body beautiful? gender, identity and the body in professional services firms

Body Beautiful? Gender, Identityand the Body in ProfessionalServices Firmsgwao_583 1..19

Kathryn Haynes*

This article explores the professional identity formation of professionalsand its relationship with their embodied physical image, with a particularfocus on women in accounting and law. It examines the role of the profes-sional services firm in defining a professional body image, socializationprocesses that contribute to the definition of the professional body, the roleof the client in defining professionalism, the legitimation of certain typesof embodied identities and the importance of the body in defining gen-dered perceptions of the self. The article draws on Bourdieu’s concepts ofcapital 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 oninterviews with contemporary practitioners, the article argues that notionsof 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 andoldest 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, makethem particularly relevant for study in the context of professional identity. Thenature of professional identity (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002), together withcareer 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]

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

More significantly, despite interest in the role of the physical body inpopular culture (Shilling, 1993), little is known about the combined relation-ship of gender, identity and the body in professions and professional servicefirms. Yet, the physical body is an important facet of professionalism becauseit is symbolic of aspects of identity and the self, an embodied representationof a perceived identity (Haynes, 2008). Attitudes towards the body may alsobe gendered suggesting that ‘the ways in which women’s and men’s bodiesare 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 genderedin professional services firms. Drawing from an international study of profes-sionals in accounting and law firms in both the UK and the USA, it exploresthe 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 interactionof 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 PierreBourdieu, whose concept of physical capital is useful in understanding pro-cesses of domination and subordination. Although Bourdieu does notprovide a detailed account of gendered orientations to the body, I extend hisinsights to encompass gender and a form of gendered physical capital. Indoing so, the article fulfils a need for further research into relationshipsbetween the body and the self, the impact of embodied practices at work,and cultural issues affecting the embodied identities and working lives ofwomen practitioners in accounting and law. It draws implications for thelegitimation of certain cultural elements of embodied identities, which mayhave the effect of marginalizing groups or individuals who may notconform to acceptable bodily norms in a profession. In particular, thesebodily 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 thenature of gendered identities in professional services firms and secondly, itintroduces the concepts of embodiment, physical and cultural capital with

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reference to Bourdieu. After a methodology section, it discusses how womenprofessionals experience various aspects of professional embodiment, includ-ing professional appearance, professional demeanour, interaction with theclient relationship, embodied expectations and control. Finally, the articlediscusses 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 sucha role (Lehman, 1992). Women’s oppression in accountancy interacted withthe development of power and influence in the profession itself and theconstitution of its knowledge base in terms of gender (Kirkham, 1992). Untilthe latter half of the 20th century the professional echelons of accounting werea male preserve in the UK, as the masculine qualities required of accountingprofessionals ‘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’sadmission to law occurred at the turn of the 19th to 20th century or during thefirst decades of the 20th century as the progress of professionalization grewapace, but entry to the judiciary occurred much more slowly (Schultz, 2003).For example, in England and Wales women struggled to achieve equalitywith men and were often subordinated into the least prestigious sections ofthe profession (Sommerlad and Sanderson, 1998) and in Canada monopolieson legal services gave law societies significant power to exclude women fromthe profession (Brockman, 2001). Despite professions such as accounting andlaw appearing to have accepted the close tying of educational credentials tomeritocratic access as an ‘ideological necessity’, their role in supportingaccess 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 thoseseen as ‘other’, as a result of their gender, race, or class (Francis andSommerlad, 2009; Hammond, 2002; Sommerlad, 2007).

Recent decades have seen significant increases each year in the numbersof women attracted to these professions and the professional service firms inthem. In the case of law, the percentage of female students enrolling with theLaw Society in the UK consistently reached around 62 per cent in the yearsfrom 2001 to 2009 (Law Society, 2010), whereas in accounting, worldwidenumbers 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 OversightBoard for Accountancy, 2010). However, women attempting to progress tothe higher echelons of professional services firms, particularly in the criticalpromotion to partnership, may find their progress inhibited due to a numberof issues, including gender discrimination (Nicolson, 2005), the combinationof professional and family commitments (Johnson et al., 2008), stereotypicalassumptions 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 betweenlargely 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). Thisstratification of law into different types of firms, legal specialisms and orga-nizations fractures women’s experiences of law (Sommerlad, 2003). Thehegemonic masculinity of mainstream laws is accentuated as a result of thefeminization 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 firmsat an early stage (Accountancy, 2008) and those women who do stay inpractice 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 associatedwith 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 womenattempt to pass through organizational hierarchies in corporate law firms, thetraditional male domination of upper level positions intensify these decision-maker biases (Gorman and Kmec, 2009). Moreover, women are subjected tostricter performance standards than men when undertaking the same job(Gorman and Kmec, 2007) and are likely to be rewarded less than their malecounterparts (Kay and Gorman, 2008). Hence, the professional and organiza-tional discourses forming the socialization processes in accounting and lawexercise a significant degree of institutional power in the shaping of theindividual (Anderson-Gough et al., 1998; Sommerlad, 1998), which may havesignificant gendered effects.

