Habitus and the labor of representation among elite professionals

This paper reports findings from an 8-year study of the embodiment, acquisition, and consequences of habitus in the wealth management profession. The study contributes in three ways to the ongoing effort to apply Bourdieu’s theories to contemporary professional service work. First, it sheds light on the agency of individual practitioners in manifesting habitus, including the avoidance of certain behaviors in interactions with clients and peers. Second, it looks in greater depth at the process of acquiring habitus through work experiences, particularly among those who come to the profession without a suitable primary habitus; the findings suggest that having a fragmented habitus can constitute a strategic advantage for some practitioners. Third, the study sheds light on ways habitus affects client service; contrary to the trend in other professions, wealth managers’ ability to enhance clients’ cultural capital is often more highly valued than increasing their economic capital. These novel contributions are offered through analysis of a broadly global dataset, incorporating original interview data with 65 practitioners in 18 countries. This forms the basis for new insights on ‘global habitus’ in trans-national professional work—a topic of current scholarly debate. K E Y W O R D S : elites; habitus; wealth. I N T R O D U C T I O N In many forms of contemporary professional service, the ‘product’ consists of the right advice delivered at the right time (Muzio and Faulconbridge 2013). Under these conditions, the quality of the work and the competence of the advisor can be difficult for clients to assess (Alvesson 2001). This foregrounds the importance for professionals to embody expertise and trustworthiness (Ashley and Empson 2013, p. 221). The question is, how do they do this? How do the social competencies of professional work manifest in and affect client relations, and how are such competencies acquired? Several recent studies have addressed the social and self-presentation skills required in elite professional services, such as law and accounting (e.g. Haynes 2012; Spence and Carter 2014). However, these studies tend to be limited to European contexts (but see Spence et al. 2016), and to remain undertheorized in terms of the acquisition and client impact of the non-technical qualities involved in professional success. This paper seeks to contribute to the growing scholarly conversation on these issues with a more broadly international study drawing on the concept of habitus—the practical mastery of tastes, habits, style, dispositions, and all that ‘goes without saying and therefore goes unquestioned’ (Bourdieu 1977, p. 166). VC The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com 1 Journal of Professions and Organization, 2017, 0, 1–20 doi: 10.1093/jpo/jox002 Scholarly Article Although Bourdieu had little regard for the sociology of the professions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), key elements of his conceptual framework— such as habitus, the field, and illusio—have been applied to research on professionals with analytically fruitful results (Spence and Carter 2014; Lupu and Empson 2015). This approach treats a professional’s habitus as an ‘embodiment of capital’ that influences adaptation to the field of professional relations (Noordegraaf and Schinkel 2011, p. 104). As Sallaz (2010, p. 297) writes, ‘the value of the habitus concept is that it expands our purview beyond the labor process, on to the larger field of experiences and meanings that workers bring with them into the workplace. ’ Using this perspective allows us to shift the scholarly conversation about expertise and client relations from the domain of technical competencies to that of symbolic and social practices—what Bourdieu has called the ‘labor of representation’ (Bourdieu 1999, p. 234). Although ‘representation’ includes selfpresentation, the concept is distinct in its recognition of the patterns and limitations imposed by the field of action; it explicitly links agency to social structure in a way that research on self-presentation and image management have not. In addition, the ‘labor of representation’ differs from related concepts through being tied directly to Bourdieu’s theory of the accumulation of capital: the labor draws on cultural capital, of which habitus is the embodied form (Bourdieu 1986); it then leads to the production of economic capital, which has become the prime objective of professional service firms (Spence and Carter 2014). To unpack this labor process, the present study will examine the manifestation, acquisition and consequences of habitus among wealth managers—a profession composed of lawyers, accountants, bankers, and others who specialize in protecting the fortunes of the world’s richest people from taxation and dissipation. Wealth management makes an interesting object of study for several reasons. First, it demands that practitioners possess an abundance of cultural capital alongside an unusually wide-ranging technical expertise; second, their habitus differs dramatically from that of other contemporary professional services by requiring that practitioners downplay, if not conceal, the role of selling, compensation, and other manifestations of economic capital in their work. The remainder of this article will review the relevant literature on professional image and habitus, then expand on wealth management and the data gleaned from the profession in the methods section. The findings section is organized around three research questions: (1) how does habitus manifest in wealth management? (2) through which modes can professionals acquire this habitus? and (3) what is the impact of habitus on service and professionalclient interactions? Finally, the article expands on the implications of these findings visa-vis recent research on professional services, and suggests directions for future research. Ultimately, this paper contributes to theory in four ways. First, it sheds light on professionals’ strategic agency in terms of embodying habitus. Building on recent research (Spence and Carter 2014), it explores the negative side of habitus: while much of previous research has focused on what professionals must do to enact habitus successfully, this study details the many things that professionals must not do. Second, it looks in greater depth at the process of acquiring and displaying secondary habitus—offering the novel insight that for some practitioners, creating a ‘splintered habitus’ (Wacquant 2016, p. 69) can be strategically useful. Third, the study sheds light on the benefits of a successful habitus for both professionals and clients in the service interaction. Here too, the findings offer an original perspective: while other research has emphasized that professionals who wish to advance in their fields must make clients richer economically (Hanlon 2004; Carter and Spence 2014), this study shows clients placing even higher value on ways that practitioners can enrich them culturally. If anything, success in wealth management demands downplaying or suppressing issues of economic capital in favor of cultural and social forms of capital; this suggests a dimension of elite professionalism overlooked by previous research. Connected to this is the fourth and final contribution of the paper. By drawing on a broadly global dataset–involving practitioners from 19 distinct nationalities working in 18 countries— this study can challenge recent work casting doubt on the possibilities of ‘global habitus’ (Spence et al. 2016) for any profession. That is, can any elite 2 Habitus and the labor of representation