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Purpose-This paper seeks to understand: how and why do experienced professionals, who perceive themselves as autonomous, comply with organizational pressures to overwork? Unlike previous studies of professionals and overwork, we focus on experienced professionals who have achieved relatively high status within their firms and the considerable economic rewards that go with it. Drawing on the little used Bourdieusian concept of illusio, which describes the phenomenon whereby individuals are "taken in and by the game" (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), we help to explain the "autonomy paradox" in professional service firms. Design/methodology/approach-This research is based on 36 semi-structured interviews primarily with experienced male and female accounting professionals in France. Findings-We find that, in spite of their levels of experience, success, and seniority, these professionals describe themselves as feeling helpless and trapped, and experience bodily subjugation. We explain this in terms of individuals enhancing their social status, adopting the breadwinner role, and obtaining and retaining recognition. We suggest that this combination of factors cause professionals to be attracted to and captivated by the rewards that success within the accounting profession can confer. Originality/value-As well as providing fresh insights into the autonomy paradox we seek to make four contributions to Bourdieusian scholarship in the professional field. First, we highlight the strong bodily component of overwork. Second, we raise questions about previous work on cynical distancing in this context. Third, we emphasise the significance of the pursuit of symbolic as well as economic capital. Finally, we argue that, while actors' habitus may be in a state of "permanent mutation", that mutability is in itself a sign that individuals are subject to illusio.

Research on work-family balance decisions generally presents them as an individual's rational choice between alternatives. The anticipatory socialisation literature highlights the role that early formative experiences play in shaping work and parenting decisions. We go further to emphasise the role of habitus -historically constituted dispositions -in workfamily balance decisions. This relational approach explores how the entrenched and historically formed dispositions of individuals interact dynamically with contextual (i.e. organizational) imperatives. Numerous studies have highlighted the difficulties of reconciling the intense demands of professional careers with family lives. Drawing on 148 interviews with 78 male and female professionals, our study looks at much deeper rooted causes of work-family conflict in professional service firms than have previously been considered. We identify four broad patterns of response to the work-family conflict: professionals may willingly reproduce their parental model, reproduce their parental model against their will, willingly distance themselves from their parental model, and distance themselves from the parental model against their will. We show that the impediments to greater equality lie not only in organizational and societal structures, but within individuals themselves in the form of historically constituted dispositions which contribute towards the maintenance and reproduction of those structures.

Purpose Despite the growing amount of research on the social and organizational role of legitimacy, very little is known about the subtle discursive processes through which organizational changes are legitimated in contemporary society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the subtle processes of interdiscursivity and intertextuality through which an organization constructs a sense of legitimacy. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on the case of a newly privatized oil company in a transitional, post-communist economy, the authors’ research uses critical discourse analysis to analyze the annual reports, corporate press releases, and relevant media from the four years following privatization. Findings The authors argue for a relational understanding of legitimacy construction that emphasizes how legitimacy relies on the multiple processes of intertextuality linking corporate narratives and media texts. Corporate narratives are not produced solely by the discourses that occur at the individual and organizational levels; they are also produced by the much broader discourses that occur at the societal level. Originality/value This study’s main contribution is that it reveals the intertextual and interdiscursive construction of corporate narratives, which is a key element in understanding how discourses around privatization are interlinked and draw upon other macro-level discourses to construct legitimacy.