Corporate professional stratification in human resource management: a sequential multi-method Hong Kong and United Kingdom analysis

Abstract

The rise of corporate professions reignites a longstanding sociological debate concerning the structure of intra-professional relations within purportedly collegiate entities. However, unlike the classic case of independent professions, research has yet to examine how corporate professions stratify occupationally. The omission is surprising since the motivational prospect of corporate practitioners climbing an embedded career ladder engenders what one might reasonably refer to as ‘stratification by design’. Theoretically, while scholars demarcate several types of intra-professional relations within independent professions (e.g. extraction, protection, and imperialism), how far such arrangements transpose to a corporate professional context lacking occupational autonomy remains uncertain. Addressing the research gap, our study corroborates sequential multi-method Hong Kong and UK data to examine intra-professional stratification in human resource management, a role engendering a distinctly organizational rather than independent professionalizing form. Three discerning research questions guide our investigation. First, how are documented human resources (HR) certification criteria structured by membership level and competency composition? Second, to what extent do the stipulated competencies reflect empirical practice? Third, on what organizational, occupational, and demographic grounds do ‘elite’ HR practitioners claim superordinate status? Across both case contexts, our study finds that while strategic competencies assume a higher certification status than administrative competencies, preserving routine maintenance remains an indispensable organizational activity. The exception concerns a group of predominantly executive-level practitioners abstaining from administrative duties, raising questions about their functional integration, and whether the ascendancy of managerial logics over professional logics produces a compromised form of occupational imperialism.

Introduction

The distribution of tasks and responsibilities within professional hierarchies remains a longstanding topic of sociological interest (Abbott 1981; Freidson 1985; Kirkpatrick, Dent and Jespersen 2011; Brydges et al. 2022). In contraposition to the widely held image of homogeneity within expert groups (Parsons 1939; Ladinsky and Grossman 1966), professional hierarchy and stratification are not only common but also increasingly prevalent (Waring 2014; Adams 2020; Kirkpatrick, Zardini and Veronesi 2023). Take Ackroyd and Muzio’s (2007) study of English law firms. It details a form of internal organizational closure whereby equity partners exercise increasing control over the employment conditions of expanding cohorts of high-value-adding subordinates to extract mounting financial surpluses (Ackroyd and Muzio 2007). Meanwhile, in medicine, Friedson’s (1985) re-stratification thesis points to the emergence of ‘knowledge’ and ‘administrative’ elites aiming to protect clinical excellence in the face of de-professionalization pressures.

When transposing these classic examples to the rising terrain of corporate professions, one encounters even more stratification diversity. A theorized product of professionalization ‘from above’ (i.e. domination of forces external to the group, McClelland 1990) and ‘control from a distance’ (i.e. the discursive construction of ‘appropriate’ professional identities and conducts, Fournier 1999), the prospect of corporate practitioners climbing an embedded career ladder produces what one might reasonably refer to as ‘stratification by design’. Despite employers governing ‘the route and body through which professional progression becomes possible’ (Paton, Hodgson and Muzio 2013: 237), practitioners purportedly accept such corporate encapsulation because it enhances their organizational status and offers rewards for good performance (Evetts 2003). However, in the absence of internal organizational closure (Ackroyd and Muzio 2007), how those reaching the apex of corporate professional association relate to subordinate peers remains unclear.

In theory, as managerial logics infiltrate professional logics (Kirkpatrick, Zardini and Veronesi 2023), the determinants of corporate professional authority derive less from status credentials (e.g. licensure and certification status) and more from one’s formal (management) position (i.e. hierarchical seniority). Accordingly, a disjuncture could arise between the legitimizing discourse motivating corporate practitioners to climb a professional career ladder and the managerial reality of organizational practice. Respectively, just as corporate professional status replicates hierarchical power in certified form (Paton, Hodgson and Muzio 2013), the stipulated competencies governing certified progression disciplines practitioners to work hard (Evetts 2003). By implication, far from resisting the imposition of managerial logics onto professionalization logics (Adams 2020) or exercising some independent occupational autonomy (Freidson 2001), employer agendas comprise an integral part of corporate professional identity.

While extant stratification research has focussed on the fortunes of well-established collegiate professions, whose intra-professional relationships vary by organizational independence (e.g. medical doctors in a hospital, veterinarians in a practice), less is known about the conterminous case of corporate professions, which also lack occupational autonomy. Bridging the gap, one of our study’s most important contributions lies in examining what a professionalization project entails for a role engendering a distinctly organizational rather than independent professionalizing form. Theoretically, while the prospect of corporate practitioners climbing an embedded career ladder may motivate incumbents to work hard (Evetts 2003), it also compromises their potential to leverage the trappings of career promotion. In contrast, scholars of independent professions recognize the economic and symbolic agency of elite professionals to ‘control’ (Larkin 1983), ‘protect’ (Freidson 1985), and ‘extract value’ (Ackroyd and Muzio 2007) from subordinate peers.

Cognizant of the occupational and organizational differences between independent and corporate professions, our selection of human resource management (HRM) for empirical purposes adds insight by covering one of the most recognizable and established corporate activities (Syrigou and Williams 2023). Moreover, accepting that organizational-based (Bévort and Poulfelt 2015) human resource (HR) practitioners lack the occupational autonomy of their more independent counterparts (Butler, Chillas and Muhr 2012), they exalt managerial-professional hybridity forms by design rather than evolution. Tangentially, since females constitute the bulk of the HR workforce, the role provides an appropriate context to consider gender (among other demographic factors) as a stratification determinant. Extant corporate professionalization studies tend to privilege analysis of managerial and professional logics. Hence, among our study’s three discerning research questions, we include consideration of occupational, organizational and demographic variables shaping intra-professional relations.

