Constrained Morality in the Professional Work of Corporate Lawyers
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Constrained Morality in the Professional Work of Corporate Lawyers Dawn Yi Lin Chow1 · Thomas Calvard2 Received: 19 September 2019 / Accepted: 26 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this article, we contribute to sociological literatures on morality, professional and institutional contexts, and morally stigmatized ‘dirty work’ by emphasizing and exploring how they mutually inform one another in lawyers’ work activities. Drawing on interview data with 58 practitioners in the commercial legal industry in Singapore, we analyze how they experience professional and institutional constraints on the expressions of morality in their work. Our findings illustrate how a dominant managerial and economic focus maintains and reproduces a constrained form of morality, limited to instrumental, utilitarian and commercial ends, and subordinated to lucrative client and firm interests. We discuss our findings in terms of the need to research and reform professions in ways that support more rounded and unconstrained moral reflexivity and autonomy in how work is undertaken and valued. This in turn has implications for how organizations and professions might achieve alternative moral institutional orders, and for legal work to avoid the moral and social taints of dirty work. Keywords Dirty work · Institutions · Lawyers · Morality · Professions
Introduction Understanding morality through a sociological, pluralistic and contextual lens has gained a renewed emphasis in the social sciences, partly as a critical response to more psychological, scientific views that reduce morality to ‘thin’ kinds of generalizing and individual moral judgment (Abend 2013). This renewed social emphasis on the sociology of morality has to do with an agenda focused on “[o]rganizations, organizational arrangements, and social networks: their effects on moral actions, views, and society-level outcomes” (Abend 2010, p. 580). Research on ‘rediscovering the moral’ in work activities and social relations involves recognizing the role of evaluative norms and meanings in contextualized interactions,
* Dawn Yi Lin Chow [email protected] Thomas Calvard [email protected] 1
Lee Shau Kee School of Business, The Open University of Hong Kong, 30 Good Shepherd Street, Ho Man Tin, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Resource Management & Human Resource Management, University of Edinburgh Business School, 29 Buccleuch Pl, Edinburgh EH8 9JS, UK
2
where actors address, narrate, confront, and account for their morality in relation to specific identities (Shadnam 2015). However, other theoretical lenses that focus on rational actors or structural control assumptions fail to recognize in full how morality can vary according to the situation (Farjoun et al. 2015). Morality is under-theorized in how it varies according to context and how context conditions it (Shadnam 2015). The current article contributes to this renewed sociology of morality by considering how actors navigate and make sense of morality in the work context and activities of cor
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