Diversity without inclusion? Career progression, HRM and capitals in small law firms

Critical scholarship drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and capital is central to understanding career trajectories, social mobility, and inequality within elite professional service firms (PSFs). Yet, small and medium-sized firms, comprising 98% of law firms in England and Wales, remain underexamined. This matters as smaller firms recruit from local labour markets, reflect regional demographic diversity, and potentially play a vital role in social mobility within local economies. Using concepts of career capital and habitus, this paper examines how career pathways and promotion opportunities are shaped within smaller law firms, and what this reveals about inclusion and inequality across the profession. Through in-depth interviews with 42 legal professionals, we find that progression is shaped less by formal human resource management (HRM) or diversity and inclusion (D&I) policies than by informal assessments of cultural fit, professionalism, and social capital. These embodied and social capitals mirror those valued in elite firms, despite the absence of comparable organisational infrastructure. While smaller firms appear more accessible and diverse at entry, this does not necessarily translate into inclusive career progression. Informal promotion practices and reliance on dominant field-valued capitals reproduce dominant, classed and gendered norms, challenging assumptions of meritocracy and social mobility. We conceptualise this dynamic as diversity without inclusion, whereby compliance-oriented D&I practices coexist with persistent structural inequalities. We advance Bourdieusian analysis of professional careers by demonstrating how field-level career logics travel across PSF size, prestige and geographical location, challenging assumptions that smaller firms provide inherently more inclusive cultures, than larger elite firms.