Learning the rules of the game : How is corporate masculinity learned and enacted by male professionals from nonprivileged backgrounds ?

Correspondence Andreas Giazitzoglu, Newcastle University Business School, 5 Barrack Rd, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 4SE, UK. Email: Andreas.giazitzoglu@ncl.ac.uk Abstract Focusing on the lived intersection of social class and hegemonic masculinity, this article uses data elicited over a 5‐year period to analyze the experiences of 10 white male participants from nonprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who were recruited as information technology professionals by a prestigious professional service firm (PSF). Employing a Bourdieusian perspective, we reveal how participants learned to enact the configuration of corporate masculinity deemed hegemonic in the field of their employing PSF. We pay particular attention to how participants engaged with distinctive forms of cultural capital to enact corporate masculinity, and the symbolic violence and “hidden injuries of class” this represents and leads to. In turn, we highlight how classed masculine norms create exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination in organizations. We suggest that class becomes recognized as a germane area for scholars of diversity and inequality to focus on and integrate in the future, in their ongoing investigations into which social norms create marginalization in organizations.

contemporary organizations, and how particular social identities, and their intersections, create marginalization for some organizational members.

| HEGEMONIC WHITE CORPORATE MASCULINITY IN PSFS
Hegemonic masculinity is the "normative … most honored way of being a man" (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 832) in a cultural context. "Men are not intrinsically hegemonic; rather, they must accomplish hegemonic masculinity in and through their enactments, by referring to the particular codes of the (hegemonic) masculinity sought" (Giazitzoglu, 2020, p. 69). Extensive scholarship has documented how PSFs are pervaded by hegemonic masculine corporate cultures, in which white men are considered "ideal workers." Corporate masculinity is characterized by "ceaseless availability, rationality, control, ruthlessness, ambition, aggression, stamina, and mental and emotional strength" (Gregory, 2016, p. 8) and an unwavering dedication to one's career. Those who do not meet "the normative constructions of hegemonic masculinity" (Gregory, 2016, p. 17) are marginalized and discriminated against.
Most studies investigate how PSFs' masculine cultures exclude women. Gregory (2016) depicts the marginalization experienced by women in British and American computing and advertising PSFs during the Thatcher era.
Gregory positions masculinity as a key part of "the game" played in PSFs. This excludes women inside and, less obviously, outside of work. Women generally find themselves excluded from the hyper-masculine car, alcohol, sexualized, sport-based, and competitive forms of entertainment that many male employees in PSFs engage with outside of work. For female employees, this further affirms a sense of being outside of "the game." Hatmaker (2013) illustrates the marginal, peripheral status of women employed in heavily gendered engineering firms. Hatmaker's illustration shows women responding to their marginalization through two strategies: "impression management," so as to "fit in" by reproducing traits associated with masculinity (see also Wajcman, 1999) and "coping strategies," so as to better manage their marginalization, emotionally. Kumra and Vinnicombe (2008) and Bolton and Muzio (2007) focus on the key issue of promotion to partnership in PSFs, and point out that while an increasing number of women are recruited by PSFs, very few women progress to partnership roles in them. Kumra and Vinnicombe (2008) explain this by showing that women are less likely to "fit" a culturally constructed, masculine-centered model of "success" while Bolton and Muzio (2007), focusing on law PSFs, show promotion criteria, emphasizing billable hours and "rain making" are gendered, and relegate women to subordinate positions. Accordingly, women are disadvantaged, judged unfairly, and are prevented from fully progressing to the top of their organization's structures. Tomlinson, Muzio, Sommerlad, Webley, and Duff (2013) show how women and minority ethnic employees face a series of structural challenges within law firms, which impact both their recruitment and career progression. Tomlinson et al. (2013) show how respondents engage in a number of response strategies, ranging from assimilation to withdrawal, with the majority of respondents "playing the game" by reproducing-rather than participating in strategies that challenge-the masculine status quo within PSFs. Thus, despite rhetoric about equal opportunities, old inequalities persist in legal structures for women and Black and minority ethnic employees, whose ethnicity and gender make them, as marginalized subjects, reluctant or unable to participate in the strategies needed to join the upper echelons of their organization.
Less frequently, studies address how PSF cultures are shaped by ageist and embodied norms. Yet the significance of age and embodiment is demonstrated in Riach and Cutcher's (2014) study of a highly competitive UK hedge fund in the City of London, in which middle-class, athletic, fit, and muscular male bodies are idealized. By ensuring their bodies look and perform as such, aging male traders can prove they-and their bodies-are "built to last," thus remaining employable in a physiologically demanding profession that requires long hours spent working, socializing, and managing stress. Thus, traders offset the marginalization an aging body may create for them, by GIAZITZOGLU AND MUZIO -3 letting their bodies function as "accumulation strategies"; as part of their lifelong accomplishment of a professional masculine identity.
Although the extant literature often mentions the upper-class background of the vast majority of PSF employees, the classed nature of PSF hegemonic masculinity has largely remained unexamined (yet, for an exception, see Riach & Cutcher, 2014). While recognizing the hegemonic position of white masculinity in PSFs, it is important to acknowledge that not all white male professionals benefit equally from it. White professional men are not a homogenous group. They are a diverse category, differentiated on the basis of their social class origins, and associated masculinities.
Following Winlow (2001, p. 38) and Nayak (2006, p. 820), working-class masculinity generally refers to the "hard" masculinity acquired and learned when one is conditioned through a nonprivileged context (e.g., in socioeconomically marginalized families and spaces). Codes of working-class masculinity include the ability to participate in violence if needed, hedonism, irresponsibility, machismo, over-emotive reactions, and loyalty to "the lads" (i.e., other working-class men), rejection of authority and distinctive styles of dressing and talking (Hayward & Yar, 2006). Working-class masculinity is hegemonic among certain men and in certain social contexts, such as in the gym and among "the lads" studied by Giazitzoglu (2018). However, in other contexts, codes and tastes associated with working-class masculinity are stigmatized and dismissed as "parochial," "laddish," and "loutish" (Stahl, 2015, pp. 18-19;Walker & Roberts, 2018).

