Theories of Culture

A. Definition

A simple, sociological definition of culture is the way of life of a society.^[177] Culture is comprised of symbols, language, values, beliefs and norms.

Socialisation is a term used in the social sciences to describe the processes ensur­ing social and cultural continuity. The main vehicles of socialisation are families and other institutions. A society may comprise groups with distinctive values and norms. These often create an ideology, a body of ideas reflecting the group’s needs and aspi­rations, as part of their culture. These ideas are often deeply felt and perceived to be true. Ideology is ‘both interested and distorted, but also practical and lived’.^[180] Groups that are distinctive in society usually have an ideology that justifies or explains their distinction and which the group tries to persuade others to accept.

B. Occupational Culture

Durkheim considered it natural that people with work interests in common would form communities of interest; a ‘restricted group, having its special characteristics... in the midst of general society’.^[181] Larson suggests that occupations which require special skill and a special work context tend to develop marks of distinctiveness, dressing, talking, behaving, that tend to identify members to each other and to outsiders.^[182] Community was an important attribute of occupations because education occurred naturally among people working on common tasks in proximity.

Larson proposes that professional culture accommodates medieval notions of craft and community to industrial capitalism. Professions promoted the values of science in social and economic reform and in professional ethics.^[183] Professional socialisation takes standards determined by the elite and attempts to make them part of the indi­vidual’s subjectivity. There is an element of social control inherent in being subject to ‘a calling’ or vocation.^[184]

Durkheim also considered that occupational culture had something to offer wider society. In one of his early texts on professions he observed that deliberation, reflec­tion and a critical spirit in public affairs promoted the health of democracy.^[185] To Durkheim, professions epitomised this intellectual orientation. This, he thought, would provide an important counterbalance to the drift of the modern state towards domination by the market and by state bureaucracy.

C. Legal Culture

Western legal professions tend to be inherently conservative. Law has a naturally bourgeois orientation. The legal system reflects the class structure of society and law­yers tend to represent the propertied classes in that system. So for example, lawyers tend to defend the ideology of legalism and procedure over substantive theories of justice.^[186] Even so, the idea that there is a distinctive legal culture is controversial.^[187]

Friedman describes legal culture as having an external dimension, popular attitudes towards law and legal institutions, and an internal dimension, the perspective of law- yers.^[188] The external dimension is shaped by the projection of law in contemporary media, how it is understood and experienced^[189] and the internal dimension by the sources and practices of legal reasoning and the values, ideologies and politics that maintain lawyers as a distinct professional group.

The criticism that legal culture is inseparable from general culture has some truth, since all fields of activity absorb wider social, political and economic influences.^[190] Cotterrell prefers the term ‘legal ideology’ to legal culture, which he describes as the ideas, beliefs, values and attitudes embedded in and shaped by practice, particularly the practices of developing, interpreting and applying legal doctrine.^[191]

It is certainly true that, over the 700 years of evolution of legal professions in England and Wales, a distinct ideology was created. It supports and is supported by complex professional norms. Some of these may be regarded either as rich traditions or as redundant myths, much like ‘taboo’ rules in anthropological studies.¹⁸ In practice, many norms continue to have some force, certainly enough to affect the way lawyers interpret their role. It is arguable, therefore, that the work, institutions, community and values of the legal profession differ sufficiently from the mainstream to constitute a distinctive culture.¹⁹

To understand the present situation of the legal profession it really is necessary to explore its past. This shows how lawyers emerged as an occupation and how they transformed in successive ages. It illustrates how the concept of legal work was con­structed, how the professional community evolved and how it achieved a position of special privilege among occupations. It will also show how the current institutions, culture and ethics of the legal profession grew out of its history.

III.