High-Status Conformity and Deviance : Pressures for Purity among U . S . Corporate Law Firms

We advance a new theory to explain why high-status actors receive an effective license to violate some norms but are more severely sanctioned when they violate other norms. Past theory explains this difference in terms of the importance of the norm involved. However, this approach is problematic because: (a) violations of seemingly minor norms are often treated as very serious breaches of categorical purity; and (b) it cannot account for the empirical pattern we examine, whereby high-status corporate law firms are given leeway to diversify into the very low-status practice of family law (FL) (Phillips and Zuckerman 2001), but are barred from the somewhat higher-status practice of plaintiffs’ personal injury law (PIL). Our theoretical framework derives both different norms and how their importance varies by status from the two stages (categorization and selection) and the two key desiderata (capability and commitment) that govern valuation by any achievement-oriented audience. Based on this framework, we argue that FL represents a “membership-norm” violation, which sends a signal of categorical impurity that is damaging to lower-status actors. By contrast, PIL represents a “loyalty norm” violation, which sends a signal that the commitment to the audience is impure (audience impurity). This second type of impurity is particularly damaging to high-status actors-but only in the eyes of the audience that is betrayed. This interpretation and the theoretical framework that supports it are substantiated by two sets of studies: (a) quantitative analyses of diversification patterns and labor-market reactions to such diversification in Silicon Valley, over the years 1946-1986; and (b) a 2008-2009 interview study of relevant actors in the Boston legal market.