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Turning Vice Into Virtue: Institutional Work And Professional Misconduct, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
Turning Vice Into Virtue: Institutional Work And Professional Misconduct, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington
Brooke Harrington
Why do professionals engage in or aid misconduct, rather than rejecting it as a threat to their legitimacy and labor market survival? This paper contributes to the scholarly agenda by drawing on an ethnographic study of professionals who facilitate offshore tax avoidance for the ultra-wealthy. This form of expert advisory work has become highly controversial, and is increasingly classified as a form of professional wrongdoing. Building on theories of institutional work and categorization, the study theorizes practitioners’ responses to field-level legitimacy threats. Specifically, the paper models a process in which misconduct is re-categorized in terms of the core norms that …