AbstractLiterature around middle management has highlighted the importance of intra‐organizational boundaries, focusing on the in‐betweenness and fluidity of middle‐managerial roles and practices. Yet, this literature has largely focused on the crossing of largely stable, monolithic boundaries, placing less emphasis on the plurality of emerging boundaries and the ways in which they are constructed. Focusing on boundaries as the outcomes of, rather than only as constraints upon, everyday practices, we conduct an ethnographic study across multiple sites of a Brazilian audit firm, examining middle managers' construction, maintenance and adjustment of boundaries. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldnotes and 155 formal interviews, our study reveals how middle managers fluidly manipulate boundaries' visibility and permeability to achieve specific purposes, and how different configurations of these elements generate various boundary work practices, which we describe as barricade, façade, taboo and phantom boundary work. Moreover, we show the dual orientation of middle managers' boundary work – both obstructing and facilitating boundary‐crossing – demonstrating that, in contrast to prior research, both orientations can be enacted by the same actor according to his or her purposes. By doing so, we contribute to scholarship exploring agency and plasticity as the key issues linking the existing literature on middle management with that on boundary work.

AbstractThis paper examines how middle managers subvert organizational norms through diverse forms of deviance. Considering deviance not only in its negative sense, but including elements of adaptability and innovation, we draw on Mertonian theorizing around structural strains to explain deviance as resulting from mismatches between organizational norms and everyday work ‘on‐the‐ground’, with deviance practices feeding back iteratively into norm formation itself. Drawing upon observations, shadowing and interviews in a Brazilian accounting firm, we explore how deviance follows from incompatible pressures and norms across organizational levels and locations, and is realized in creative practical operationalizations of, and reaction to, conflicting norms. Through thick descriptions of three exemplary cases, we examine middle‐managerial deviance at varying level of detachment from, and dialogical relation to, norms. On this basis, we advance a multifaceted conceptualization of deviance – rescoping, reconfiguring and replacing norms – accounting for its conditions of emergence, diversity of mechanisms, and repercussions on middle managers' agency and organizational functioning and norms. Our findings demonstrate that deviance paves the way for new norm formation, reconciling contradictory constraints while consolidating middle managers' power over and beyond their official mandates.

Abstract One view of the socialization experienced by professionals in global Big 4 firms suggests that the intensity of socialization engenders a strong and deep‐rooted professional identity. We scrutinize this claim by drawing on interviews with partners who retired from lifelong employment in Big 4 firms in Japan. Through partners' reflections on their experiences in detaching from the firm, we examine how socialization manifests in partners' identity work. We find that partners' identity, which often appears entrenched, invariable, and heroic, can be highly fragile and vulnerable to changing circumstances. Before leaving the firm, interviewees attempt to reconcile their Big 4 “graduation” with feelings of obsolescence and a growing distance from previous accomplishments. After leaving the firm, interviewees revisit the identity built throughout their careers. Unable to move on to a selfhood detached from that identity, they refashion their identity relative to their former Big 4 partner self, backgrounding their private life and post‐firm professional affiliations. Not knowing how to “close the books,” retired partners seek comfort in the old “plot” and in the old “characters,” finding ways to “keep the books open” even after the “setting” has changed. Our results reconfirm the powerful socialization experienced by partners during their tenure with the Big 4 but run counter to scholarship that characterizes the identity of Big 4 partners as strong and fixed. Rather, we demonstrate the insecurity underlying our professional service heroes' identity work and the contingent identity work processes that partners engage in while navigating departure from the Big 4.