| THE PSF AS A BOURDIEUSIAN FIELD
We see the PSF studied as a Bourdieusian field; metaphorically, this can be presented as players engaging and interacting in a game. Players are broadly speaking the employees of the PSF, who agree to play because they believe the gain is worth it: being seen as a competent and legitimate employee, and thus keeping and improving one's position in the PSF. The game is played in accordance with "rules" or regularities (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 98), which orient how players should and should not behave, interact, and present themselves, yet, these rules are not explicit and codified. We see corporate masculinity-and its inherently middle-class connotationsas such expected expression of professional behavior within the PSF. Put differently, for employees to be seen as credible players, they need to enact a specific form of corporate masculinity, in accordance with the one expressed by the dominant incumbents. In this sense, corporate masculinity can be seen as belonging to the PSF's doxa, that is, the taken-for-granted norms operating in the organization and posing as normal or "natural" form of masculinity.
Cultural capital refers to both "cultural knowledge" (including knowledge in the form of educational qualifications) and physical "cultural goods" (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 5) or status symbols, such as expensive watches, sports cars, and tailored suits. Displaying these middle-class forms of cultural capital is an effective way for PSF employees to construct legitimacy, credibility, and belonging as players in a PSF's field (Ashley & Empson, 2017;Cook et al., 2012;Harvey & Maclean, 2008;Spence et al., 2017). Thus, cultural capital functions as symbolic capital for PSF employees, who can use cultural capital to visually denote their tastes are aligned with those of incumbents.
Professionals who were raised in privileged-that is, middle-class and upper middle-class-backgrounds are likely to have learned how to engage with middle-class cultural capital before their employment. This can be explained via Bourdieu's notion of habitus. A habitus-or "structuring structure"-is the set of cultural experiences and dispositions that one has collected and encountered before entering a given field. Habitus forms "the intentionality without the intention, the knowledge without cognitive intent, the pre-reflective, infra-conscious mastery that agents acquire in the social world" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 19) and "predisposes … individuals towards certain ways of behaving" (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013, p. 500). Having been brought up in the habitus of affluent families, boarding schools, elite universities, and other elite institutions, middle-class recruits "fit" in PSF fields, with a priori knowledge of how to "play the game" in a PSF by drawing on middle-class forms of cultural capital. This not only bolsters middle-class applicants' chances of recruitment into a PSF (Cook et al., 2012;Ingram & Allen, 2018;Rivera, 2015), but also heightens their chances of feeling, metaphorically, like a "fish in water" (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 127) in a PSF's field once employed, as they already possess and enact habitus associated with competent and legitimate employees. This also helps middle-class recruits cement relationships with a PSF's (typically middle-class) clients (Ashley & Empson, 2017;Hanlon, 2004;Harrington, 2017;Rivera, 2015), at a time when middle-class status is seen as a proxy for professional competence (Ingram & Allen, 2018;Spence et al., 2017, p. 217).
In contrast, those who are brought up in working-class contexts have been exposed to, and most likely know best, working-class habitus and will have acquired working-class cultural capital (e.g., in their vocal accents and dress sense), but not middle-class cultural capital and will therefore be at a disadvantage. However, for their careers to evolve, male professionals from working-class backgrounds must learn "the rules of the game" operating in their PSF, acquire and display knowledge of corporate masculinity, to be seen as competent players. They need to utilize middle-class cultural capital to position themselves as relevant players in the PSF field. Accordingly, this results in a process of symbolic violence, whereby more powerful social groups and individuals impose their ideals, norms, and doxa on the less powerful, who themselves, participate in this domination by accepting this prevalence.
We now outline the research context we studied, and the data acquisition and analysis techniques we employed to answer our research question.

