Since the 1960’s we have seen a steady stream of more women entering the workplace. The 2000’s brought more women to senior leadership positions. This shift in the workforce has created

Body Beautiful? Gender, Identity and the Body in Professional Services Firmsgwao_583 489..507

Kathryn Haynes*

This article explores the professional identity formation of professionals and its relationship with their embodied physical image, with a particular focus on women in accounting and law. It examines the role of the profes- sional services firm in defining a professional body image, socialization processes that contribute to the definition of the professional body, the role of the client in defining professionalism, the legitimation of certain types of embodied identities and the importance of the body in defining gen- dered perceptions of the self. The article draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of capital to explore how physical capital is implicated in processes of social- ization, subordination and control. By examining the development of pro- fessional embodiment of women in accounting and law, and drawing on interviews with contemporary practitioners, the article argues that notions of physical capital remain highly gendered in professional services firms, with implications for equality and diversity in the professions.

Keywords: body, professional services, identity, Bourdieu, physical capital

Introduction

The two professions of accounting and law are the most established and oldest of those encompassed in the professional services sector. Their

identification as a profession, with the attendant notions of public service, client service, technical competence and professional characterization, make them particularly relevant for study in the context of professional identity. The nature of professional identity (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002), together with career advancement for professional women in industrialized countries (Davidson and Cooper, 1992), has long been recognized as problematic.

Address for correspondence: *Professor of Accounting, Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University, 5 Barrack Road, Newcastle, NE1 4SE, UK; e-mail: [email protected] newcastle.ac.uk

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Previous research has identified the professions of accounting and law as historically gendered (Sommerlad and Sanderson, 1998) and has acknowl- edged problems for women in progressing in these professions (Kumra and Vinnicombe, 2008). However, although there have been studies on gender and identity in each of the relevant disciplines of accounting and law, very few studies have drawn insights from both these professions simultaneously.

More significantly, despite interest in the role of the physical body in popular culture (Shilling, 1993), little is known about the combined relation- ship of gender, identity and the body in professions and professional service firms. Yet, the physical body is an important facet of professionalism because it is symbolic of aspects of identity and the self, an embodied representation of a perceived identity (Haynes, 2008). Attitudes towards the body may also be gendered suggesting that ‘the ways in which women’s and men’s bodies are perceived, categorized and valued are undoubtedly important in legiti- mizing and reproducing social inequalities in the [accounting] profession’ (Haynes, 2008, p. 345).

This article examines how professional identity is embodied and gendered in professional services firms. Drawing from an international study of profes- sionals in accounting and law firms in both the UK and the USA, it explores the perceptions, experiences and professional identities of women practitio- ners; examines how the identity of the professional is inscribed on the physi- cal body; and considers the role of the professional services firm in defining, controlling and legitimizing professional body image. The article also evalu- ates the way women manage or utilise their physical body and the interaction of professional work with the body in a number of ways, including dress, body image, weight and demeanour.

In addressing these issues, the article draws from the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, whose concept of physical capital is useful in understanding pro- cesses of domination and subordination. Although Bourdieu does not provide a detailed account of gendered orientations to the body, I extend his insights to encompass gender and a form of gendered physical capital. In doing so, the article fulfils a need for further research into relationships between the body and the self, the impact of embodied practices at work, and cultural issues affecting the embodied identities and working lives of women practitioners in accounting and law. It draws implications for the legitimation of certain cultural elements of embodied identities, which may have the effect of marginalizing groups or individuals who may not conform to acceptable bodily norms in a profession. In particular, these bodily norms include gender, which the article addresses in some detail, but may also derive from other embodied identities, encompassing race, class, disability, age, or sexuality.

The article is structured as follows. Firstly, it provides a review of the nature of gendered identities in professional services firms and secondly, it introduces the concepts of embodiment, physical and cultural capital with

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reference to Bourdieu. After a methodology section, it discusses how women professionals experience various aspects of professional embodiment, includ- ing professional appearance, professional demeanour, interaction with the client relationship, embodied expectations and control. Finally, the article discusses the nature of embodied gendered physical capital and its implica- tions for professional services firms.

