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

of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and national business systems (Whitley, 1998) influence
and are influenced by organizational learning processes. It does this by revealing how
transnational law firms use CoP to generate new and transfer existing knowledge and best
practices to overseas offices, as has been exemplified by existing studies (Currah and Wrigley,
2004; Jones, 2005, 2007), but also to manage the geographically heterogeneous affects of
institutional contexts on the identities of workers. Specifically it is shown how CoP allow
learning relating to the expected identities and behaviours of lawyers employed by a
transnational law firm, identities and behaviours defined by the institutionalised and placespecific
norms of the home-country of the firm. It is, therefore, suggested that approaches to
studying TNCs that draw on the CoP framework should pay more attention to the equally
important ‘identity regulation’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002) role of CoP that coexists and
contributes to the organizational learning role focussed upon in existing studies. It is also
suggested that the role of CoP in the institutional entrepreneurship strategies of TNCs should be
better recognised. These strategies seek to short-circuit the influence of institutional
heterogeneity on workers in different parts of the firm’s international network yet little is
currently known about the extent to which such uses of CoP allow TNCs to overcome hurdles to
international business associated with the varieties of capitalism and national business systems.
The rest of the paper develops these arguments over four further sections. The next section
consider the globalization of law firms and the way institutions have influenced and in some
cases hindered the development of integrated office networks. The following section then
considers the way CoP have been formed by transnational law firms to overcome the challenges
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