First, to corroborate the fundamental notions of ‘corporate capture’ and ‘stratification by design’, how does professional standards documentation structure by certified membership level and competency composition? By documenting the all-encompassing and multi-tiered structure of HRM’s professional membership criteria, our first question aims to illuminate how corporate professional association instils the disciplining/motivational prospect of career laddering (Evetts 2003) while embedding a holistic/hoarding approach to a professional association (Kessler, Heron and Dopson 2015). As Paton, Hodgson and Muzio (2013: 238) note in the conterminous case of project management, the stratification of corporate professions breaks ‘with the classical collegiate model of professionalism as a cadre with one entry point and allegedly equal levels of competence and lays open the possibility for a polarised and fragmented occupation’.

Second, to establish the empirical authenticity of corporate professional progression, to what extent do the stipulated HR competencies reflect empirical practice? Extant studies of corporate professional association tend only to investigate the documented expression of corporate professions (e.g. Veldman 2013; Collins and Butler 2020). They tend not to substantiate the empirical authenticity of such claims. Critically, if the aim of ‘corporate capture’ is to instil the disciplining logic of professionalism (Evetts 2003), one might observe a disjuncture between the motivational claims of professional progression and the workplace reality of frontline practice. Hence, our study aims to distinguish rhetoric from reality (Kipping, Bühlmann and David 2019) by examining whether the desired competency descriptors motivating HR practitioners to progress in their professional careers realistically reflect organizational requirements.

Third, on what organizational, occupational, and demographic grounds do ‘elite’ HR practitioners claim superordinate status? While managerial and professional logics likely influence the structure of intra-professional stratification (e.g. Adams 2020; Kirkpatrick, Zardini and Veronesi 2023), they need not necessarily comprise the only factors. For instance, commentators increasingly note how demographic factors such as age and gender also exert influence (Gorman 2015; Segovia‐Pérez et al. 2020), particularly in a female-dominant role such as HRM. Suddaby and Muzio’s (2015) review of the English legal profession supports such demographic consideration. Their study identified a striking gender demarcation between predominantly male controlling partners and predominantly female rank and file workers.

Cognizant that comparative studies of professions remain relatively rare (Brock Leblebici and Muzio 2014), we aid theoretical generalizability by replicating our research in Hong Kong and the UK, adding an insightful international dimension. Compositionally, our two selected cases provide comprehensive knowledge, having reached the standard professionalization milestones witnessed by the HR role more generally (Farndale and Brewster 2005). For instance, in both of our case contexts, HRM represents a distinct occupation maintained by a certified practitioner body enjoying Regional (European or Asian) and World (i.e. the World Federation of People Management Association [WFPMA]) affiliation. At the same time, commensurate with the respective people management association (PMA)—Hong Kong’s Institute of HRM (IHRM) and the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)—offering mass certification, our study includes analysis of all certified levels, providing a basis to inform commensurate professionalization circumstances (among which at least 90 such professionalization projects exist globally, based on WFPMA membership figures).

We continue our paper as follows: first, we summarize the literature on corporate professionalization and intra-professional relations, paying attention to their HR contextualization. We then detail our study’s methodological properties before presenting the research findings. After discussing the key findings, a conclusion section rounds off the paper.

The competing discourses of HR professionalization

There has long been a debate about the nature and content of what constitutes a professional occupation. Idealistically, society entrusts professions to reshape symbolically and materially a client’s ‘call for help’ by placing it within a given scenario and applying objective responses that reorder ‘given existential or epistemic conditions’ (Olgiati 2010: 816). Whether such professional performances involve actions concerning individuals (i.e. the classic liberal case) or actions concerning organizations (i.e. the contemporary corporate case) depends on the broader institutional context key mobilizing agents encounter (Suddaby and Muzio 2015). One material implication of corporate professionalization’s rise is that managers and administrators prosper from their ability to control their inhabited bureaucratic machinery by addressing key organizational problems (Faulconbridge and Muzio 2008). Accumulating ‘strategic’ rather than ‘cultural’ assets (Savage et al. 1992), corporate professions become capitalism’s legitimizing functionaries, serving sectional, not general, interests (Dahrendorf 1964). However, cognizant that not everyone is enamoured by the encroachment of private values onto public affairs (Reed 1996; Leicht and Fennell 2001), some clarification is required when assessing the material implications of intra-professional polarization among frontline practitioners caught up in capitalism’s substructure.

While there remains some debate as to how far HRM can claim ‘true’ professional status (see summaries by Farndale and Brewster 2005; Higgins, Roper and Zhao 2024), it remains incumbent to note that no profession configures exactly like any other, and on many standard traits (e.g. associational representation, professional membership, and code of ethics) HRM can at least claim ‘semi-professional’ status, even if it lacks licensure. Institutionally, the associational entitlement of certified HR practitioners to exclusively use a particular professional title (i.e. post-nominal designations) states publicly that only qualified personnel should perform HR activities (Wiley 1995). In a competitive market, such certified assurance is critical because it is difficult for employers to tell a genuine professional from the growing field of people claiming to be professional. However, the risk of convincing employers to hire certified practitioners is that it potentially limits the supply of available practitioners in the field, which could drive up wages (Wiley 1995). Alternatively, by certifying desired standards of practice, PMAs can help organizations save the time and costs of thoroughly investigating the background of every individual who applies for a job to determine their abilities (Aguinis, Michaelis and Jones 2005).

