Well, what do you know? Exploring physicians' embedded framings of management consultants and their expertise

Members of traditional occupations with strong professional ideals, such as lawyers, auditors, and physicians, are increasingly exposed to situations in which they need to interact with members of newer occupations, like management consultants, HRM-specialists, and tech companies providing legal and medical services. Despite the increased salience of such inter-occupational interactions, the question of how occupations are enacted and remade in individual members' relating' to people outside of their group is largely underdeveloped in the literature. To address this gap, we explore how physicians, as members of a traditional occupation with strong professional ideals, perceive management consultants, and their expertise. Drawing on a framing lens and data from the Polish healthcare sector, we show how individuals variably enact their occupation when framing `the other' in inter-occupational relationships. More specifically, we show that individuals' framing of management consultants involve framing of the context (the enacted relationship between professional and managerial ideals), of the organization (as bureaucratic and hierarchical, or non-bureaucratic and inclusive), and of the self (as having a unipod or polypod self-image). Together these nested framings shape occupational members' perceptions of and receptivity to the expertise of 'the other'. Our conceptualization opens up avenues for future studies of how occupations are enacted as members 'relate' to other occupational groups, and su ests that framing is a fruitful lens to unpack such acts of relating.