Managing Elites: Professional Socialization in Law and Business Schools (review)

How do students in elite professional schools grapple with the tensions between their job preferences and the jobs privileged in their schools? This would not be much of an issue if most students entered elite professional schools already predisposed in favor of what the author calls "jobs of least resistance." These are the high pay and high prestige large legal firms, investment banks, and consulting firms, the enterprises most identified with Corporate America. But, in fact, most first year students in the case studies undertaken in this book have vague or alternative job goals and frequently express reservations about the jobs of least resistance. So, how is it that so many of these students end up employed in large legal firms, investment banks, and consulting firms?

The core answer to this question is that the organization and culture of elite professional schools tilts its students in the direction of the higher paying and more prestigious jobs. This tilting involves socialization in the direction of abstract standards and identities, that is, learning to think like a lawyer or strategizing like a manager. This emphasis on abstract form makes it easier to conclude that there is nothing intrinsically more virtuous about working for a non-profit or the government than for a Fortune 500 corporation. What becomes truly important is learning to function like a professional lawyer or manager, regardless of which clients one serves. Moreover, the courses and the role-playing requirements associated with them are more likely to situate students as decision makers in jobs of least resistance. These legal and business decision makers acquire greater and more positive significance in the ways in which students imagine what they are becoming. Lastly, Corporate America recruiters knock on the doors of the placement offices with greater efficacy than their less well-endowed competitors. They offer summer jobs that turn out to predict post degree jobs; think of this process as tilting in stages.

This core answer is arrived at via interviewing a cohort of students as they progressed through an elite law and an elite business school. These interviews tapped elite professional school expectations and experiences, summer jobs, future goals and current jobs. These interviews were supplemented by an assessment of the literature generated by the schools and by attending some of the same lectures these students faced. The appendixes are useful and reading them first may actually be a plus for those interested in methodological issues.

The main strength of this book lies in its vivid description of the professional socialization experiences undergone by these students. One gets a good sense of variability in terms of initial orientation to the profession as well as receptivity and resistance to elite professional culture. One also gets a good sense of how the organization and culture of the schools influence how students view themselves and their future jobs. Via repeated references to the voices of the students as they move in the direction of the preferred professional identity, Managing Elites successfully manages to answer the "how" question.

The book is less convincing in its assertion that class reproduction is the latent function of professional socialization in elite schools. The conventional and sweeping character of this assertion stands in awkward juxtaposition with the nuanced and insightful assessments of resistance and compliance. It also will not do to argue that students purse these professions to maintain class standing. In many cases it is mobility – not the reproduction of class – that motivates the pursuit of professional degrees. The trouble, of course, is that the reproduction of inequality has nearly become the sociological equivalent of professional ideologies such as thinking like a lawyer or a strategizing like a manager. Surely a study that presumes to be an exercise in grounded theory (see p. 214) would not arrive at such a well-established theoretical perspective, unless the latter had special standing in one's discipline. But absent more compelling evidence for our grand theory and its...