Gendered identities in professional services firms

Both accounting and law have previously been considered masculine territo- ries from which women have been excluded through barriers to entry. His- torically the opportunity for women to become accountants was problematic, as they were seen by some as both physically and intellectually unfit for such a role (Lehman, 1992). Women’s oppression in accountancy interacted with the development of power and influence in the profession itself and the constitution of its knowledge base in terms of gender (Kirkham, 1992). Until the latter half of the 20th century the professional echelons of accounting were a male preserve in the UK, as the masculine qualities required of accounting professionals ‘contrasted markedly with the image of the weak, dependent, emotional “married” woman of mid-Victorian Britain’ (Kirkham and Loft, 1993, p. 516). Similarly, in the legal profession women were historically sub- jected to significant barriers to entry. In many western countries women’s admission to law occurred at the turn of the 19th to 20th century or during the first decades of the 20th century as the progress of professionalization grew apace, but entry to the judiciary occurred much more slowly (Schultz, 2003). For example, in England and Wales women struggled to achieve equality with men and were often subordinated into the least prestigious sections of the profession (Sommerlad and Sanderson, 1998) and in Canada monopolies on legal services gave law societies significant power to exclude women from the profession (Brockman, 2001). Despite professions such as accounting and law appearing to have accepted the close tying of educational credentials to meritocratic access as an ‘ideological necessity’, their role in supporting access to status required restricted entry (Larson, 1977, p. 51). Hence, profes- sional practices, such as restricting access to work experience requirements, have contributed to historical and continued professional closure for those seen as ‘other’, as a result of their gender, race, or class (Francis and Sommerlad, 2009; Hammond, 2002; Sommerlad, 2007).

Recent decades have seen significant increases each year in the numbers of women attracted to these professions and the professional service firms in them. In the case of law, the percentage of female students enrolling with the Law Society in the UK consistently reached around 62 per cent in the years from 2001 to 2009 (Law Society, 2010), whereas in accounting, worldwide numbers of female student members of the six major UK accounting bodies

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between 2002 to 2009 were consistent at 48 per cent (Professional Oversight Board for Accountancy, 2010). However, women attempting to progress to the higher echelons of professional services firms, particularly in the critical promotion to partnership, may find their progress inhibited due to a number of issues, including gender discrimination (Nicolson, 2005), the combination of professional and family commitments (Johnson et al., 2008), stereotypical assumptions about parenting (Hagan and Kay, 1995), the need to fit a pre- vailing masculine model of performance or success (Jonnergård et al., 2010; Kumra and Vinnicombe, 2008, 2010) and ‘marked segmentation between largely feminine, community orientated and relatively underpaid special- isms on the one side and male-dominated, corporate oriented and remu- nerative practice areas on the other’ (Bolton and Muzio, 2007, p. 58). This stratification of law into different types of firms, legal specialisms and orga- nizations fractures women’s experiences of law (Sommerlad, 2003). The hegemonic masculinity of mainstream laws is accentuated as a result of the feminization of the profession occurring in niches of legal practice that are ‘naturalized’ as female and where women play a ‘maternal’ caring role (Sommerlad, 2003). As a result, many women exit professional services firms at an early stage (Accountancy, 2008) and those women who do stay in practice often find there is a ceiling on their status and monetary compen- sation (Hagan and Kay, 1995).

Professional identities may also be gendered due to stereotypes associated with masculine and feminine social and cultural norms in professional ser- vices firms. Organizational decision-makers in hiring decisions perceive can- didates through the lens of gender stereotypes (Gorman, 2005) and as women attempt to pass through organizational hierarchies in corporate law firms, the traditional male domination of upper level positions intensify these decision- maker biases (Gorman and Kmec, 2009). Moreover, women are subjected to stricter performance standards than men when undertaking the same job (Gorman and Kmec, 2007) and are likely to be rewarded less than their male counterparts (Kay and Gorman, 2008). Hence, the professional and organiza- tional discourses forming the socialization processes in accounting and law exercise a significant degree of institutional power in the shaping of the individual (Anderson-Gough et al., 1998; Sommerlad, 1998), which may have significant gendered effects.

