This article proposes a new approach to the study of job satisfaction in the legal profession. Drawing on a Bourdieusian understanding of the relationship between social class and dispositions, we argue that job satisfaction depends in part on social origins and the credentials related to these origins, with social hierarchies helping to define the expectations and possibilities that produce professional careers. Through this lens, job satisfaction is understood as a mechanism through which social and professional hierarchies are produced and reproduced. Relying on the first national data set on lawyer careers (including both survey data and in-depth interviews), we find that lawyers' social background, as reflected in the ranking of their law school, decreases career satisfaction and increases the odds of a job search for the most successful new lawyers.
When combined with the interview data, we find that social class is an important component of a stratification system that tends to lead individuals into hierarchically arranged positions.
The published literature on lawyer satisfaction tends to take one of two forms. One comes from those seeking to make the profession, and especially corporate law firms, more open and humane. This literature paints a "gloomy" (Rhode 2000) picture of a profession in "crisis" (Kronman 1993), relying on data on depression and alcohol use in the profession, or on more general measures of career dissatisfaction (e.g., Glendon 1994; Schiltz 1999; Rhode 2000). Much of this work highlights the lack of equal opportunity within the bar, focusing on the relative dissatisfaction of women and lawyers of color (e.g., Rhode 2000). These findings are often picked up on, repackaged, and transmitted by the popular press-with media headlines often reflecting data from bar surveys or polls with relatively low response rates, tending to overrepresent the more dissatisfied population of lawyers (Dolan 1995:A1; Muir 1995:16). The overall picture is one of a profession not doing enough to respond to perceived dissatisfaction.
By contrast, a second literature, typically stemming from more systematic social science, tends to minimize the problem of lawyer dissatisfaction. This empirical research often finds that lawyers are relatively satisfied across a range of measures (Hirsch 1985; Taber et al. 1988; Tucker et al. 1989; Gellis 1991; Heinz et al. 2005) and that this finding is fairly stable across gender (Chambers 1989; Hagan & Kay 1995) and race (Dau-Schmidt & Mukhopadhaya 1999). These reports of relative satisfaction, however, need to be contextualized by the more general finding that most people, across most occupations, tend to report that they are "satisfied" with what they do (e.g., Firebaugh & Harley 1995).
Underlying both strands of work on satisfaction is the implicit assumption that differences in satisfaction are symptoms of discrimination or inequality within the profession. This assumption is not surprising. Decades of work on the legal profession have confirmed that there are hierarchies in the profession that every lawyer knows. Access to the most prestigious positions has not been attained by women and minorities in proportion to their representation in the lawyer population (see, e.g., Carson 2004; NALP 2004). At the same time, however, this inequality is not consistently reflected in measures of job satisfaction-and it is this disjuncture of expressions of job satisfaction within structures of inequality that calls for a new approach to understanding lawyer satisfaction. We therefore seek in this article to steer the literature on job satisfaction in the legal profession away from models that evaluate the internal interest of lawyers' work or explain differences in satisfaction based solely on the obstacles or rewards that lawyers enjoy within the profession.
Rather than assuming lawyer satisfaction to be a persistent problem, no problem at all, or simply one of discrimination, this article argues that job satisfaction should be understood as both a manifestation of and a factor in a stratification system that tends to lead individuals into hierarchically arranged positions. We argue that job satisfaction depends in part on social origins and the credentials related to these origins, with social hierarchies helping to define the expectations and possibilities that produce professional careers.
As Bourdieu (1996) demonstrated in his work on The State Mobility in France, for example, class positions not only explain which schools students will attend, but these social origins also determine how well students will fit with the mission of particular schools.
Indeed, Bourdieu's work has clearly demonstrated the ways in which individuals' dispositions across a range of fields-from their taste for film, food, music, or art (Bourdieu 1987, 1993) to their career aspirations (Bourdieu 1998)-both reflect and legitimate social differentiation.
A Bourdieusian approach thereby emphasizes that social stratification is not merely externally produced, but that individuals, through their habitus-the set of practices and dispositions acquired through the repetition of living life-internalize what they can reasonably expect in life and, more important, what they cannot (Calhoun 2003). And in this way, it is often their choices and expectations that reproduce patterns of stratification, so long as we recall that the "dispositions that incline them toward this complicity are themselves the effect, embodied, of domination" (Bourdieu 1998:4).
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