Clearly, employers have a vested interest in determining how HR practitioners progress professionally and contribute to organizational performance. Institutionally, akin to other corporate professions—e.g. project management, consultancy, and executive search (Muzio et al. 2011)—HRM veers towards a commercialized legitimacy claim than a state-sanctioned one (Gilmore and Williams 2007). As Nicklich, Braun and Fortwengel (2020) elaborate, while classic professions have often relied on strong regulatory embedding in state regulations and licensure, organizations primarily anchor corporate professions, which, acting as large employers, provide the principal arena in which their professionalization project unfolds. However, the HRM case adds intrigue because, while HR practitioners could claim a mandate on regulatory compliance, such as instructing colleagues to operate within the boundaries of employment law, they do not require HR certification to authorize such compliance. Instead, the requisite power derives from secondary sources (i.e. state law) rather than primary associational ones (Bailey 2011). By implication, even if employers stipulate HR certification as a desired or essential person specification (Aguinis, Michaelis and Jones 2005), they need not relinquish managerial authority over the organizational application of people management expertise.

From an intra-professional perspective, the source of HRM’s legitimacy claim matters because it mandates the type of state versus market assets (Krause 1996) practitioners wield over organizational decisions, including resource distribution and client relations (Suddaby and Muzio 2015). However, one danger of HR succumbing to the ‘gatekeeper’ source of professional legitimacy is that the state, rather than the profession, controls the practitioner’s work (Bailey 2011). Conversely, the danger with HR siding with managerial prerogatives is that associational representatives shape practitioner identities around corporate agendas (Paton, Hodgson and Muzio 2013). On balance, commensurate with the HR role’s broader transformation from personnel management to strategic HRM (Lundy 1994), corporate affiliation seems to have gained ascendancy in popular discourse (Marchington 2015). Hence, one can reasonably posit that discourses of business partnering, value-added, and leadership will assume a higher certification status than more traditional notions of proficiency, regulatory compliance, and trust (Hope-Hailey, Farndale and Truss 2005; Gunawan, Aungsuroch and Fisher 2019). Whether the desired competency descriptors motivating HR practitioners to excel in their jobs realistically reflect organizational requirements or merely provide a performative function remains a separate matter.

The iterative purification of intra-professional stratification

Accepting that polarizing relations stem from the use of occupational power orientated downwards (Brante 1988), the rise of corporate professions elongates the hierarchical division of labour, acquiring legitimacy not from within the role’s practitioner base but ‘from above’ among managerial and employer interests (McClelland 1999). Despite threatening to erode such traditional professional traits as autonomy and expertise (Evetts 2003), the practitioner appeal of such corporatization resides in incumbents’ opportunity to climb an embedded career ladder. In contrast, professionalization ‘from within’ (McClelland 1999) engenders a more spontaneous and indigenous mobilization source founded on associated practitioners’ tacit skills and knowledge.

Despite the contrasting indigenous versus exogenous forms, both professionalization routes produce highly stratified practitioner groupings established from the local versus managed accomplishments of an extended labour process. For instance, when documenting the classic case of medicine, Abbott (1981) notes how the highest-status professionals tend to deal with issues furthest removed from human complexity, receiving pre-digested, and predefined problems referred to by ‘subordinate’ peers. Conversely, the lowest-status professionals tend to capture problems from which one cannot remove human complexities. The referral process of successive iterative purification thus entails senior practitioners withdrawing from precisely those problems the public values (Abbott 1981).

While all professions need an internal order to safeguard jurisdiction in an increasingly marketized environment (Alvehus, Eklund and Kastberg 2020), established professions such as medicine and law have proven adept at drawing on symbolic and economic resources to protect their professional turf from external interference (Alvehus, Avnoon and Oliver 2021). The resulting outcomes need not be distribute evenly. In the case of medicine, for instance, Friedson’s (1985) much-cited re-stratification thesis points to the emergence of ‘knowledge’ and ‘administrative’ elites established to retain clinical excellence in the face of de-professionalization pressures. By ‘buffering’ the rank and file from an increasingly bureaucratic and marketized workplace, medical elites purportedly protect subordinate peers from managerial reform, while maintaining their status differential.

Conversely, in law, Muzio and Ackroyd (2005) argue that defensive actions protect senior lawyers’ status and earnings rather than rank-and-file workers. Materially, the resulting polarization takes a more extractive form and demarcates between a shrinking elite of partners, who manage and regulate the activities of their peers and enjoy a disproportionate share of its associated rewards, and a rapidly expanding cohort of salaried professionals, excluded from many decision-making processes and who confront supervised work and deteriorating employment conditions (Muzio and Ackroyd 2005).

When explaining differences in the type of intra-professional relationships forged within the medical and legal professions, organizational circumstance provides an important mediating factor. For instance, while the legal profession typically organizes within an independent professional organization (e.g. the partnership governance form), medical experts usually belong to a large-scale bureaucratic organization (e.g. a hospital). The organizational distinction draws attention to the embedded agency paradox, which refers to how actors can influence change when their actions, intentions, and rationality are all conditioned by the institution they wish to modify (Daudigeos 2013).