| RESEARCH CONTEXT
Our analysis focuses on the regional office of a prestigious management consultancy firm referred to as Ferguson (a pseudonym). It adheres to the definition of a PSF given by Von Nordenflycht (2010) due to its knowledge intensity and professionalized workforce. Ferguson is a Fortune Global 500 and S&P500 company, with revenues of over £34 billion. It employs over 400,000 people globally, with clients in over 200 cities. Ferguson's UK operations are headed from several offices in the City of London. It opened a regional office, near a post-industrial city in the north of England (UK) in the early 2000s. This office provides IT support to Ferguson's clients, predominantly other global PSFs who employ Ferguson to design, implement, and manage their large-scale IT systems.
White working-class men are statistically less likely to enter the professions than middle-class men (Laurison & Friedman, 2016, p. 680). When they do enter the professions, white working-class men earn on average 17% less than middle-class men doing the same roles (Laurison & Friedman, 2016, p. 669). In IT-the profession focused on here-males from working-class backgrounds earn an average of £11,000 a year less than men from privileged backgrounds (Friedman, Laurison, & Miles, 2015, p. 277).
Our research centered on 10 male participants, who found employment as IT professionals in Ferguson's regional office between 2003 and 2013. All participants self-identified as "white British." Some participants were among the first recruits to find employment in Ferguson's regional office.
In the area around Ferguson's regional office, there is a shortage of "traditional" PSF recruits, that is, individuals from affluent backgrounds who are graduates of Russell Group universities, which are considered the most prestigious British universities (Ingram & Allen, 2018), and who learned how to enact corporate masculinity pre-recruitment. This has left a gap for local IT graduates from less privileged backgrounds to enter Ferguson, in a way that is atypical for PSF recruitment. Hence, participants were recruited in the context of Ferguson facing a GIAZITZOGLU AND MUZIO -5 shortage of skilled graduates willing to live and work in the post-industrial area its regional office resides. As a consequence of their socioeconomic backgrounds and rather exceptional recruitment into a prestigious PSF, participants are a highly relevant cohort to examine when considering how corporate masculinity is learned by male professionals from nonprivileged backgrounds, as a consequence of their exposure to the "rules" and doxa of a professional cultural field.

