Professional socialization and substance use: Notes on leveraged expertise

• In Event: White-Collar Crime at 75: Perspectives on Workplace Deviance

Abstract

Preliminary findings are reported from a study documenting the experiences and accounting practices of substance users in graduate and professional school (N=25; law, medicine, business, social and life sciences, the humanities). Graduate school provides occasions to use and make sense of one’s use in the context of deepening immersion in and identification with a new profession. We explore how expertise acquired through formative immersion in a profession is leveraged in substance use discourse during ethnographic interviews, illustrating how 1) academic or experiential knowledge specific to a field can transform the significance and practice of substance use, and 2) association with a “legitimate” institution can deepen and solidify one’s involvement with deviant behavior. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Authors

• Oren M. Gur, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Peter Ibarra, University of Illinois at Chicago