The commercialisation of law and the enterprising legal practitioner: continuity and change

Parental-leave policy for male lawyers in Helsinki and Montreal: cultural and professional barriers to male lawyers’ use of paternity and parental leaves

“…Law firms operate today as the primary locus of professional socialisation and regulation (Faulconbridge and Muzio 2008;Flood 2011), which impacts further lawyers' opportunities for work-life balance and their sense of professionalism (Wallace and Kay, 2008). The pressure of business development and client recruitment becomes everyday reality, particularly for those lawyers who aspire to become law-firm partners in large transnational firms (Sommerlad, 2011(Sommerlad, , 2016Thornton and Bagust, 2007). The current business model of the profession-with the growing corporate sector that favours the competitive and adversarial approaches to lawyering-put lawyers' commitment to professional core values into question (Collier, 2015b;Macfarlane, 2008).…”

“…You are the most junior and you know that others are watching you…you need to continue performing By imposing these expectations on subordinates, the Finnish and Quebecois law-firm partners assume that their younger colleagues have possibility and will to prioritise work demands over family, even during parental leaves. While the family models are changing, and today's male lawyers are more likely to have spouses with equally demanding careers, the professional ideal of unbroken career progress with long work hours not only remains, but also increases with the intensification of work culture and technological advances (see Sommerlad, 2011;Thornton, 2016b).…”

Understanding social exclusion in elite professional service firms: field level dynamics and the ‘professional project’

“…Studies using this framework have shown that as organizations attract, screen and select applicants, they make collective assumptions about the relationship between particular types of cultural capital and an individual's likely performance in the professional field (Cook et al, 2012: see also Rivera, 2015;Sommerlad, 2011Sommerlad, , 2012. These attributes include a degree from an elite university, particularly Oxford or Cambridge, defined as institutional capital, and characteristics such as deportment, body language and 'professionalism' under pressure, defined as embodied capital (Cook et al, 2012).…”

“…Second, though these early studies theorized social closure across a range of professions, more recent studies undertaken against a backdrop of fragmentation have often focused on a single profession, usually the law (e.g. Ashley, 2010; Ashley and Empson, 2013; Cook et al, 2012; Sommerlad, 2011, 2012). As such, they do not investigate how social exclusion may be affected by relationships between occupations and organizations in a range of sectors.…”

Strategic Compliance: A study of Professionals’ Responses to Sales Management Control

“…Despite indications that the practice and discourse of sales play a significant part in contemporary work in PSFs-and that, as firms, PSFs are more explicitly exposed to market mechanisms-there is a paucity of research on how professionals within PSFs experience and respond to sales management control. There are a few studies emphasizing that commercialization and sales permeate various aspects of professional work, and they indicate that resistance is common at the intersection between commercialization/sales and professionalism (Sommerlad, 2011;Darr, 2002;Lander et al, 2012). However, this research is still limited and mainly conceptualizes reactions to commercialism in terms of resistance and does not focus on how the professionals experience sales management control and struggle to combine pressure to sell with ideals of professionalism, which is the focus of this paper.…”