Professional identity formation in the physical form of the professional has also been argued to be embodied as inherently masculine (Thornton, 2007). The norm of bodily presence is an integral dimension of the culture of legal practice (Thornton and Bagust, 2007). Haynes’ (2008) study of women accounting professionals demonstrated the significance of the physical body in the formation of the personal and professional self, where the body becomes a vehicle for displaying conformity, or indeed non- conformity, to gendered social norms. For example, forms of organizational and professional embodiment may clash with other forms of gendered

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embodied self, such as that experienced during pregnancy and in early motherhood, affecting embodied practices, emotions and identities and leading to disillusion and disengagement by women accountants, with serious implications for the future of the profession (Haynes, 2008). It is to the significance of the body in professional work which I now turn.

Concepts of embodiment, physical and cultural capital

The concept of embodiment emphasizes the lived body of a subject who knows the world through bodily perception. Thus, the body is a phenom- enologically lived entity through which we experience our everyday lives, as well as a socially constructed phenomenon influenced by social and cul- tural forces. As Hall et al. (2007, p. 535) suggest: ‘Embodiment concerns the body we are [my emphasis] and, as such, enables an understanding of the dialectical processes of identification as they unfold in particular social contexts’.

The constraints and context of professional services firms therefore form an important part of understanding gendered embodiment, in which Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984, 1986) theories of practice and capital provide some useful theoretical explanation. Bourdieu is concerned with how various forms of capital support symbolic power and dominance. He outlines a form of cultural capital which is accumulated in part from educational credentials and institutionalized in social systems and practices, supported by social capital arising from powerful social networks (Bourdieu, 1986). Cultural capital encapsulates cultivated dispositions that are internalized by the indi- vidual through socialization processes that constitute schemes of meaning and understanding so that all forms of cultural capital are said to be embod- ied (Swartz, 1997). For Bourdieu, the body is a bearer of symbolic value and a form of physical capital: a possessor of power, status, and distinctive sym- bolic forms, which is integral to the accumulation of various resources linked to the acquisition of status and distinction (Shilling, 1993).

Bourdieu (1984) suggests that any given embodied practice can only be understood diacritically, that is, in relation to other practices in the same context. His concept of habitus represents the socially constituted system which inculcates a world based on, and reconciled to, these practices (Bourdieu, 1977). The concept of field is the social arena in which struggles for, or access to, resources occur, which is interdependent with the notion of capital, as ‘capital does not exist and function except in relation to a field’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 101). Agents are positioned in fields according to the overall volume and relative combinations of capital avail- able to them, hence capital is a key constraint or stake in the development and range of possible strategies and actions available to agents in the struggle to gain ascendancy (Malsch et al., 2011). Habitus contributes to the

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reproduction of field as individuals are habituated towards interpretive schemes interposed with power relations, such as in the social and cultural context of the professions.

Furthermore, Bourdieu’s (1996) analysis of the state nobility, the dominant social groups whose legitimacy is supported by their accredited education qualifications, may be said to relate to professions such as accounting and law. In these contexts the acquisition of knowledge and technical expertise is part of what constitutes the ‘social magic’ of the state nobility (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 118), or the dominance of an elite. This is reminiscent of the recent so-called Milburn Report on fair access to the professions in the UK that noted the propensity of professional services firms to recruit from a narrowing range of elite universities and ‘the frequent practice of professions recruiting from existing cultural circles and thus exclud[ing] many potential candidates who are regarded as being from “outside” the circle’ (Panel of Fair Access to the Professions, 2009, p. 50). Moreover, the state nobility is imbued with ‘bodily hexis, clothing, ways of speaking’ and a ‘distinguished’ appearance, demon- strating its cultural and physical capital (Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 35 and 180). These concepts will be analysed below, once the methodology to the study has been outlined.

Methodology

The data in this article derive from a 2-year funded research project involving professional services firms in the USA and the UK. These geographical areas are where most of the largest and, therefore, arguably the most influential professional services firms originate, although it is acknowledged that cul- tural contexts may differ in and between these contexts and with other parts of the world. The article draws from semi-structured interviews carried out with 15 female practitioners in the USA and 15 in the UK. The interviewees were initially sourced through personal contacts in the two professions and through contacting professional women’s networking groups, followed by snowballing techniques whereby additional interviewees were referred to me through contacts, an invaluable source when the potential participants are few in number or difficult to ascertain, or where some degree of trust is required to initiate contact (Atkinson and Flint, 2001). In this case, the fact that I am a former accountant enabled me to utilise personal contacts from aca- demia, accounting and law, and develop some degree of trust with partici- pants through a shared experience of the sector.