| WORKING OUT CLASS
Information was generated about the educational attainment, homes, and occupations of participants' parents, with these variables being long-standing measures of one's social class origin (Goldthorpe, Llewellyn, & Payne, 1980). On this basis, participants were classified as people who grew up in homes that fit "emergent service workers," "traditional working class," or, less commonly, "new affluent worker" categories proposed by Savage et al. (2013, p. 230). These backgrounds represent nonprivileged ones that do not usually bestow the ability to engage with "high-brow" cultural capital on those socialized within them (Friedman et al., 2015, pp. 261-263). Participants studied at post-1992 universities as the first generation of university attendees in their families and have lived in the local region for all of their lives. Post-1992 universities are seen as less prestigious and less academically rigorous than the allegedly elite collection of British universities categorized as "Russell Group" universities. PSF recruits are normally graduates of Russell Group institutions. This further shows that participants' pre-recruitment experiences are markedly different from other "ideal," typical PSF recruits. How corporate masculinity was learned by participants and "formulated, reformulated and amplified" (Messerschmidt, 2018) within their enactments was the focus of our data collection.

| DATA COLLECTION
Data was collected over a 5-year period, through a series of 34 qualitative interviews, with the same participants being interviewed at different stages (i.e., the probation and early post-probation stages) of their careers.
This allowed us to document and compare participants' narratives at different points in their learning processes, and see how their enactments of corporate masculinity and engagement with cultural capital fluctuated over time.
Research participants were generated through a gatekeeper: TT. TT is a long-term employee in Ferguson. TT participated in interviews with the first author during an earlier, separate study. TT agreed to be interviewed for this project, and introduced the first author to other participants who constitute an "office clique" within Ferguson's regional office and who gave informed consent to participate in a series of semi-structured interviews "about what it's like where you work and how where you work has impacted you." In this, rather informal, way access was negotiated. Interviews took place in the first author's house, participants' houses, and local coffee shops. All participants were promised anonymity. In line with ethical guidelines, no harm came or will come to participants because of their consensual involvement with this study. Ferguson are unaware of the research project and are kept anonymous as an organization. Having accessed participants, contact was maintained with them through emails, text messages, and a WhatsApp group.
Interview questions were designed following the phenomenological analysis approach, to reveal how participants subjectively "make sense" of their experiences in relation to the research question (Gill, 2014).
Interviews followed a sociobiographic approach (Tomlinson et al., 2013, p. 252), whereby we asked participants to reflect on their time in Ferguson with reference to biographical narratives and anecdotes they had already articulated in earlier interviews (Tables 1 and 2).

| DATA ANALYSIS
Each interview transcript was read several times, so familiarity with data was established. Data was then coded using Ethnograph software and analyzed. Analysis focused on inductively developing data within transcripts into a cohesive narrative to answer the question: how is corporate masculinity learned and enacted by male professionals from nonprivileged backgrounds? We used Bourdieu's ideas of field, habitus, doxa, symbolic capital, and cultural capital to code data and contextualize data theoretically. These concepts appeared particularly relevant when initially reading data. They became theoretical lenses and frameworks that we 2. Why some recruits fail to "change" their masculinities/change their masculinities to a lesser extent than others?
More data on participants' cultural capital use is elicited. A journey from working-class masculinity to corporate masculinity is evident in participants' discourses. Complying to corporate masculinity through cultural capital use gives participants a sense of being partly, though not fully, anchored in Ferguson. A sense that some local recruits are less willing to change the intersection of their class and masculinity is expressed Participants described and accounted for the differences in their status, masculinity, and use of cultural capital "then" (in the early days of their employment and before their employment) and "now." Specific examples of cultural capital, which participants engage with, were listed and discussed. The journey from working-class masculinity to corporate masculinity is further articulated, phenomenologically. The "hidden injuries of class" experienced by participants in their communities of origin as well as in their professional interactions are discussed GIAZITZOGLU AND MUZIO -9 consulted when iteratively answering the research question, in relation to participants' phenomenological narratives.
Our longitudinal design allowed us to capture how participants' narratives evolved over time, revealing participants' learning of corporate masculinity as a temporal process. Furthermore, our longitudinal design allowed us to see how participants' learning of corporate masculinity entailed experiences of habitus cleft and symbolic violence for them.

