therefore presumes a
necessary relationship between learning and active em-
ployee involvement at all levels: that all employees can
act as independent agents, take responsibility, experi-
ment, and make mistakes as they learn. At the same time,
the open exchange of ideas among workers also depends
on all employees being able to make themselves heard. As
such, the gender inequalities outlined in the previous
section potentially constrain professional service firms’
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absorptive capacities and restrict firms’ abilities to cap-
italize fully on the skillsets of female employees.
S0030 Internationalization of Professional
Services
P0065 A second distinctive feature of the emerging geography
of professional service firms is the development of spa-
tially dispersed, interdependent organizational networks
at the international scale as PSFs have ‘gone global’. This
globalization process needs to be understood in the
context of a number of causal drivers: to follow client
firms overseas; to reduce risk by operating in more than
one geographical marketplace; to follow other pro-
fessional service firms in order to reduce their com-
petitive advantage through imitation; and to expand
operations through merger and acquisition activities.
This process of PSF internationalization through inter-
national branch plant development is particularly ex-
tensive within the accountancy and management
consultancy sectors, well-known corporate examples in-
cluding Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst and
Young, and KPMG. Indeed, PriceWaterhouseCoopers is
now the largest accountancy firm globally, with 130 000
employees in almost 150 countries worldwide. However,
in stark contrast to many media accounts which portray
this globalization phenomenon as a relatively straight-
forward process, professional service firms are faced with
a number of significant knowledge management chal-
lenges as a function of their capital accumulation strat-
egies ultimately being dependent on the embodied
knowledge, intricate personal networks, skills, expertise,
and trustworthiness of their professionally accredited
employees who engage clients in face-to-face interactions
in order to generate fee income. Above all, how to
‘stretch’ locally rooted tacit knowledge and corporate
memory to clients overseas? One organizational response
by British legal firms has been to expatriate partners and
lawyers to export ‘English common law’ to their inter-
national overseas offices, while simultaneously employing
the services of local staff to supply jurisdictional law. In
this way, British legal firms are able to develop, manage,
and diffuse idiosyncratic knowledge from the corporate
core to overseas subsidiaries, as well as meeting locally
specific client expectations of quality of service and
working practices. Accordingly, such strategies are ne-
cessarily not uniform nor homogenous across different
professional service firms, nor indeed across all overseas
branch office locations within a single professional ser-
vice firm. As such, the globalization activities of pro-
fessional services provide further significant evidence to
critique the ‘end of geography’ thesis.
S0035Future Research Directions
P0070Research on the socioeconomic geographies of pro-
fessional services continues to develop a distinctive
contribution to our understanding of emerging global
service networks and new international divisions of labor,
as well as the new forms of work and employment which
characterize knowledge-intensive firms in the New
Economy more generally. There are a number of dir-
ections in which future research on this sector might
usefully develop, not least because professional services
are widely seen as a ‘flagship AU1’ – new economy sector,
where work and employment practices are developed
first before diffusing out to other industrial sectors. First,
in light of persistent structures of inequality within
professional service firms which militate against female
and ethnic minority workers progressing as quickly
through employment hierarchies as their white male
colleagues, future research should continue to dereify so-
called ‘glass ceilings’ of constraint by grounding them in
everyday concrete workplace interactions, social pro-
cesses, and their associated causal agents – an attribution
of responsibility upon which policy actors might then act.
Moreover, by demonstrating empirically the ways in
which these same worker inequalities based on gender
and ethnicity themselves constrain corporate innovative
performance, future studies might also develop argu-
ments for workforce diversity couched in the language of
economic competitiveness that firms (and governments)
particularly appreciate and understand. Second, building
on previous case studies in the legal services and ad-
vertising sectors, there exists considerable scope for ex-
ploring the role of local informal and formal institutional
context in shaping the internationalization strategies of
other types of professional service firms. In so doing,
geographers might offer increased empirical and con-
ceptual insights into (overcoming) the spatial limits to
knowledge and learning which are likely to underpin
divergent development trajectories in the emerging ‘new
economy’. Finally, future work might also usefully ex-
plore the emergent operations of professional service
firms outside of the USA, Western Europe and South
East Asia, particularly in non-English speaking countries
– or in other words, outside of economic geography’s
domain of empirical inquiry as traditionally demarcated
vis-a`-vis development studies. In this way, new work
might contribute to the nascent ‘postcolonial economic
geographies’ research agenda which, while conceptually
exciting, nevertheless continues to suffer from a rather
narrow empirical evidence base.
See also: Borderland economies (00133); Business
services (00136); Consumption (00142); Corporate
governance (00143); Corporate responsibilities (00144);
Ethnic economies (00155); Feminism and work (00158);
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Foreign direct investment (00167); Industrialization
(00178); Informal economy (00179); International trade
(00186); Neighbourhoods/community (01065); Tropical
geography (00128).
Further Reading
Amin, A. and Thrift, N. J. (1992). Neo-Marshallian nodes in global
networks. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 16,
571--587.
Ascher, B. (1993). Business and professional services: Competing in a
more mobile world. In Aharoni, A. (ed.) Coalitions and Competition:
The Globalization of Professional Business Services, pp 20--31.
London: Routledge.
Beaverstock, J. V. (2004). ‘Managing across borders’: Knowledge
management and expatriation in professional service legal firms.
Journal of Economic Geography 4, 157--179.
Beaverstock, J. V., Smith, R. G. and Taylor, P. J. (1999). The long arm of
the law: London law firms in a globalising world. Environment and
Planning A 31, 1857--1876.
Bryson, J. R., Daniels, P. and Warf, B. (2004). Service Worlds: People,
Organizations, Technologies, 286p. London: Routledge.
Burton-Jones, A. (1999). Knowledge Capitalism: Business, Work and
Learning in the New Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coe, N. M. and Townsend, A. R. (1998). Debunking the myth of
localized agglomerations: The development of a regionalized service
economy in South-East England. Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 23, 385--404.
Faulconbridge, J. R. (2006). Stretching tacit knowledge beyond a local
fix? Global spaces of learning in advertising professional service
firms. Journal of Economic Geography 6, 517--540.
Hochschild, A. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of
Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kroes, N. (2005). Better Regulation of Professional Services UK
Presidency Seminar Brussels, 21st November 2005. http://
www.europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference ¼
SPEECH/05/711&format ¼ HTML&aged ¼ 0&language ¼
EN&guiLanguage ¼ en (accessed Jul. 2008).
Keeble, D. and Nachum, L. (2002). Why do business service firms
cluster? Small consultancies, clustering and decentralization in
London and southern England. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 27, 67--90.
Leadbeater, C. (1997). Living on Thin Air: The New Economy. London:
Viking.
Lowendhal, B. (1997). Strategic Management of Professional Service
Firms. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press.
Lowendhal, B., Revang, O. and Fosstenlokken, S. N. (2001).
Knowledge and value creation in professional service firms. Human
Relations 54, 911--931.
McDowell, L. M. and Court, G. (1994). Performing work: Bodily
representations in merchant banks. Environment and Planning D 12,
253--278.
Nachum, L. (1999). Measurement of productivity of professional
services: An illustration on Swedish management consultancy firms.
International Journal of Operations and Production Management
19(9), 922--949.
Warf, B. (2001). Global dimensions of US legal firms. Professional
Geographer 53, 398--406.
Relevant Websites
http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk
Clifford Chance Centre for the Management of Professional Service
Firms, University of Oxford.
http://www.oecd.org
OECD indicators of regulatory conditions in the professional services
sector, Regulatory Reform: Economic Issues, Indicators of regulatory
conditions in the professional services, Economics Department.
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