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



embodied self, such as that experienced during pregnancy and in earlymotherhood, affecting embodied practices, emotions and identities andleading to disillusion and disengagement by women accountants, withserious implications for the future of the profession (Haynes, 2008). It is tothe 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 whoknows 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 concernsthe body we are [my emphasis] and, as such, enables an understanding ofthe dialectical processes of identification as they unfold in particular socialcontexts’.

The constraints and context of professional services firms thereforeform an important part of understanding gendered embodiment, in whichBourdieu’s (1977, 1984, 1986) theories of practice and capital provide someuseful theoretical explanation. Bourdieu is concerned with how various formsof capital support symbolic power and dominance. He outlines a form ofcultural capital which is accumulated in part from educational credentialsand institutionalized in social systems and practices, supported by socialcapital arising from powerful social networks (Bourdieu, 1986). Culturalcapital encapsulates cultivated dispositions that are internalized by the indi-vidual through socialization processes that constitute schemes of meaningand 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 anda form of physical capital: a possessor of power, status, and distinctive sym-bolic forms, which is integral to the accumulation of various resources linkedto the acquisition of status and distinction (Shilling, 1993).

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



reproduction of field as individuals are habituated towards interpretiveschemes interposed with power relations, such as in the social and culturalcontext of the professions.

Furthermore, Bourdieu’s (1996) analysis of the state nobility, the dominantsocial groups whose legitimacy is supported by their accredited educationqualifications, may be said to relate to professions such as accounting and law.In these contexts the acquisition of knowledge and technical expertise is partof 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-calledMilburn Report on fair access to the professions in the UK that noted thepropensity of professional services firms to recruit from a narrowing range ofelite universities and ‘the frequent practice of professions recruiting fromexisting cultural circles and thus exclud[ing] many potential candidates whoare regarded as being from “outside” the circle’ (Panel of Fair Access to theProfessions, 2009, p. 50). Moreover, the state nobility is imbued with ‘bodilyhexis, 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 studyhas been outlined.

Methodology

The data in this article derive from a 2-year funded research project involvingprofessional services firms in the USA and the UK. These geographical areasare where most of the largest and, therefore, arguably the most influentialprofessional services firms originate, although it is acknowledged that cul-tural contexts may differ in and between these contexts and with other partsof the world. The article draws from semi-structured interviews carried outwith 15 female practitioners in the USA and 15 in the UK. The intervieweeswere initially sourced through personal contacts in the two professions andthrough contacting professional women’s networking groups, followed bysnowballing techniques whereby additional interviewees were referred to methrough contacts, an invaluable source when the potential participants arefew in number or difficult to ascertain, or where some degree of trust isrequired to initiate contact (Atkinson and Flint, 2001). In this case, the fact thatI 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 inthe firm’s offices, in a public place or in the participant’s home. All wererecorded with the permission of the participant and were then transcribed. Ilistened to the tapes while scrutinizing the transcript, the first time to correctfor any errors, and the second time to annotate them with significant



examples of emotion, changes of tone and emphasis. Further interpretivenarrative analysis took place in subsequent readings by drawing out anyreferences 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 ofthe accountants from Big 4 firms and the remainder from large second-tierfirms, located either in west coast states of the USA or in sizable cities in theUK. Participants ranged in their experience from second-year associatelawyers and accountants with 3 year’s post-qualification experience to equitypartners with up to 25 years’ experience. All the participants were white,except two in the USA who originated from Asian backgrounds. As might beexpected from professionally qualified practitioners, all the participants hadhigh educational qualifications.