| REFLEXIVITY
Owing to his participation in an earlier study, a level of rapport existed during the research process between the first author and TT. As a result of the multiple years spent researching, closeness emerged between all participants and the first author during fieldwork. As a white man from a similar socioeconomic background to the participants, who had himself learned to enact a different form of masculinity to suit the cultural field of a Russell Group business school, the first author has experienced a similar lived experience to participants. In some interviews, participants noticed the first author wore cufflinks depicting an Oxford University crest. Participants were intrigued about the cufflink's symbolism, asking "what life was like at Oxford for a normal lad like you?" All of this shows a high level of closeness and familiarity existed in the research process, with participants seeing the first author as "normal," resembling themselves, and-like them-somehow at odds with elite institutions, not normally accessible to "men like us." Accordingly, it is necessary to reflexively consider how elicited data might have been impacted by the closeness between the researcher and the researched; with reflexivity being understood as a "researcher's consciousness of her or his own assumptions and prejudices" (Hibbert, Sillince, Diefenbach, & Cunliffe, 2014, p. 283). This closeness allowed access to a rare but salient cohort of PSF employees to emerge and be sustained over the whole research period. Further, we believe it meant a level of honesty and openness in the research process, resulting in rich qualitative data emerging from participants who may otherwise be reluctant, even embarrassed, to reveal the extent of their learning of corporate masculinity. Also, interviewing participants in "nonwork places," such as houses and coffee shops, appeared to further heighten the level of detail in data acquired, and create a richer context for analysis: participants said they felt "looser" and "freer" when "they talked about work outside of work," and therefore potentially ventured empirical data with more qualitative validity.
While recognizing the benefits of closeness in the research process, it is also necessary to outline a source of possible bias in the sample. Our contact person TT selected who was interviewed. While this was necessary for access to emerge, TT may have sought out informants who were most "like" him, reducing the scope of the collected narratives (Brannick & Coghlan, 2007). It is possible that male professionals from working-class backgrounds employed in Ferguson who were not interviewed would have given different accounts to those captured.

| GETTING HURT: LEARNING THE RULES OF THE GAME
During their first 4 months of employment, all participants experienced discomfort. Participants' working-class masculinities were "looked down on" by incumbents in Ferguson, such as line managers who: looked down on us, not because of … work [technical skills] which has always been good but because of how we were, like how we looked and acted and spoke. (TT) In their narratives, participants reflected on their own working-class masculinity, contrasting it with the masculinity projected by affluent male recruits, who were positioned as ideal in Ferguson:

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we called them the golden boys … their backgrounds were [Russell Group university] and they were just different … the managers thought they were great because they were posh, even though they were shit at programming. (FT) Participants felt somewhat marginalized in Ferguson: distinct and different to the "posh" men around them, despite participants apparently being better at doing the technical job of programming.
Ferguson's office, which appeared to participants as "top of the range" (BD), with "posh art on the walls" (BT) and "the best of the best equipment" (JJ) also contributed to participants feeling "unworthy" (CZ) and "like imposters" (HB) in a field that "intimidated" (TT) them. Participants cited their accents as a further source of distinction between themselves and corporate men: "I talked like I was dragged up" (FT). They also discussed their dress sense in this regard: "I realized I was the only guy in the office with trainers on, I didn't realize it would be a problem at work, but it was" (EO). One respondent identified the "general auras" of corporate men they met as a further source of the experiential discomfort they experienced in Ferguson's field during their early months of employment: "they [managers] all had this general aura of confidence and strength and I've always been shy and introverted, it's bad manners to act like they do where I come from" (RM).
Accordingly, participants experienced a disjunction between the habitus and doxa they knew before employment, and the habitus and doxa they encountered when recruited into Ferguson. This created a sense of internal suffering and destabilization for participants: you come from a house like mine … and you go into that … office, and it is a different world … like living on a farm all your life then visiting New York city … it was very uncomfortable. (CT) Despite this, participants were eager to find long-term employment in Ferguson, due to associated financial benefits, which functioned as incentives and motivations for participants to remain in a field they found discomforting: where else around here could we have got paid that much? It was the golden ticket getting in there … it was a London job with a London salary but in this region. (FT) Participants cited clothing as a form of cultural capital they learned to engage with at inductions, in order to aesthetically adhere to the corporate masculinity that is hegemonic in Ferguson. Participants discussed the necessity to wear "white or maybe blue business shirts" (HB) at work, with "ties that have a thick knot … never a skinny tie" (BD). Participants also mentioned how, during inductions, they learned to use embodied cultural capital to enact corporate masculinity, including "neat haircuts … and manicured nails" (JJ), and modify their vocal styles by speaking "slowly with as little regional-accent as possible" (EO) and "making sure you spend more time listening than talking … only discussing facts, never opinions" (TT).

