Competing Identities of ‘Managed Professionalism’: Lawyers’ Attitudes to Management in Law Firms

Stream title: New perspectives in the study of professionalism: Reconnecting professional organizations with professional occupations, Reconnecting Critical Management. The 5th International Critical Management Studies Conference, Manchester Business School. 11th–13th July 2007.

AUTHOR:
Ashly Pinnington
Karin Winroth

ABSTRACT:

This paper examines how lawyers explain and narrate their on-going enactments of professionalism and management. Through investigation of various identity constructions and post-hoc justifications of ‘managed professionalism’ we explore some of the ways that individuals and collective institutions of the legal professions call on similar resources available in work, organisations and society. In interpreting and differentiating their shared and ceded territories of work and social life lawyers may often evoke norms and values of particular reference groups such as their professional occupational peers and corporate clients.

Through accounts from lawyers working in law firms in two different countries (Australia and Sweden) we seek to understand individuals’ different orientations towards the roles of management in law firms. We conclude that these accounts can be assessed for their pragmatism in serving individual and group interests and recommend that they be more closely evaluated for their distinctive value commitments to systems of societal ethics, politics, economics and law.

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