While professionals claiming internal organizational closure (e.g. lawyers in a partnership) likely command more labour process discretion than those confined to bureaucratic settings (e.g. doctors in a hospital), both practitioner groupings can utilize their economic and symbolic resources to ‘maintain the ambiguity of their professional work, since “outsiders” never really get to engage with the core work process’ (Alvehus, Avnoon and Oliver 2021: 240). In contrast, lacking both organizational independence and occupational autonomy, corporate professions have neither had to resist the intrusion of managerial logics onto professionalization logics nor gained internal organizational closure. Instead, emerging from within organizational contexts, they produce hybrid forms by design.

Despite the occupational and organizational distinctions, the prospect of intra-professional stratification nevertheless prevails because by motivating appropriate work identities (Fournier 1999), practitioners achieving corporate objectives gain career promotion and reward (Evetts 2003). However, while practitioners reaching the apex of corporate professional association may enjoy more prestige than those situated on a lower rung, such superior status may not convert to any isolated occupational advantage. Instead, evidence suggests that elite corporate practitioners adopt a ‘liminar’ form (Paton and Hodgson 2016; Reed and Thomas 2021), which means being mindful of corporate interests when acquiring the positional trappings of professional–managerial seniority (Schneider 2007).

Accepting that HRM lacks the same degree of epistemological formalization and state-backed regulation as its more independently established counterparts (Butler, Chillas and Muhr 2012), the ‘extractive’ and ‘protective’ strategies observed in law and medicine may not travel and, at best, only assume a compromised form. For instance, modifying the ‘extractive’ situation observed in English law firms (Ackroyd and Muzio 2007), elite HR practitioners could apply a ‘task complex’ skillset (Johnson 2009). Here, elite HR practitioners deploy subordinates to add corporate value by applying non-standard, unpredictable, and unanalysable practices that resolve core organizational problems (Reed 1996). However, it seems unlikely that any resulting gains will accrue a direct pecuniary elite advantage since incumbents lack the requisite organizational closure.

Alternatively, akin to the ‘protective’ situation observed in medicine (Freidson 1985), elite HR practitioners could pursue a ‘task continuity’ strategy (Johnson 2009). Here, hierarchically generated rules and procedures that standardize, monitor, and enforce required HR performance facilitate superordinate control given the role’s high degree of task specificity (Stanton et al. 2010). Operationally, HR practitioners add organizational value by maintaining competence in ‘nuts and bolts’ activities and ensuring smooth internal operations. Thus, compared to the extractive approach, elite HR practitioners maintain their hierarchical importance by securing lower-order functions such as onboarding, booking time off, and assuring compensation, raising concerns only when things go wrong, such as a missed pay packet. By dealing with day-to-day problems that can otherwise quickly escalate, HR protects the organization from potentially damaging legal and administrative failings.

A third instrumental strategy elite HR practitioners could pursue while safeguarding corporate integrity concerns ‘occupational imperialism’ (Larkin 1983): acquiring high-status roles and skills while delegating undesirable tasks to subordinate groups (Kirkpatrick, Dent and Jespersen 2011). As Wright (2008: 1063) contends, the demarcation of a business partner/internal consultancy role within the HR function lends credence to such a prospect: ‘serving to undermine any pretence to a unitary and cohesive occupational identity, the bifurcation between routine transactional and strategic transformational activities encourages competition within the HR profession between different sub-groupings’. In labour process terms, HR’s technical, administrative, and strategic differentiation seems highly amenable to the type of internal rationalization facilitative of such elite practitioner demarcation.

One notes, for example, how, in the UK at least, the HR role has not only enjoyed a near doubling of practitioners from 248,000 in 2001 to 458,000 in 2023 (91% increase)—but classifies into two (2001–2010) and, subsequently, three (2011 onwards) distinct practitioner categories (see Table 1, Office for National Statistics 2018, 2024). While practitioners assuming ‘managerial and directing’ positions outweigh their administrative counterparts fivefold, it remains unclear what the respective roles practically entail and how they interrelate. One mediating factor concerns the prospect of technology automating and displacing routine clerical activities (IHRM 2018; CIPD 2020), conditional upon broader labour market conditions (Autor, Levy and Murnane 2003). For instance, just as firms operating with less latitude to set low wages (i.e. high minimum wage and extensive collective bargaining) will create fewer low-end jobs, a large pool of unqualified labour seems a precondition for employment polarization (Grimshaw, Bosch and Rubery 2013).

In our study, since both the UK and Hong Kong share similar levels of technology and, via their historical connection, ‘liberal’ wage-setting institutions, one posits that firms from both cases will have reasonable latitude to create low-end jobs. Theoretically, an occupational bifurcation between high-skilled analytical work and low-skilled interpersonal service jobs could materialize (Autor, Levy and Murnane 2003), hollowing out the middle. If so, one might need to reconsider the proposition that certified practitioners uniformly benefit from corporate professionalism’s heightened status and rewards (Paton, Hodgson and Muzio 2013) since different work categories may thrive or falter. Instead, commensurate with the addition of a formal ‘manager and director’ HR classification (Table 1), the prospect of occupational imperialism seems the most likely form of (compromised) elite HR advantage.

METHODS

Corroborating sequential multi-method Hong Kong and UK data, our study addresses three discerning research questions concerning intra-professional stratification within the hitherto unexplored corporate professional domain of HRM. First, how are documented HR certification criteria structured by membership level and competency composition? Second, to what extent do the stipulated competencies reflect empirical practice? Third, on what organizational, occupational, and demographic grounds do ‘elite’ HR practitioners claim superordinate status?

