Who guards the guardians? Protecting a lateral control regime from its own oligarchs

The purpose of this paper is to combine insights from collective action theory and from a structural approach to contribute to a theory of control among peers. Drawing on a network study of a medium-sized Northeastern corporate law firm, I show that partners — all formally equal and locked in a cooperative situation — have developed an informal pattern of “lateral control” to help protect their common interests against free loading due to individual expressive problems. This pattern helps peers exercise early monitoring and sanctioning by providing status-based guidance for choices of “sanctioners” who exercise pressure on behalf of the firm. The analysis identifies partners who are most likely to be chosen as sanctioners, offers structural hypotheses to explain these choices, and outlines the implications of these findings for a theory of cooperation among peers.

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