The interviews ranged in length from 1 to 3 hours and took place either in the firm’s offices, in a public place or in the participant’s home. All were recorded with the permission of the participant and were then transcribed. I listened to the tapes while scrutinizing the transcript, the first time to correct for any errors, and the second time to annotate them with significant

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examples of emotion, changes of tone and emphasis. Further interpretive narrative analysis took place in subsequent readings by drawing out any references or inferences to the body or embodiment.

All the participants in the study were drawn from large professional ser- vices firms: the lawyers from international corporate law firms; about half of the accountants from Big 4 firms and the remainder from large second-tier firms, located either in west coast states of the USA or in sizable cities in the UK. Participants ranged in their experience from second-year associate lawyers and accountants with 3 year’s post-qualification experience to equity partners with up to 25 years’ experience. All the participants were white, except two in the USA who originated from Asian backgrounds. As might be expected from professionally qualified practitioners, all the participants had high educational qualifications.

However, it is important to stress that the participants were not intended to form a large representative sample of practitioners from professional services firms in accounting and law, or to provide a geographical comparison. Both professions encompass a wide range of organizational sites, and while in this case the participants were drawn from large firms, the research was designed to explore and interpret the experiences of professionals rather than sample a specific population. The in-depth interviews intended to ascertain how they perceived the importance or otherwise of the physical presentation of the self, the body and its interaction with their identity as lawyer or accountant and to examine the circumstances and effects of the presentation of their professional physical body. Due to the nature of the two professions of accounting and law and their requisite professional identity, participants may have had embodied experiences that were potentially or to some extent similar, but how they dealt with them and felt about them may be different. While the sample of partici- pants is not intended to be generalizable, the analysis provides some insight into the relationship that professionals in large professional services firms have with their bodies and the interaction of professional work and identity with the body, which allows for the drawing of some implications for the embodiment of the professions. I now turn to the analysis of the interviews.

‘What is professional?’ A professional appearance

The participants in the study expressed awareness that the nature of profes- sionalism incorporates aspects of presentation, embodied in the form of required attire or dress:

We won’t let our junior associates, you know, go to Court without a jacket. They know they have to have a jacket at the office, even if it is a simple 2 second, you know, put an uncontested motion on the record in front of the Judge. (Partner A, law firm)

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It is common for professional services firms to inculcate and reinforce pro- fessional identity and the required embodied behaviour and appearance through socialization mechanisms such as in-house courses and training programmes:

The whole group of first level people will go up to our headquarters and there will be two or three days’ training. Now 90 per cent of it will be technical, you know: how to audit, how to do that, but they often throw in something light, like business etiquette or how to present yourself, and appropriate dress and appropriate behaviour and how to eat properly. (Partner A, accounting firm)

In addition, individual practitioners learn acceptable appropriate behaviour and appearance by mimicking the behaviour of others:

You got it just from being in the office environment, a lot of it, you just saw people. (Audit manager A)

Cultural codes in firms are disseminated through informal discourse and networks of common understanding that act to reinforce informal rules and norms:

People were pulled up about things … for example they would never say ‘boys can’t wear ear rings’, but if one of the lads went in with an ear ring he’d be told and everybody would know about it and it was like, ‘Oh well, you don’t do that type of thing’. (Audit manager, B)

The exact nature of required professional self–presentation, through dress and appearance, however, is difficult to define and is not always explicit. For women, in particular, this form of professional embodied identity may be difficult to negotiate because the informal rules governing women’s attire and appearance are not as explicit or traditional as the archetypal professional male suit:

We have had a series of ongoing discussions in the firm where we have some younger female associates who, you know … some of them either dress too casually and some of them dress too trendily so in both cases it is not quite professional enough, but then it sparked this whole conversation of what is professional? (Partnership-track lawyer)

Women have to present themselves in a way that exudes their status and ability as professionals, and adds credibility to their competence:

I certainly find that with women they have got to understand the conse- quences of the way that they are dressing and if they dress in a way that is not traditionally professional, or too casual, or too sort of trendy that veers away from the business look, I think it affects their credibility. (Partner B, law firm)