Philosophically, our study adopts a critical realist perspective that preserves a scientific attitude towards social analysis while recognizing the importance of actors’ meanings (Bhaskar 1989). The realist ontological outlook accepts that reality exists beyond one’s sense perceptions but is typically accessed using concepts and social structures subject to dispute amongst various commentators (Zachariadis, Scott and Barrett 2013). Methodologically, we combine documentary and survey evidence to compare different perceptions while building statistical profiles of HR practice across two comparable jurisdictions. In other words, while documentary evidence provides the formal associational position of normative HR practice, the empirical authenticity of such criteria requires validation. Hence, by surveying practitioners’ workplace experiences, we test how far the desired competencies resonate in practice. Respectively, while the documentary material provides an open, unobtrusive, and uncontaminated method that others can verify (Platt 1981), the survey of HR practitioners tests its empirical feasibility within an applied context.

Procedurally, we describe our study as a sequential multi-method analysis where the findings of each step condition the subsequent step’s focus. As Creswell (2014) explains, the logic governing a sequential multi-method approach is that a single data set is insufficient, one must address each question consecutively, and each type of question requires different kinds of data. Applying the sequential logic to our comparative study, creating a certified HR practitioner survey (Step 2) depends on the documented content of certification material (Step 1). Then, having established how far the certified criteria resonate in practice (Step 2), we can consider their most discerning properties by practitioners’ demographic, organizational, and occupational statuses (Step 3).

Concerning our study’s comparative dimension, to corroborate the related notions of corporate capture and stratification by design, we began by examining how our two sets of certification criteria (CIPD 2010a,b,c, 2013a,b,c, 2015a,b,c; IHRM 2010) structures by membership level and competency composition. Specifically, how many structuring levels? Which practices do association interests consider ‘elite’ (high membership level) versus ‘rank and file’ (low or middle membership level)? What does the discursive content of the HR certification criteria reveal about how the association wants to present itself at different levels of professionalism?

Second, after analysing the defining HR criteria, we operationalized the core components into a survey of HR practitioners to examine their empirical resonance. Hence, the composition of our survey questions (Step 2) depended on the results of the preceding document analysis (Step 1). The resulting survey questions comprise 17 core certification criteria (eight items each from Hong Kong and the UK, plus one shared item) operationalized into a single instrument deployed among both sets of participants alike. We then compiled the resulting survey responses (615 UK and 172 Hong Kong) by average time practitioners spent on each activity—from ‘1’ (low) to ‘5’ (high)—and via an exploratory factor analysis (using a principal component extraction method and an oblimin rotation¹) to demarcate the most discerning HR activities.

Third, we deployed multiple regression analysis to ascertain how the resulting activities structure by practitioners’ organizational, occupational, and demographic circumstances. Again, stage three analysis depended on the results of stage two since we used the latent factor profiling to apply the multiple regression analysis. One downside of our approach is that we could not control the composition of the underlying factors. Hence, to help build an overall picture of certified HR practice, we make recourse to all contributing independent variables contextualized by supplementary descriptive data. Given our study’s exploratory nature, the stepwise process of entering/excluding the independent variables into the regression model was appropriate. It resulted in the following statistically significant variables: hierarchical position (categorical: executive, managerial, specialist, and generalist), time spent on HR (% total time), HR certification level (categorical: Fellow, Chartered/Professional, Associate), years of HR certification (banded), years of HR experience (banded), and gender² (categorical: Male, Female)³ (see Tables 5 and 6).

Finally, having piloted the survey among CIPD and IHRM representatives to iron out any coding (e.g. agreeing to remove salary bands) and language (agreeing to present the Hong Kong version of the survey in English: an official language used daily in the workplace) issues, an email containing a link to an electronic survey was sent to a representative sample (by stratified certification status) of the respective membership, achieving a completion rate of 59.5% and 56.4%, respectively. The IHRM sample comprises 3% fellows, 46% professional, and 51% associate. The CIPD sample comprises 21% fellows, 32% chartered, and 47% associates.

Findings (1) Documented and empirical manifestation of corporate capture

Empirically, the first point noted about the documented structure of our two analysed sets of HR certification criteria is that consistent with the notion of ‘stratification by design’, both comprise three all-encapsulating certification levels: Associate, Chartered (CIPD)/Professional (IHRM), and Fellow. The respective PMAs have also created a non-certifiable foundation membership category (CIPD 2019; IHRM 2022) to encourage engagement among prospective and inexperienced HR practitioners. However, since these two entry-level avenues do not offer post-nominal designations, they fail to attract the same degree of institutional recognition as the corresponding certification scheme. Nevertheless, such developmental prospect is commensurate with the associational adoption of a hoarding/holistic strategy (Kessler, Heron and Dopson 2015) and seems designed to ‘capture’ (Paton, Hodgson and Muzio 2013) the career prospects of all practitioner grades.

Compositionally, accepting that the UK’s HR certification scheme entailed three minor revisions over the period detailed, Table 2 shows that in both case contexts, the substantive ordering of certified HR progresses from technical competencies at Associate-level to administrative competencies at Chartered/Professional level and, finally, to strategic leading competencies at Fellow-level. Connotatively, the hierarchically arranged membership ordering suggests associational interests privilege a corporate/market (i.e. strategic) vision of professional HR over a state/bureaucratic (i.e. administrative) one. While the documented claims of professional HR progression may inspire administratively focussed HR practitioners to acquire strategic leading competencies, it remains uncertain whether employing organizations will utilize them in practice (see Findings (2) Professional HR in practice).

