 Understanding social exclusion in elite professional service firms: field level dynamics and the ‘professional project’Louise Ashley and
Laura Empson
Work, Employment & Society, 2017, vol. 31, issue 2, 211-229 Abstract: This article explores social exclusion in elite professional service firms (PSFs) through a qualitative study of six legal, accounting, investment banking and consulting firms. Employing a Bourdieusian perspective we find that all six firms privilege candidates with the same narrow forms of cultural capital, while acknowledging that this contradicts their professed commitment to social inclusion and recruiting the best ‘talent’. We find that this behaviour is enshrined within the habitus of elite firms. We argue that it represents an organizational strategy generated by a compulsion to achieve legitimacy in a specific field of London-based elite PSFs. We identify a ‘professional project’ of sorts, but argue that this can no longer be mapped on to the interests of a discrete occupational group. As such, we contribute to studies of elite reproduction and social stratification by focusing specifically on the role of elite professional organizations in the reproduction of inequality. Keywords: Bourdieu; elite reproduction; professional service firms; social exclusion; social stratification (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:31:y:2017:i:2:p:211-229 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association |
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