TY - JOUR
T1 - Constrained Morality in the Professional Work of Corporate Lawyers
AU - Chow, Dawn Yi Lin
AU - Calvard, Thomas
N1 - Funding Information:
The first author would like to thank her current employer, the Institute of International Business and Governance for its support of her academic endeavors. The Institute of International Business and Governance was established with the substantial/partial support of a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (UGC/IDS16/17).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2021/5
Y1 - 2021/5
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Dirty work
KW - Institutions
KW - Lawyers
KW - Morality
KW - Professions
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85091820259&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10551-020-04634-x
DO - 10.1007/s10551-020-04634-x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85091820259
SN - 0167-4544
VL - 170
SP - 213
EP - 228
JO - Journal of Business Ethics
JF - Journal of Business Ethics
IS - 2
ER -