However, it is important to stress that the participants were not intended toform a large representative sample of practitioners from professional servicesfirms in accounting and law, or to provide a geographical comparison. Bothprofessions encompass a wide range of organizational sites, and while in thiscase the participants were drawn from large firms, the research was designedto explore and interpret the experiences of professionals rather than sample aspecific population. The in-depth interviews intended to ascertain how theyperceived the importance or otherwise of the physical presentation of the self,the body and its interaction with their identity as lawyer or accountant and toexamine the circumstances and effects of the presentation of their professionalphysical body. Due to the nature of the two professions of accounting and lawand their requisite professional identity, participants may have had embodiedexperiences that were potentially or to some extent similar, but how they dealtwith them and felt about them may be different. While the sample of partici-pants is not intended to be generalizable, the analysis provides some insightinto the relationship that professionals in large professional services firms havewith their bodies and the interaction of professional work and identity with thebody, which allows for the drawing of some implications for the embodimentof 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 ofrequired 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 2second, you know, put an uncontested motion on the record in front of theJudge. (Partner A, law firm)



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

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

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

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

Cultural codes in firms are disseminated through informal discourse andnetworks of common understanding that act to reinforce informal rules andnorms:

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 ringhe’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 dressand appearance, however, is difficult to define and is not always explicit. Forwomen, in particular, this form of professional embodied identity may bedifficult to negotiate because the informal rules governing women’s attire andappearance are not as explicit or traditional as the archetypal professionalmale suit:

We have had a series of ongoing discussions in the firm where we havesome younger female associates who, you know ... some of them eitherdress too casually and some of them dress too trendily so in both cases it isnot quite professional enough, but then it sparked this whole conversationof what is professional? (Partnership-track lawyer)

Women have to present themselves in a way that exudes their status andability 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 isnot traditionally professional, or too casual, or too sort of trendy that veersaway from the business look, I think it affects their credibility. (Partner B,law firm)



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

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

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

‘Professional demeanour’ and the client relationship

Relationships with clients have been identified as an important influence onservice provision (Oerton, 2004), particularly in what McDowell (2009) termsinteractive service work where both the consumer and the provider of theservice 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 alonger 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 inprofessional services firms is therefore central to defining the nature of pro-fessionalism and how this is embodied. The expectations of the client impacton the requirement of a professional image:

There is a reputation issue and an image issue, and everyone is so freakedout 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 theclient is going to question it even more. (Partner B, accounting firm)

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

How they present themselves, their dress, demeanour and so on, is in themix as well because we have to consider, you know, you are going to begoing out to a client, would you be presentable to a client? So if they do notcarry themselves very well or they are not very dressed up, ... it’s kind oflike, ‘OK, do they not understand’ or, you know, ‘Do they not care?’ (Seniormanager A, accounting)

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



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 thisperson someone we feel comfortable we could send him [sic] out to theclient and they would be able to articulate things clearly, present them-selves in a professional way, you know, show that sort of professionaldemeanour. (Senior manager B, accounting)

Professional embodiment therefore involves meeting the expectations ofclients 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 theirattire and dress, but also how they perform this elusive ‘professionaldemeanour’, 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 theway that she was speaking, because she does have this very authoritativemanner of speaking, is that she was strident and he couldn’t get past thatand listen to what she was saying because she was so strident and he feltattacked. (Associate lawyer A)

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

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



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

Society’s cultural expectations are that women embody softer, feminineattributes, whereas in law, the nature of the work sometimes involves pow-erful advocacy which requires more assertive behaviour. Women whoare deemed to be acting contrary to femininity and embodying the moremasculine attributes required by the law profession are subject to negativecharacterizations:

If a man had made the same arguments, in the same manner, in the sameway as a woman, you know they were just protecting their clients’ interestsor whatever, but if a woman does it, she is a bitch. That is one of the thingsfor women, at least in litigation, it is more of a problem for women to betaking strong positions and arguing forcefully and striking that balance. Ifyou do it too much you are a bitch, that is how you would be characterizedand you know, with some people, if you do it at all you are a bitch. (PartnerA, law firm)

The elusive and ephemeral professional demeanour that encapsulates bodylanguage, manner and speech may have differential sets of performativecriteria for men and women, so that what is regarded as professional for aman may be regarded as too masculine for a woman.

