Tasks, stratification and occupational change : evidence from the legal profession

Abstract

The organization of professional work-that of lawyers, doctors, and accountants, among others-is undergoing change. One of the most notable changes is the disaggregation of work processes, or the unbundling of work into component tasks and their allocation to different sources of labor. The legal profession, and specifically the corporate law firms and clients that make up the profession's "core", is increasingly subject to such reorganization. An emerging hypothesis is that this unbundling and reallocation of tasks underpins new forms of stratification. This dissertation explores the extent to which tasks underpin the distribution of opportunities and rewards that come to define occupational stratification in law.

In the first essay, I show how market pressures-specifically, rooted in changing firm-client relationships, incongruities in law firm business models, and increased competition from alternative legal service providers-contributes to occupational change by transforming law firms' division of labor and its tasks. The precise implications of such transformation remain unclear, as tasks are not typically examined as a mechanism of professional stratification. The next two essays aim to bring clarity to this issue. In each, I build from an emerging model of task-based stratification found in work design and organizational scholarship. In this model, tasks are theorized to underpin stratification through their technical, social, and subjective characteristics, doing so in ways that hinge on their status.

I examine this model first using qualitative data collected in two major legal markets, showing that the disaggregation of tasks that vary by status shapes divergent opportunity structures related to skill, social resources, and signals of professional status, such professional expertise and autonomy, which reinforce existing stratification in new ways. The third essay builds on these insights, using both fieldwork and survey data to test the relationship between task status and occupational outcomes more systematically. My findings show that certain high- and low-status tasks are associated with three forms of social resources, mostly in the expected direction. Yet nuance in these relationships suggests further refinement and new conditions of the model. These findings raise implications for task-based stratification and stratification in the profession more generally.