Struggling to organize across nationalborders: The case of global resourcemanagement in professional service firms
A growing body of research has challenged the commonly accepted 
view that multinationals have evolved into globally integrated 
networks, demonstrating instead that such organizations are 
sites of conflict between competing rationalities emerging from 
distinctive national institutional contexts. However, this research has 
neglected professional service firms (PSFs) in spite of them often 
being held as exemplars of the integrated network model. This 
article redresses this imbalance by focusing, in particular, on how PSFs 
seek to coordinate the horizontal flow of their human resources as 
a mechanism of inter-unit knowledge sharing. Drawing upon interviews 
in four PSFs, I show that these organizations have developed 
resource management systems that cannot simply be reduced to 
national institutional contexts. However, I also demonstrate that the 
process of resource management is subject to inter-unit conflicts that 
undermine its raison d’etre. I argue that these tensions are symptomatic 
of both the Anglo-American model of multinational management 
and cross-national differences in market conditio