Gendered embodied expectations and control

The women in the study were conscious of how they utilised, maintained ordeveloped their bodies in order to fit more successfully into the masculineculture of professional services firms. Sometimes this involved the use ofnatural attributes which enabled them to fit more easily into the symbolicorder of professionalism:

You may have noticed I am extraordinarily tall and I think it has actuallyserved me very well in law and in a male dominated profession because Ithink that I do get accorded a lot more credibility because of that ... peoplethink that I am older or more experienced or more confident or sure ofmyself or whatever.... I think that does work to your advantage in law.(Associate lawyer A)

At other times they were conscious of compensating for their apparent lack offit and professional demeanour by altering their self-presentation through themanagement of their body. This includes simply out-dressing others, usingclothes as a cloak of professionalism:

I sort of think that if you go to a meeting and you are the only women in theroom you better be the best dressed one there, and if you go to a meeting



with clients and you are the accountant you better be dressed one notchabove the client. (Senior Manager D, accounting)

Some aspects of physical appearance, such as size, race, age or physicaldisability, cannot be disguised. Individuals may feel marginalized on anumber of fronts due to their physical appearance, which cause them, as inthe case of the lawyer being described here, to feel the need to compensate, bywearing ‘these fantastic suits and dresses and, you know, high heels andthings to overcome her petite size and the fact that she looks so young’ inorder to adopt some of the characteristics of professionalism.

While obesity and size are issues for both men and women in moderncapitalist societies, the need to control body weight is an issue that pervadespopular culture in terms of women’s embodiment. Being overweight sug-gests an apparent lack control of one’s body, which this participant, aware ofher own large size, was conscious of:

I think there is still the misconception as far as body image goes that if youare fat it is your fault, you are fat because you choose to eat too much ... soI have always been aware of it. (Partner A, law firm)

Control of the body and its outward display, through being physically fit,healthy and an appropriate weight, can be said to be indicative of being incontrol of one’s rationality and corporeal presence, central to the embodimentof the professional in accounting and law:

They want you to appear fit and healthy and you know you cannot beoverweight, they encourage you to be healthy ... they do encourage that.(Associate lawyer B)

Those who do not conform to this norm struggle to attain the professionaldemeanour and professional embodiment so prized in professional servicesfirms:

A colleague, she looks young, and she is also very heavy, and ... I have seenher struggle throughout her career with being taken seriously, and unfor-tunately I think some of it has to do with her weight, and ... she had all herown issues about it already and then I think on top of it she was beingjudged for it, which is unfortunate, but I think law firms in a lot of ways arekind of shallow. (Associate lawyer A)

Even those who have ostensibly achieved success by achieving partnershipstatus may have done so at a personal cost of significant strain on the body:

The worst part is the stress, I mean I don’t look like that anymore, in termsof the photograph they took after I [was made partner], you know, so on thewhole, you lose some part of yourself. (Partner D, law firm)



This comment from a partner was striking in its veracity as I had visited herweb pages to glean some background information prior to our meeting andalmost did not recognize the woman I met from the photograph on thewebsite. Long hours, associated tiredness, a sedentary working life and aninability to plan weekend physical activities with friends due to work com-mitments had led to her sense of physical deterioration.

Discussion: gendered physical capital

The preceding sections have identified that concepts of professionalism inaccounting and law are ephemeral, encapsulating dress and self-presentation,speech and manner, which might be termed professional demeanour, andwhich relate directly to the body. This relates to Bourdieu’s (1984) argumentthat the body has become commodified in modern societies and is central tothe acquisition of status and distinction. The body is a bearer of symbolicpower, through its form of physical capital, and in its ‘embodied states, asmodes of speech, accent, style, beauty and so forth’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 243).There is also an interrelationship between the development of the body andthe habitus, such that the context in which the commodification of embodi-ment takes place will clearly influence the outcome. Bourdieu’s concept ofhabitus suggests that understanding the socially constituted system of aprofession such as accounting and law is central to understanding the cultureand socialization of professional embodiment. Habitus encapsulates

the general dispositions, inclinations, attitudes, and value of any particularfield that are embodied in the field’s inhabitants and are durably incorpo-rated in their bodies ... in short, habitus is the logic or code for the socialbehaviour of a field. (Macintosh, 2009, p. 3, cited in Malsch et al., 2011)

As Bourdieu (1977, p. 94) puts it, values are ‘given body’ and culture is ‘madebody’ within a field. Moreover, institutions seek to produce

a new man [sic] through the process of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’... set[ting] such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress,bearing, physical and verbal manners ... treating the body as a memory, theyentrust to it in abbreviated and practical form the fundamental principlesof the arbitrary content of the culture. (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 94, italics inoriginal).

