Turning vice into virtue: Institutional work and professional misconduct

Abstract

Why do professionals engage in or aid misconduct, rather than rejecting it as a threat to their legitimacy and labor market survival? This article contributes to the scholarly agenda by drawing on an ethnographic study of professionals who facilitate offshore tax avoidance for the ultra-wealthy. This form of expert advisory work has become highly controversial, and is increasingly classified as a form of professional wrongdoing. Building on theories of institutional work and categorization, the study theorizes practitioners’ responses to field-level legitimacy threats. Specifically, the article models a process in which misconduct is recategorized in terms of the core norms that underpin professional legitimacy. Through this process, practitioners create institutional change by altering the way they see themselves and their work, transforming the ‘vice’ of tax avoidance into the professional ‘virtues’ of public service and expert neutrality. This model advances knowledge compared to previous research on professional misconduct, which was situated primarily at the organization level, and responds to calls for analysis of ‘agentic self-categorization’ processes in creating the micro-foundations for legitimacy in the professions.

Inserting professionals and professional organizations in studies of wrongdoing: The nature, antecedents and consequences of professional misconduct

“…Lander et al (2018) -differences according to careers stage create heterogeneous understandings Radaelli et al (2018) -the specificities of misconduct in any particular setting (in their case medical education) complicate singular definitions The antecedents of professional misconduct What factors render social and symbolic boundaries more or less important, interdependent and effective or ineffective in professional misconduct? Harrington (2018) and Roulet (2018) -the boundaries between clients and professionals are dissolved in ways that encourage misconduct Are there new symbolic boundaries that need to be taken account of and why? Lander et al (2018) -the symbolic boundary between junior and senior professionals affects the likelihood of misconduct Who do professionals interact with, and how do these interactions influence the nature, antecedents and consequences of professional misconduct?…”

“…The studies reported in this special issue illustrate the complex nature of professional misconduct. Harrington (2018) shows how misconduct manifests at the institutional level when 'practitioners acquire the moral justification necessary to perpetuate misconduct' (Harrington: 24). Professionals re-categorize tax avoidance so that it does not now constitute professional misconduct but a sensible and entirely rational corporate practice.…”

“…A particularly strong theme in the special issue articles is that of symbolic boundary weakening. Both Harrington (2018) and Roulet (2018) provide examples of how the symbolic boundary between professional and client is increasingly dissolved and the logics of the two groups fused. For Harrington, this relates to the category editing process, a process through which the definition of 'wealth management professional' (the category in question) is revised (edited) by members of the professions to justify their behaviour, while for Roulet this relates to a co-produced understanding of professional logics.…”

Institutional Work: A Review and Framework based on Semantic and Thematic Analysis

“…Second, models feature IW as one part of a larger model. For example, in her model of professional misconduct, Harrington (2019) situates IW between triggering events (contestation) and possible outcomes (self-authorization). The model places IW as one step in a process.…”

Transnational Professionals

“…Methodologically, these practical implications and shifts in conceptual focus foreground the need for two distinctive data collection and analysis strategies. First, ethnographic immersion (Harrington 2015b(Harrington , 2017c)-a technique based on anthropological fieldwork-has proven particularly enlightening in the study of social and cultural capital as facilitators of mobility for transnational professionals. Indeed, the sociology of the professions would benefit from greater attention to work by anthropologists on transnational professionals: Research in this stream has steadily built theory on key issues relevant across the social sciences, such as the micro-macro link in globalization.…”