Learning to be a lawyer in transnational law firms: communities of ...

etween institutions and the production of firms’ best practices and workers identities to reveal
how transnational law firms use CoP to change the influence of institutions on workers’
identities and practices. In revealing this ‘identity regulation’ (c.f. Alvesson and Willmott, 2002)
role for CoP the paper demonstrates that the activities of TNCs are actually embedded (c.f. Hess,
2004) by a somewhat understudied social force: the geographically heterogeneous influences of
national institutions on workers’ identities (see also Morgan [2001] and Ferner et al. [2006] on
such ideas). Understanding the nature of such identity-related embeddedness is important, in
particular because it provides a lens to explore the way TNCs are affected by and in turn affect
the varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and national business systems (Whitley,
2001).
The focus on the role of CoP in transnational law firms reveals, then, the growing sophistication
of the strategies used by TNCs to short-circuit and overcome the embedding affects on
operations of geographically diverse institutional contexts. Work on the varieties of capitalism
and national business systems has increasingly begun to focus on the way TNCs seeks to change
the influence of institutions on their operations in different countries (see for example Crouch,
2005; Dejelic and Quack, 2003). In line with the ideas developed here about the relationship
between institutions, attitudes and values (identities) and behaviors, it has been recognized in this
work that institutions “are not universally embraced or straightforwardly ‘adapted to’, but rather
continue to be the object of ongoing conflict, as actors struggle over the form that these
institutions should take and the functions they should perform” (Thelen, 2004, 32). The struggle
described by Thelen is represented in this paper by the identity regulation strategies of
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