Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and professions as well as a critical review of past and current work on the topic. Indeed, the field has largely failed to keep pace with the rising salience of occupational and professional (as opposed to organizational) dynamics in work life. Moreover, not only is there a dearth of studies that explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore two-fold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a three-part framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of “becoming”, “doing”, and “relating”. We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.

为了重新评估职业和专业，以及对该主题的过去和当前的工作进行严格的审查，管理和组织奖学金已经过期。确实，该领域在很大程度上未能跟上职业和专业（相对于组织）动态在工作生活中日益凸显的重要性。此外，不仅缺乏明确地考虑职业或专业类别的研究，而且缺乏用于理解职业和职业含义的共享分析框架。因此，我们的目标是双重的：首先，向不太熟悉这一领域的学者提供指导，他们在自己的研究中遇到职业或专业方面的动态；其次，引入一个由三部分组成的框架，用于概念化职业和职业，以帮助指导将来的查询。我们建议可以通过“成为”，“做”和“联系”的角度来理解职业。当我们回顾过去的文献并讨论每种方法对未来研究的意义，以及更广泛地对管理和组织理论领域的意义时，我们将开发此框架。