Hence, while organizations as a context have long been termed masculineenterprises (Acker, 1990; Kanter, 1977) in which the woman’s body is expe-rienced as marginal (Brewis and Sinclair, 2000; Gatrell, 2011a, 2011b;Trethewey, 1999), professional embodiment, in the context of professionalservices firms in accounting and law, has a particular form of commodifica-tion and physical capital arising from the very nature of these professions.



Though not homogenous, accounting and law firms, as professional servicesorganizations, are dominated by the concept of the client and the clientinterest, with a long history of male domination and masculine cultures.Despite there being no intention to compare firms geographically in thisstudy, participants from both the UK and the USA faced similar embodiednorms, suggesting that, despite the potential for national differences, profes-sional norms may override cultural differences in terms of doing genderedidentity. The socialization processes of mimicking behaviour, approbation ordisapprobation in professional services firms in accounting and law formwhat Bourdieu refers to as a ‘structural apprenticeship, which leads to theembodying of the structures of the world, that is, appropriating by the worldof a body thus enabled to appropriate the world’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 89). Inother words,

there is a dialectical relationship between the body and the context inwhich it operates, each informing the other, such that the rules, hierarchiesand metaphysical commitments of professional culture are inscribed on thebody, and the body reflects this back. (Haynes, 2008, p. 343)

The concept of physical capital is persuasive in understanding how embodiedforms acquire status and distinction. Where Bourdieu’s work is less compre-hensive is in applying this to gendered constructs,1 particularly outside thedomestic context. Where a culture has been historically highly masculine, asin accounting and law, the socialized embodied forms become synonymouswith masculine attributes that even Bourdieu recognizes as ‘typically mascu-line and bourgeois virtues ... character, manliness, leadership’ (Bourdieu,1996, p. 118). Of course, men are also subject to this embodied characteriza-tion and socialization. I have shown in this study, however, how women findit difficult to identify and negotiate the ephemeral nature of professionaldemeanour, dress appearance, and self-presentation and I argue that this isbecause the pervasive culture and embodied identity of professional servicesfirms in accounting and law remains inherently masculine. Through a processof commodification and socialization, women feel compelled to compensatefor a lack of ‘natural’ masculine characteristics but are equally criticized forasserting themselves too much. Moreover, their bodies are subjected to acontrolling masculine rationality in maintaining their embodied characteris-tics in relation to voice, weight and self-presentation such that, as Grosz (1994,p. 13) points out:

A convenient self-justification for women’s secondary social position ... [isto] contain them within bodies that are represented, even constructed, asfrail, imperfect, unruly, and unreliable, subject to various intrusions that arenot under conscious control.

These symbolic distinctions associating social attributes with genderedbodies become crucial in constructing and legitimating hierarchical andinegalitarian evaluations of worth in professional services firms.



Bourdieu (1977, p. 184) argues that it is the degree of objectification asso-ciated with physical capital, by which he means the interactions betweenpeople and institutionalized hierarchical mechanisms, that is the basis ofmodes of domination. To relate this idea to professional services firms, wecould say that the symbolic value of (masculine) professional embodiment isembedded in the culture of the profession to such a degree that it is regardedas natural and rewards those who more closely relate to its forms, thusreinforcing the culture and reproducing the inegalitarian forms of worth in atype of vicious circle. This is what Bourdieu characterizes as symbolic vio-lence, which develops not only when subordinate agents internalize the dis-courses of dominant agents as natural, but also when dominant agents cometo perceive their own domination as natural (Neu et al., 2003). Moreover, statenobility confers what Bourdieu (1996, p. 104) calls a ‘dialectic of consecrationand recognition’ which enables elite institutions ‘to attract individuals whomost closely conform to its explicit and implicit demands and who are theleast likely to alter it’. This is what enables professional services firms toreproduce themselves in their own image, recruiting from a relatively narrowpool of institutions, and makes it very difficult and slow to change the cultureof embodied identities.

