Lawyers’ identity capital

“Why not a blonde woman?” Identity realism and diversity work in New York and in Paris

“…Extending this model to a broader range of power relations, the notion of "identity capitalism" refers to a system in which out-group identities based on race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, etc., are commodified for the benefit of in-group members (Leong 2016). Responding to the exploitation of their identity, some out-group members have become "identity entrepreneurs": by strategically highlighting their minority identity and manipulating it to fit the expectations of the majority group, they intend to "leverage their out-group status to derive social and economic value for themselves" (Cha and Roberts 2019;Leong 2016Leong , 1334; see also Wald 2016).…”

“…Second, while most empirical studies on the managerial uses of workers' identity have focused on race or gender, looking at the diversity occupational role, which is closely linked to issues of race and gender, enables to explore the intersection of gender and race as organizationally valuable identities. A third gap in the literature is the disjunction between research on the organizational valuing of minority identity and research on the privileges associated with majority identity, such as whiteness and masculinity (for an exception, see Wald 2016). Adopting a comparative perspective between the United States and France allows us to observe the organizational valuing of minority identity (in the United States) and that of the majority identity (in France) for the same occupational role, that of diversity manager.…”

Life, work and capital in legal practice

“…Social and cultural capital remains important in securing entry (see e.g. Francis and Sommerlad (2009), and in this issue Dinovitzer and Dawe (2016) and Wald (2016)), but features of the neoliberal firm demonstrate how an exchange value is easily attributable to identity that might previously have been regarded only in Bourdiesian terms as a "structural correspondence between social class of lawyers and their clients -where the position of lawyers in their professional hierarchy corresponds to the position their clients occupy in the social hierarchy" (Swartz, 1997, p. 130). Thus, Sommerlad's (2007) research among City law firms revealed an employee at one of the top City firms in London stating: "We could take a woman who wore the hijab .…”