Defining Professional Services Firms
Many industrial groupings have been used for academic research when looking at professional services firms, making a clear definition hard to attain. Some work has been directed at better defining professional service firms. In particular, Von Nordenflycht generated a taxonomy of professional service firms, defining four types:
- Classic PSFs (e.g. law and accounting firms) - characterised by a high knowledge intensity, a professionalised workforce, and low capital intensity
- Professional campuses (e.g. hospitals) - characterised by a high knowledge intensity, a professionalised workforce, and high capital intensity
- Neo-PSFs (e.g. management consultants) - characterised by a high knowledge intensity and a low capital intensity
- Technology developers (e.g. R&D firms, biotechs) - characterised by a high knowledge intensity and a high capital intensity
Frameworks such as this greatly aid the ability of managers and academics to better understand how such firms manage themselves and how to judge benchmark practices.
Read more about this topic: Professional Services
Famous quotes containing the words defining, professional, services and/or firms:
“The industrial world would be a more peaceful place if workers were called in as collaborators in the process of establishing standards and defining shop practices, matters which surely affect their interests and well-being fully as much as they affect those of employers and consumers.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Many young girls are ... becoming trained nurses, whose gentle ministrations in the sick-room, skilled touch, patient watchfulness and unwearied vigils, are as great factors in the care of the sick, as are the professional physicians.”
—Lydia Hoyt Farmer (1842–1903)
“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“While waiting to get married, several forms of employment were acceptable. Teaching kindergarten was for those girls who stayed in school four years. The rest were secretaries, typists, file clerks, or receptionists in insurance firms or banks, preferably those owned or run by the family, but respectable enough if the boss was an upstanding Christian member of the community.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)