This paper examines the ways in which recruitment and selection processes facilitate the reproduction of elites and elite cultures within City law firms. The research is based upon original research carried out during 2009 consisting of in-depth semi-structured interviews, semiotic and content...

Karl Polanyi is arguably one of the most significant economic sociologists. At first glance the links between Polanyi's ideas about markets, society and institutions and strategy may not be obvious. However, there is a hereto unrecognised link between recent writing about institutions and...

In the light of its surprising absence in extant literature in the domain of the sociology of work, specifically within the journal Work, Employment and Society, this article represents a ‘call to arms' for research focused upon professional misconduct in healthcare. Specifically,...

In discussions of the globalization of professional service firms there is an increasing recognition that understanding the quot;social constructionquot; of organizational architectures is essential. In this paper we argue, using the management of transnational law firms as an example, that to...

In this essay we describe the growing importance of professions and the organizations in which they work, and we trace some trends in relevant scholarly research on this topic. We start by noting a dearth of recent publications in leading management and organization journals that address the...

In this paper we use the case of the internationalization of English law firms into Italy, and the refocusing of their operations on the city of Milan, to make a number of contributions to existing literatures on responses to institutional complexity. Firstly, we contribute to the literature on...

Questions remain about the factors that influence the ability of transnational corporations (TNCs) to shape processes of institutional change. In particular, questions about power relations need more attention. To address such questions, this article develops a neoinstitutional theory-inspired...

The knowledge economy has been characterised by the proliferation of new forms of expert labour such as IT (Marks and Scholarios, 2007), advertising (Alvesson, 2004), and as discussed in this paper, project management (Hodgson and Muzio, 2010), management consultancy (Fincham, 2006; Kirkpatrick et...

Through a historical case study of the internationalization of large English law firms in Italy, this paper uses Scott’s three pillars approach (2005) to look at how local institutions constrain and mediate the strategies and practices of professional services firms (PSFs). In doing so, it...

We investigate institutional change as the co-occurrence of deinstitutionalization and institutionalization, while accounting for its determinants at multiple levels of analysis to further our understanding of how individual characteristics aggregated at the organizational level and...