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Just Like Global Firms: Unintended Gender Parity and Speculative Isomorphism in India's Elite Professions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen
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Abstract

Against most male-dominated accounts of professional work, elite law firms in India pose a puzzling exception: women make up about half of these firms, even at senior levels of partnership. Using in-depth interviews with over 130 professionals in India's elite litigation, transactional law, and consulting firms, this research suggests that elite law firms—as new local organizations—aggressively differentiate themselves from their more traditional peers to establish organizational legitimacy. At the same time, as institutions trying to mimic global firms without actual scripts for doing so, these firms engage in a form of “speculative isomorphism” through which they signal meritocracy and modernity to their global audience. Because equal gender representation is one such mechanism, the result is environments where certain kinds of women are uniquely advantaged.

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Law & Society Review , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 108 - 140
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© 2019 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This research was made possible by the generous support of the following fellowship and grant funding sources: The Diversifying Academia by Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellowship at Stanford University, National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (SES – 1,423,439); Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy Research (IGLP Doha Santander Grant 2014); Stanford Centre for South Asia (Summer Research Grant 2012, 2013); Harvard Law School Centre on the Legal Profession (GLEE Grant 2012); International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Juan Celaya Grant 2011) and the Stanford Vice Provost for Graduate Education (Graduate Research Opportunity Award 2011, Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity Funds, 2013). The author thanks Bob Allen, Stephen Barley, Hannah Brueckner, Koji Chavez, Sara Dezalay, Corey Fields, David Grusky, Adam Horowitz, Tomas Jimenez, Devon Magliozzi, Woody Powell, Cecilia Ridgeway, Rebecca Sandefur, Peter Stamatov, and David Wilkins for comments and thoughts on various iterations and drafts of this article. Comments and reactions from colleagues at the American Bar Foundation's Speaker Series, the ASA World Society Mini-Conference, the Carlos III-Juan March Institute Comparative Sociology Speaker Series, the NYUAD SRPP Seminar, the Harvard Center on the Legal Profession Speaker Series, and the Stanford Work and Organizations Workshop were similarly crucial for moving this project forward.

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