Are veterinary workplaces still fit for purpose?

Following on from the first part of this article (VT56.19), I am brought to the theoretical heart of my doctoral research, and to the concept I find most generative for thinking about where the veterinary profession stands at this moment.

The structural question: SARFIT

This brings me to structural contingency theory, developed by Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) and later extended by Donaldson (1987, 2001), proposing that organisational effectiveness depends on the alignment between an organisation’s structural arrangements and its contextual conditions. Structure must fit context. When the fit is strong, the organisation functions well. When context shifts but structure stays the same, performance declines and the organisation must adapt.

Donaldson developed a specific concept to describe this dynamic: Structural Adjustment to Restore Fit (SARFIT).

The idea is straightforward. When a significant change in an organisation’s context – its environment, its technology, its size or, as this research proposes, its workforce – creates a condition of misalignment between what the organisation is and how it is structured, the organisation faces a choice: it can adjust its structures to restore fit, or it can remain in misalignment, absorbing the performance costs that misalignment generates until adjustment becomes unavoidable.

My doctoral research expands structural contingency theory by identifying workforce demographic change as a key internal contingency. When the composition of a workforce changes as fundamentally as the veterinary workforce has changed over four decades, the structural configurations of the profession – its career pathways, leadership models, ownership structures, working pattern expectations – must adapt if alignment is to be maintained.

The question this research is exploring is whether that adaptation has occurred and, if not, whether the veterinary profession has reached the point at which structural adjustment is required to restore fit.

SARFIT does not ask whether an organisation should change; it asks whether misalignment has become costly enough, and structural enough, that adjustment is no longer optional.

That is the question I am taking into veterinary practices across the UK.

There is a compelling reason to think that this question is not only theoretical. The veterinary profession is facing a workforce sustainability crisis that is widely acknowledged within the sector. Retention is one of the most acute strategic challenges it faces.

Well-being indicators are troubling. Leadership succession is a genuine strategic concern for practices and corporate groups alike.

These challenges are typically discussed in terms of workload, remuneration, and mental health – all of which are real and important.

But my reading of the scholarship suggests that structural misalignment – the gap between the demographic reality of the workforce and the structural assumptions built into how the profession organises itself – may be a contributing factor that the profession has been slower to examine.

A profession built around the ideal worker model, one in which uninterrupted full-time commitment is the implicit standard of professional seriousness, is a profession that is structurally costly for anyone whose working life does not conform to that model. In a workforce that is now majority female, and in which approximately one-third of women work part-time, that structural cost is not marginal.

Where is the profession going?

I want to be careful here, because the research has not yet produced its findings. What I can offer is not a conclusion, but a question – or, more precisely, a set of questions that the literature makes difficult to ignore.

The scholarship on feminised professions suggests that numerical transformation without structural adaptation tends to produce one of two trajectories. In the first, the profession gradually adjusts its structures to reflect the needs and trajectories of its new workforce majority – what organisational theorists would describe as a SARFIT response.

In the second, the structures remain stable, the workforce continues to bear the costs of misalignment, and the profession enters a slow decline in its capacity to retain, develop and deploy its human capital effectively.

Which trajectory is the veterinary profession on? The honest answer is that I do not yet know. The research that will speak to this – interviews with practising UK veterinary surgeons across independent, corporate and charitable settings, exploring their lived experience of career progression, working patterns and structural fit – is currently underway. Its findings will form the third article in this series.

Based on the literature, the profession is ready for structural adjustment. The demographic shift is significant and permanent. The persistence of vertical and horizontal segregation, the pay gap and the structural penalties of part-time working represent the kind of workforce–structure misalignment that contingency theory would predict generates organisational costs over time. The well-being and retention challenges the profession is already experiencing suggest that those costs are not theoretical.

The question is not whether change is coming. The question is whether the profession will navigate it deliberately – examining its structures, understanding their origins, and adapting them thoughtfully – or whether it will absorb the consequences of misalignment until adjustment becomes unavoidable.

SARFIT is not a prescription; it is a diagnostic. It asks: at what point does the gap between structure and workforce become a question of professional survival rather than professional preference?

I am exploring this through the lived experiences of the people who know the answer better than any theory can: the veterinary surgeons themselves. Men and women, at every level of the profession, whose daily working lives are, in one sense, an embodied negotiation with the structural conditions my research is trying to understand.

A conversation in progress

I began this research as a former veterinary practice manager who had watched talented people – mostly, though not exclusively, women – navigate a system that was not built with them in mind. I had my own observations. I had my own questions. What doctoral research has given me is a framework for understanding what I witnessed and a methodology for asking whether what I witnessed was particular or structural.

I do not yet know what the data will say. That is the nature of research conducted with integrity.

What I do know is that the question is worth asking. The UK veterinary profession is at a genuinely significant moment. The demographic transformation of the past four decades is now irreversible. The structural architecture that the profession operates within was built for a different workforce. Whether those two facts together constitute a condition of misalignment serious enough to require structural adjustment – SARFIT – is a question the literature invites but does not resolve. I offer this article as an invitation. Not to agreement, but to reflection. The profession has changed in ways that are, by any measure, remarkable. The question of whether its structures have kept pace is one that deserves to be explored honestly, rigorously and – in the spirit in which this research is being conducted – with genuine openness to whatever the answer turns out to be.

• This article appeared in Vet Times (2 June 2026), Volume 56, Issue 22, Pages 20-22

Part one: Glass ceiling? Leadership challenges

References and further reading

Acker J (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: a theory of gendered organisations, Gender and Society 4(2): 139-158.

Anker R (1998). Gender and Jobs: Sex Segregation of Occupations in the World, International Labour Office, Geneva.

Bonnaud L and Fortané N (2021). Being a vet: the veterinary profession in social science research, Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies 102(2): 125-149.

Connell RW and Messerschmidt JW (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept, Gender and Society 19(6): 829-859.

Dahlerup D (1988). From a small to a large minority: women in Scandinavian politics, Scandinavian Political Studies 11(4): 275-298.

Donaldson L (1987). Strategy and structural adjustment to regain fit and performance: in defence of contingency theory, Journal of Management Studies 24(1): 1-24.

Donaldson L (2001). The Contingency Theory of Organizations, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Eagly AH and Carli LL (2007). Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Irvine L and Vermilya JR (2010). Gender work in a feminized profession: the case of veterinary medicine, Gender and Society 24(1): 56-82.

Kanter RM (1977). Men and Women of the Corporation, Basic Books, New York.

Lawrence PR and Lorsch JW (1967). Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Lincoln AE (2010). The shifting supply of men and women to occupations: feminization in veterinary education, Social Forces 88(5): 1,969-1,998.

Morini C (2007). The feminisation of labour in cognitive capitalism, Feminist Review 87(1): 40-59.

RCVS (2014). RCVS Facts 2014 – Facts and Figures from the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, London.

RCVS (2016). RCVS Facts 2016 – Facts and Figures from the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, RCVS, London.

RCVS (2019). RCVS 2019 Survey of the Veterinary Profession, London.

RCVS (2021). RCVS Facts 2021 – Facts and Figures from the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, London.

Simpson R (2004). Masculinity at work: the experiences of men in female-dominated occupations, Work, Employment and Society 18(2): 349-368.

Treanor L, Marlow S and Swail J (2021). Rationalising the postfeminist paradox: the case of UK women veterinary professionals, Gender, Work and Organization 28(1): 337-360.

Veterinary Record (2018). Gender pay gap exists across the profession, Veterinary Record 182(4): 92-93.