Meanwhile, at the individual competency level, the documentary evidence suggests that, compared to Abbot’s (1981) iterative purification notion, the content specificity of HR certification criteria becomes increasingly abstract rather than pure as it progresses. For instance, a lower-rung competency statement detailing the ability to ‘maintain administrative records’ seems less circumspect (and, by definition, more routinized) than a higher-level one stipulating the ability to ‘use insight to challenge and shape executive thinking around the risks and benefits of decisions or planned strategy’ (CIPD 2012: 11). Likewise, the experiential demands of occupational progression move from relatively concrete Associate-level knowledge requirements (e.g. specific knowledge acquisition and qualifying exams) to more vaguely articulated Fellow-level experiential requirements (e.g. years of ‘senior’ HR experience) without detailing what such seniority entails.

Irrespective of how realistic such desired competency statements are as a manifestation of empirical practice, the descriptors are interesting as they lay the foundations for associational interests to appeal to their practitioner base. By promising practitioners that certified HR offers an opportunity to move away from the more mundane reality of routine maintenance (lowest certification rung) to the more exciting strategic leading activities (highest certification rung), the certified membership scheme reinforces the aspirational qualities of professional alignment without going into too much compositional detail (since as noted above the criteria are so abstractly articulated).

Findings (2) Professional HR in practice

To establish how far the documented HR certification criteria resonate in practice, we analysed practitioners’ self-reported experiences. Empirically, by mean rank time certified practitioners spend on each level of HR activity, the descriptive data reveals that administrative tasks consume most time (4.09 in Hong Kong, 3.98 in the UK), followed by leadership (3.97 and 3.94, respectively), strategy (3.55 and 3.74, respectively), and basic operations (2.9 and 2.47, respectively).

Aside from analysing the survey responses at an individual question level, we also built profiles of HR practice using exploratory factor analysis. Accordingly, by latent factor profiling, the eigenvalues with scree test indicated the extraction of four UK components, accounting for 67.37% of the data variance, and three Hong Kong components, accounting for 69.69% of the variance.

As shown in Table 3, the first UK profile comprises five items that load onto what we label ‘strategic HR’. The second profile then comprises five items that capture ‘basic operations’. In contrast, the third profile comprises seven items that load negatively onto professional administration, which we label ‘avoid administration’. Finally, the remaining profile comprises two items that capture ‘leadership’, one of which also appears on the ‘strategic’ profile.

Next, as shown in Table 4, the first Hong Kong profile comprises seven items that load onto what we label ‘strategic leadership’. It conflates the corresponding ‘strategic’ and ‘leadership’ UK profiles. The second profile comprises the same five items that formed the UK’s ‘basic operations’ profile. Finally, the factor profile comprises six items that load negatively onto professional administration, which, as per the UK equivalent, we entitle ‘avoid administration’. Overall, our two sets of factor profiles are remarkably similar. The main difference pertains to the Hong Kong data merging the otherwise separately demarcated strategic and leader profiles (UK).

What then of the factor profiling’s implications for HR’s professionalizing authenticity? Given accompanying descriptive data, bar the ‘avoid administration’ profile, core knowledge, and administrative activities remain standard across the role (i.e. they represent the ‘rank and file’, including among strategic leaders) consuming certified practitioners’ most time, followed by leadership, then strategy. Hence, the pattern of self-reported HR activities observed by our study is dissimilar both to the demarcation posited in the classic firm-level administrative versus strategic HRM divide (e.g. Lundy 1994; Lo, Macky and Pio 2015) and the corresponding certification criteria (e.g. IHRM 2010, 2011; CIPD 2015a,b,c). Instead, accepting the role’s widespread administrative prevalence (descriptive data), the basis of occupational task demarcation occurs between a strategic/leader group, a basic operative one, and a somewhat intriguing ‘avoid administration’ profile.

Otherwise, the item composition of our two sets of factor profiles resonates with those who express caution with HRM’s strategic preoccupation (Hope-Hailey, Farndale and Truss 2005; Marchington 2015) and its detriment to the preservation of routine maintenance (Syrigou and Williams 2023). From a ‘corporate capture’ perspective (Paton, Hodgson and Muzio 2013), the core certification criteria may provide only a rhetorical function to legitimize professional progression. Even among practitioners assuming strategic and leadership responsibilities, a large swathe of administrative and legal compliance activity consumes their time (cross-tabulated descriptive data). The exception concerns the ‘avoid administration’ profile, which emerges equally in the UK and Hong Kong data and begs the question of what sort of practitioners belong to such distinct profiling.

Findings (3) Relative organizational, occupational, and demographic contribution

Concerning the independent variables predictive of each certified HR practitioner profile and, by implication, the basis of corporate professional stratification, our study’s multiple regression analysis shows that organizational position (i.e. hierarchical seniority) makes the most contribution. For instance, organizational position (e.g. executive, managerial) contributes to all four UK factor profiles (Table 5) and two of three Hong Kong ones (Table 6). Theoretically, the fact that a participant’s organizational position makes a greater contribution to HR’s factor profiling than professional status (e.g. certification level, years of certified membership) suggests that managerial logics trump professional logics (Kirkpatrick, Zardini and Veronesi 2023) in deciphering the role’s empirical structure.

Notably, certification status appears only to positively predict the UK’s ‘strategic’ profile (by Fellow and Chartered professional membership) and negatively the UK’s ‘basic operations’ profile (by years of certified membership). Similarly, among Hong Kong participants, just as the most recently certified HR practitioners (by years of membership) negatively predict the ‘strategic leadership’ profile, the two most highly certified (i.e. Fellow and Professional) and professionally established (by years of certified membership) variables negatively predict the ‘basic operations’ profile. While the findings make substantive sense, they do little to suggest that gaining certified membership exerts much countervailing pressure on one’s organizational position when ascertaining their relative contribution to certified HR activity.