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Moreover, non-conformity or some kind of faux pas in terms of appearance can affect acceptability as a bona fide professional, as this comment from a partner describing a recruitment situation demonstrates:

The two men were dressed in suits and the two women had a kind of a pant suit and a skirt type suit on but then one of them had gigantic shoes on and it was kind of like, ‘Okay, you were almost there honey, I almost would have taken you seriously’…. I never saw her again. (Partner A, law firm)

To some degree this struggle to be taken seriously may relate to youthfulness and inexperience, hence applying to both men and women, but what the quotes show is that being taken seriously for women is interrelated with their display of professional embodiment.

‘Professional demeanour’ and the client relationship

Relationships with clients have been identified as an important influence on service provision (Oerton, 2004), particularly in what McDowell (2009) terms interactive service work where both the consumer and the provider of the service are present and the service generally ends at the time of the exchange. In professional services, the relationship with the client is likely to be of a longer term nature and more relational than in low-skilled service work, allowing the client to act as a regulating force in defining service provision (Anderson-Gough et al., 2000; Kornberger et al., 2010). The role of the client in professional services firms is therefore central to defining the nature of pro- fessionalism and how this is embodied. The expectations of the client impact on the requirement of a professional image:

There is a reputation issue and an image issue, and everyone is so freaked out about what is the client going to think? If I question someone’s cred- ibility because of their appearance or anything like that then you know the client is going to question it even more. (Partner B, accounting firm)

Professional presentation is related to the credibility of a professional in the eyes of the client, as this senior manager involved in recruitment explained:

How they present themselves, their dress, demeanour and so on, is in the mix as well because we have to consider, you know, you are going to be going out to a client, would you be presentable to a client? So if they do not carry themselves very well or they are not very dressed up, … it’s kind of like, ‘OK, do they not understand’ or, you know, ‘Do they not care?’ (Senior manager A, accounting)

Here the service ethic from a professional to their client is related to embodied conduct, or ‘carrying oneself’, as if the degree of expertise and professional- ism is encapsulated in the physical body. However, the exact nature of

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professional embodiment and professionalism is elusive and ephemeral, relating to self-presentation and demeanour:

The other thing that we certainly look at is professional presence. Is this person someone we feel comfortable we could send him [sic] out to the client and they would be able to articulate things clearly, present them- selves in a professional way, you know, show that sort of professional demeanour. (Senior manager B, accounting)

Professional embodiment therefore involves meeting the expectations of clients and fellow professionals by looking the part to maintain credibility, and conducting oneself with gravitas and appropriate body language.

Women negotiating ‘professional demeanour’

For women professionals, however, not only do they have to negotiate their attire and dress, but also how they perform this elusive ‘professional demeanour’, which encapsulates speech and manner. While promotion com- mittees and recruiters are looking for ‘speaking with some kind of impact’, women’s experiences of speaking authoritatively are met negatively as over- bearing. In this quote, the participant recalls a promotion committee discuss- ing a female candidate for promotion to partner status:

We disagreed with the hiring partner on a candidate … his reaction … to the way that she was speaking, because she does have this very authoritative manner of speaking, is that she was strident and he couldn’t get past that and listen to what she was saying because she was so strident and he felt attacked. (Associate lawyer A)

Women found that to assert their authority in professional services firms in the traditionally male-dominated environments of the law and accounting professions, they had to tread ‘a very fine line between assertive and shrill and you can’t go over the shrill line’ (Partner C, law firm). They were aware of the need to be assertive but not to be perceived as overly aggressive even though the nature of the job requires a degree of physical presence, perfor- mativity and authority. For the lawyers, particularly when advocating in court, the role is ‘performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’ (Butler, 1990, p. 185). Nevertheless, acceptable performativity is gendered as masculine:

Some people talked to me about my manner of speaking: ‘Maybe you need to tone it down a little bit you know’ — it is ridiculous because I had to do it to kind of give me authority in Court, to have authority to be among the

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men, and then I did it and the men are like, ‘We’re feeling defensive and scared’. (Associate lawyer C)

Society’s cultural expectations are that women embody softer, feminine attributes, whereas in law, the nature of the work sometimes involves pow- erful advocacy which requires more assertive behavi

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