Clifford Chance Centre for the Management of Professional Service Firms

This paper takes the increasing internationalisation of professional service firms (PSFs) and recent institutionalist perspectives on embedded agency as opportunity to explore how the interplay of normative settings can create opportunities for institutional work. Using observational and interview data from an embedded single case study in a global law firm, the paper examines how banking lawyers align legal documents across institutional settings and how this material work may come to constitute institutional work. Banking transactions systematically expose lawyers to diverse means-ends frames and contradictory institutional logics from different jurisdictions. Hence, given their boundary-spanning position, banking lawyers become aware of legal solutions whose transposition could efficiently realise comparable commercial goals in different jurisdictions. However, given the rigidity of national laws and the resistance of local colleagues, lawyers are forced to employ methodologies that resemble Sahlin-Andersson's (1996) editing rules of idea translation to overcome these institutional barriers. They de-contextualise idioms of legal wording, co-construct a disembedded commercial plot, and label this prototype to resonate with the institutional logics of their local jurisdiction. As lawyers struggle to assert authority over what constitutes legitimate translation, they try to establish themselves as spokesperson for associated entities. The closer and more numerous the alliances that local lawyers can establish through continued trials of strength (Callon, 1986a), the more authority they can claim for their translation. Simultaneously, however, these trials may assimilate institutional logics that subsequently allow the transposition of field-frames that draw on an amalgam of local logics. These micro-processes give an impression of the dynamics of dominance and resistance that operate below the surface of apparently linear trajectories of organisational and institutional change. They illustrate how institutionalised structures simultaneously constrain and empower and thereby contribute to resolving the paradox of embedded agency in neoinstitutionalist theory.