Otherwise, in the UK, while less than one ‘year of HR experience’ (Exp 4) contributes most to the ‘basic operations’ factor and negatively to the ‘leadership’ one, the negative correlation between ‘time spent on HR’ and ‘basic operations’ corresponds with the descriptive data. Such mundane practice appears confined to a reasonably inexperienced and lowly qualified contingent of UK and Hong Kong practitioners. Meanwhile, aside from organizational position (i.e. hierarchical seniority), gender (males) predicted the UK’s ‘avoid administration’ and ‘leadership’ profiles. Commentators report similar male–female demarcation in other such professional occupations as architecture (Sang, Dainty and Ison 2014), information technology (Segovia‐Pérez et al. 2020), and law (Hagan 1990). However, the observation that no similar gender demarcation emerged among the Hong Kong sample begs the question of why and whether the UK should do more to rectify the situation, especially since the HR role commands the requisite recruitment and selection remit.

Discussion

Our study addressed three discerning research questions concerning intra-professional stratification in a hitherto underexplored corporate professional domain (HRM). First, as a measure of ‘stratification by design’, we examined the extent to which HR certification structures by membership level and competency composition. Second, evaluating the motivational versus rhetorical claims of such embedded career laddering, we examined how far the certified criteria resonate in practice. Third, cognizant of contrasting managerial and professionalization logics, we examined how the most discerning HR practices are structure by practitioners’ demographic, organizational, and occupational statuses.

First, as a documented statement of certified intent, our study found that a strategic (market) rather than administrative (state) HR identity prevails across our two cases. For instance, the document analysis revealed how strategic leading activities assume a higher certification status than their administrative counterparts. Lending credence to Marchington’s (2015) claim that HR could be too busy looking up in its quest for legitimacy, associational HR prioritizes strategic leading competencies over more traditional administrative ones. Moreover, when delving deeper into the competency statements governing practitioner access to different levels of professional membership, it appeared that task progression within certified HR moves not from human disorder to iterative purification (Abbott 1981) but from routine administration to greater abstraction. In other words, the substance of administrative competence is far less circumspect than the content of the more varied ‘big picture’ connotation of corresponding strategic claims. Theoretically, one explanation behind this seemingly inverted iterative purification outcome reflects associational and corporate entities drawing on the HR role’s rhetorical and performative (Kipping, Bühlmann and David 2019) claims to inspire HR practitioners to work hard (Evetts 2003).

Second, while the documented structure of certified HR corroborates the prospect of corporate capture replicating hierarchical power in certified form, it does not correspond in practice. Instead, in both case contexts, the empirical practitioner profiling combines administrative and strategic activities into the core ‘rank and file’ and then splits between an elite group of certified practitioners avoiding core HR tasks and a further group performing basic operations. Intra-professionally, rather than practitioner elites ‘protecting’ the core rank and file (as per the re-stratified medical profession), they form the rank and file, with ‘basic operations’ making up new entrants. By implication, in neither Hong Kong nor the UK does empirical practitioner profiling resonate with the documented structure of corporate capture. Instead, we observe a core rank and file grounded in routine maintenance and two peripheral entities. Such practitioner-factor profiling raises the question of how associations decipher their certification criteria and balance rhetoric with reality. Supporting documentary evidence (IHRM 2010, 2011; CIPD 2012, 2018) suggests that while associational interests engage with corporate interests to help inform desired competency specification (e.g. via focus groups and survey responses), the decision ultimately resides with the PMA.

Third, the practitioner status variables predictive of the most discerning factor profiles suggest that occupational influence derives less from professional status and more from managerial position. Consistent with the notion of managerial logics infiltrating professional logics (Kirkpatrick, Zardini and Veronesi 2023), hierarchical seniority seems more influential than professional status (e.g. certification) in determining HR’s latent factor structure. Otherwise, demographics (i.e. gender) predict ‘leadership’ and ‘avoid administration’ in the UK, whereas HR experience matters more in Hong Kong. However, a more comprehensive study should investigate the entity’s finer-grained practitioner composition (e.g. social class, Gorman 2015) to establish whether any other discerning polarizing source materializes and the degree of pecuniary differentials (i.e. salary). At the same time, whether the strategic and administrative competency demarcation identified in our Hong Kong and UK comparison prevail in other, more exclusive, HR professionalization cases⁴ (Higgins, Roper and Gamwell 2016) demands investigation and represents a limitation with the present study’s ‘mass-certification’ focus.

What, then, are the implications of our findings for the established notions of protection (Freidson 1985), extraction (Ackroyd and Muzio 2007), and imperialism (Larkin 1983)? First, despite the HR role’s dominance of managerial and director positions (Table 1, UK data), our survey evidence suggests that administration remains the most widely performed activity, despite the overall proportion of formal HR administrators (43,000) comprising a fifth of their managerial/director counterparts (215,000, UK data). Hence, at the organizational level, the HR function’s weighty administrative load does not seem conducive to the type of higher order value-adding reported in the archetypal legal sector (i.e. extraction, Ackroyd and Muzio 2007). Instead, our survey evidence points to a consolidating rather than elite-subordinate relationship (akin to protection), comprising a large rank and file of predominantly routine maintenance practitioners (assuming some strategic and leadership responsibility) and a group of entry-level basic operatives.

