Standardization – new challenges for professional identity

Abstract

Standardization of work processes affects most contemporary jobs. In customeroriented service work, standardization does not just affect organizations’ internal relations, but also relations to customers or citizens who are central to the work. In this article the work of bank advisors is analysed as an example of customeroriented service work. For financial advisors, conditions such as risk management and centralization have resulted in standardization measures. These pervade the daily work and create tensions in the relations financial advisors have to their customers, whereby their professional identity is challenged in new ways. The article argues that to understand these challenges we need to expand focus from the conflict between the role as advisor vs. the role as salesperson that for many years has been seen as central to the understanding of tensions in the work of bank advisors. Expanding the focus to the impacts of standardization, the work of bank advisors becomes exemplary; showing how standardization is not just a practical way of solving big and small tasks, but has implications for work content, social relations and professional identity. The article opens with an account of recent developments in the work of financial advisors going from a conspicuous sales orientation to an orientation towards risk and rationalisation. Elaborating on the description of the work, relations to the customer is argued to be central to the ascription of meaning for financial advisors. Financial advisors’ work is then framed as customeroriented service work drawing on theoretical conceptualizations by Korczinsky (2009) and Korczynski og Macdonald (2009). Drawing on Timmermans and Epstein (2010), standardizations is conceptualized as thoroughly integrated with work practices and social relations, thereby having a potential of transforming work in both intended and unintended ways. The core of the article is constituted by a qualitative analysis of the case studies of two Danish bank branches. The analysis feeds into the concluding discussion on how standardization challenges and changes the professional identity of financial advisors in particular, and more generally considers the implications for the understanding of standardization in comparable fields of work