While much of the performance of gender in organizations may appearroutinized, the practice of ‘doing gender’ may at the same time involveindividuals in attempting to resist the production or reproduction of gen-dered identities (Pullen and Knights, 2007), an issue which Bourdieu fails toaddress in detail. Nor does he give any degree of attention to the phenom-enological nature of the body, the ‘lived’ body, with all its frailties. However,as Ross-Smith and Huppatz (2010) point out, Bourdieu’s concepts of capitaltranscend dichotomies of dominance and subordination to facilitate under-standing of the complex nature of gender power, and the way it is contested,in organizations. In such a way, the women in this study, rather than naivelyaccepting the professional embodied identities imposed in their profession,showed a clear reflexive awareness of the ‘illusio’ (belief in the game)(Bourdieu, 1984, p. 54), playing the game in order to succeed, which meantthat they sometimes had to endorse the very masculine norms and values thatthey might otherwise wish to reject. They consciously utilised and workedtheir bodies to support their credibility and authority, through dress, voiceand self-presentation, yet were aware of the sacrifice they had made oftheir bodies, working through tiredness and pain, in order to develop andmaintain their professional identities.

Conclusion

The professions have come under scrutiny in relation to opportunities forentry and career development for professionals for many decades. While



barriers to entry have largely been overcome for women in accounting andlaw, progression through the hierarchy remains problematic and women arenot being retained in professional services firms in the numbers that might beexpected (Law Society, 2010; Professional Oversight Board for Accountancy,2010), an issue which has concerned governments and the professions alike(Panel of Fair Access to the Professions, 2009).

Drawing from interviews with women professionals in accounting and lawfirms, this article has examined an aspect of working life which remainsproblematic — the relationship between the body and identity in professionalservices firms. I suggest that concepts of professional identity and genderedembodiment are closely interlinked. The physical body is an important facetof professionalism because it is symbolic of aspects of identity and the self, anembodied representation of a perceived identity. The findings suggest that, interms of gender, the historical challenges of gendered body image and fitnessto practice remain an issue in contemporary firms. Bourdieu’s theories ofcapital, particularly physical capital, are used to argue that professionalembodiment remains resolutely masculine.

While women are conscious of managing their embodied identities in thiscontext and may use some degree of agency to resist these cultural norms,they are still subjected to marginalization as certain forms of physical capitalare associated with legitimate professional identity. Moreover, physicalcapital and a particular masculine form of professional embodiment becomeassociated with hierarchical and inegalitarian notions of worth. Women haveto tread a fine line between hiding negatively constructed aspects of feminin-ity while displaying positively construed masculine forms of embodiment inorder to be taken seriously. These issues may have severe implications for thewomen themselves as they subsume facets of their identity and sacrificeaspects of their bodies. They also have potentially serious implications for theprofessions. While the women in this study have all remained in the profes-sion and some have achieved partnership status, the findings might help toexplain if and how women continue to feel marginalized in accounting andlaw.

Future research might usefully research the impact of such genderedembodiment on women who have left professional services firms to pursueother options. It might also consider the impact on men of embodied identi-ties in the professional context. Importantly, the concept of professionalembodied identity might be applied to other groups known to be marginal-ized in the professions on grounds of race, disability, and social background,which remain tangible issues in allowing equality of opportunity in profes-sions (Panel of Fair Access to the Professions, 2009). If only certain forms ofembodied identities are regarded as legitimate, there are serious implicationsfor cultural, social and physical capital and for the careers and identities ofindividuals, if they are to secure equal access to status, career progression andaffirmation.



Acknowledgements

This research was funded by an Advanced Institute of Management Fellow-ship, RES-331-27-0022A, funded by the Economic and Social ResearchCouncil, to whom grateful thanks are extended. The author would also like tothank the Center for Professional Integrity and Accountability at PortlandState University, USA, and Jesse and Nancy Dillard, for their hospitality andsupport in undertaking the USA interviews. Thanks also to Alan Murray forsupport, to the three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments and toall the women who took part in the study.

Note

1. For more detail on Bourdieu and gender see Masculine Domination (Bourdieu,2001).

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body beautiful? gender, identity and the body in professional services firms

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