However, given the technological know-how to automate and outsource HR activities (Pritchard and Symon 2011), one must question the long-term viability of such administrative workload. For now, even though industry insights from the two cases suggest that reduced administrative time provides one of the key benefits of HR adopting technology (IHRM 2018), enabling practitioners to ‘undertake more strategic, value-adding work and to focus on the more “human” side of their role’ (CIPD 2020: 15), the function’s administrative prevalence suggests otherwise. At the same time, just as HR’s high administrative content likely compromises the selective technological routinization of highly specifiable activities, the prevalence of a relatively small group of inexperienced (UK) and lowly qualified (Hong Kong) ‘basic operations’ personnel limit the scope for substantial technology efficiency.

The ‘avoid administration’ profile thus provides our study’s most intriguing grouping and could reflect the role’s task complex value-added source or merely the comprised advantage accruing to semi-professional elites (i.e. partial imperialism). In the first instance, Dupret (2017) suggests that such ‘invisible’ work activity could reflect vital engagement signs with the complexity of work situations rather than essential task avoidance. If so, it might denote a potential source of ‘knowledge’ elitism (Freidson 1985), with incumbents representing HR’s interests in response to ongoing workplace trends and threats (CIPD 2020). In the second instance, the ‘avoid administration’ profile could manifest an economic ‘rent’ on the role’s semi-professional female-dominant practitioner base, especially in the UK. It remains possible, for instance, that practitioners from the ‘avoid administration’ profile use their relatively high status (predominantly by organizational position) to delegate undesirable tasks to subordinate groups while claiming the most interesting work.

Either way, given that the current study only examined macro-level employment data and community-level practitioner insights, research should examine how the present study’s HR practitioner profiles relate to one another within organizations. Tangential case study evidence among a subsidiary of a multinational company in the financial services sector (Roper and Higgins 2020) offers tentative insight into how the macro trends observed in the present study might prevail in organizational form. Akin to this study’s intra-professional relations focus, it observes a stratified HR departmental structure containing a tiered hierarchy of HR practitioners: from specialists to generalists, down to a call-centre operation. Conversely, organizations that maintain a ‘generalist’ HR model (ibid.) lend credence to this study’s ‘high administrative’ prevalence. In both cases, having corroborated the distributive outcome of compromised elite practitioner formation among two distinct HR professionalization cases, researchers should remain mindful of how its non-elite counterbalance also matters since the latter contingent ultimately defines the role’s contribution.

Conclusion

Our study has transposed a longstanding intra-professional relations debate from the classic cases of law and medicine to the rising terrain of corporate professions. Corroborating sequential multi-method Hong Kong and UK data, our study’s focus on HR professionalization made three substantial contributions to theory.

First, we found that the documented structure of HRM’s certification criteria engenders what one might reasonably refer to as ‘stratification by design’. In both Hong Kong and the UK, we found that the leading PMAs have created a multi-tiered professional membership scheme comprising three certified levels. Theoretically, such a multi-tiered certification arrangement serves a dual purpose. First, commensurate with the notion of professionalization ‘from above’ (McClelland 1999), it ‘captures’ the career prospects of an entire occupation and facilitates associational and employer control. Second, instilling the motivational prospect of practitioners climbing an embedded career ladder achieves ‘control from a distance’ (Fournier 1999), potentially enhancing employee productivity.

Consequently, a disjuncture materializes between the motivational effects of certified HR practitioners achieving greater professional recognition (e.g. progressing from Associate to Chartered status) and the organizational reality of frontline practice. At the same time, compared to Abbot’s (1981) iterative purification notion, we observed how the content specificity of progressive HR certification criteria becomes increasingly abstract rather than pure as it progresses the career ladder. Our explanation behind this seemingly inverted outcome is that associational interests draw on HR’s rhetorical claims to motivate professionalizing HR practitioners while a more mundane experience prevails in practice. Hence, from our study’s HR professionalization perspective, ‘corporate capture’ seems to be embedded only in documented form rather than in practice.

Second, consistent with managerial logics infiltrating professional logics (Kirkpatrick, Zardini and Veronesi 2023), our study found that organizational position (i.e. hierarchical seniority) contributes more than professional status to determine the structure of HR practice. However, accepting that one cannot control the structure of the emergent factor profiling used in our study, we considered adjacent descriptive to build a more complete picture of certified HR practice. The descriptive data demonstrates how the prevalence of routine maintenance shapes HR practice, even among practitioners assuming strategic leading roles. At the same time, we note how, in the UK, gender subtly predicts the latent factor profiling with males assuming more senior positions. Crucially, by surveying certified HR practitioners, our study has advanced extant studies of corporate professional association, which tend only to investigate the documented form of corporate professions.

Third, on the question of occupational stratification, the fact that a group of relatively senior practitioners (by organizational status) avoids routine maintenance (i.e. professional administration) provides a tentative basis to consider how established variants of intra-professional relations (e.g. protection and imperialism) among independent professions convert to the more confined (i.e. embedded agency paradox) corporate professional domain. Here, the presence of what we entitled an ‘avoid administration’ profile raises the prospect of senior HR practitioners trying to achieve a compromised form of occupational imperialism. If so, as the HR role evolves technologically, it will be interesting to see how the ‘avoid administration’ contingent thrives in the future since it is potentially the only group amenable to a more task-complex expression.

Author contributions

Paul Higgins: Guided the project. Wrote Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Discussion, and Conclusion. Ian Roper: Contributed to project guide, document format, and editing. Man Fung Lo: Contributed to Methodology and Performed the data analysis.

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (award ES/J017299/1) and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (ES/J017299/1).

Footnotes

References