The Collegial Phenomenon: The Social Mechanisms of Cooperation Among Peers in a Corporate Law Partnership

This book examines cooperation among rival partners in a North-eastern US corporate law firm. Members are portrayed as interdependent entrepreneurs who build social niches in their firm, and cultivate and mitigate status competition among themselves.
This text provides a grounded theory of the collegial form of organization. It is based on a network analysis of a traditional and successful Northeastern US corporate law firm in which partners locked themselves in a co-operative and long-term situation without much hierarchy and formal power differences to enforce their agreements. Members of the firm (partners and asssociates) are portrayed as interdependent entrepreneurs who both build social niches in their firm and cultivate status competition among themselves. They need to engage in such behaviour in order to manage various types of resources that are vital in knowledge-intensive, project-oriented organizations (colleagues' goodwill, professional advice, social support) and to fulfil their commitment to this extremely constraining contract. This behaviour generates informal social mechanisms (generalized exchange, lateral control, oligarchic regulation) on which this type of organization is shown to depend for its self-governance.