A Bourdieusian perspective on internal activism and professional careers

Professionals increasingly seek to use their careers to advance social and environmental change, yet we know little about how professional rules and career norms shape the forms that activism takes and its career consequences. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical ideas, this study explores how professionals navigate internal activism around climate issues inside professional service firms (PSFs). Based on 58 interviews with mainly management consultants involved in internal climate activist groups, we identify three practice configurations: integrating activism for career progression, leveraging activism through career leadership and separating activism from organisational career for societal purpose. These configurations are shaped by field-level norms and by professionals’ dispositions, and are underpinned by two mechanisms, namely capital accumulation and capital conversion, through which professionals build and translate activism-related career capital. We demonstrate how the PSF field rewards commercially compatible forms of activism, while more resistant forms remain unrecognised in career terms. In doing so, we develop career-based mechanisms that explain why internal activism is commonly channelled into incremental rather than transformative forms, and highlight how, when pursued as an individual career project rather than collective action, internal activism is vulnerable to co-optation and can reinforce the very field structures it seeks to challenge.