GIAZITZOGLU AND MUZIO
Hence, the rules and codes associated with enacting corporate masculinity were revealed during inductions. Simultaneously, participants began to realize how men who personify corporate masculinity in Ferguson have different tastes (in a Bourdieusian sense) and knowledge to working-class men they know (e.g., fathers and uncles). This is made clear in the way JJ discusses contrasting ways men "think about and wearing suits": Where we come from, you … think about wearing suits … [working-class people] only wear suit if you're in court or at wedding, but at work it's not that you'll wear a suit, it's that you'll wear the right suit in the right way with the right accessories … people in the professional world notice these things and they matter a lot … there are codes to it and working-class lads are not aware of it, it's like a secret code.
As part of their inductions, participants were transported "first class on a train to a swanky hotel" (RM), where they stayed for 5 days. Prior to inductions, some participants had never visited London, and most participants had never seen the "city area" of London where "tall buildings" (RM) and other markers of advanced capitalism flank The corporate masculinity that participants learned to enact had geographical connotations for participants, who saw corporate masculinity as a London phenomenon, not associated with the sorts of "hard working but poor" post-industrial spaces where participants grew up and work.
Participants often described inductions as populated by "them" and "us." This division is encapsulated in the following anecdote, which shows the disdain that London Ferguson personnel felt towards Ferguson's regional office and the a-typical recruits it employs: I was using the bathroom [in London, on an evening during induction] and I was locked in the cubicle and I could hear two of them [Ferguson managers or consultants based in London] talking … they were saying: "Wow have you heard this lot talking? I can't understand them, it's like they live in the 1980s and stuff like that …" The other one was laughing hysterically, like he was on drugs or something, and in the end … said: "Well as long as they can program." (TT) It is significant that participants are accepted "as long as they can program." This suggests a classed division of labor and masculinity operates in Ferguson, with those in London "doing consultancy and project management," and those in Ferguson's regional office "doing the programming." In this way, participants' subcultural status in Ferguson is further revealed: according to London's actors, participants are viewed as men "up north" who programmed, as opposed to men in London, who enacted corporate masculinity proper, and who were involved in the more glamorous (and lucrative) operations of Ferguson. The above quote indicates that participants are seen as culturally and geographically peripheral and at the margins of Ferguson's field.

GIAZITZOGLU AND MUZIO
Given their experiences during their early stages of employment and induction, participants may have viewed Ferguson skeptically, and rejected the corporate masculinity that constituted the field. However, in the first 2 years of their employment, they became increasingly willing to "play the Ferguson game" by enacting the codes of corporate masculinity they were exposed to at induction.
Examples of engagement with cultural capital given by participants include them adopting the dress code associated with corporate masculinity uncritically. "I stopped asking why I should wear it [suit] and just started wearing it" (CZ). Or, eating and drinking certain foods due to these foods' status connotations: "when I was in London I saw all the big-shots coming into the office with espressos and eating sushi at lunch-I was like raw Further examples of acquiring embodied cultural capital among participants include them "working on facial skin": "when I started [Ferguson] I had acne but my manager … got me onto this skin regime … you can't be dressing in nice suits but then have a face like that" (BT). Obtaining "better teeth": "I've had a lot of work done-my teeth were a problem because of the food I ate growing up, all sugar and that rubbish … and I was conscious of it … so now I feel like I can smile" (JJ). "Improving" accents (all participants mentioned their working-class accents as now being "less regional") and wearing fake spectacles to "look the part": I wanted to … look … more corporate, ideally … American news presenters … I tried a beard and it softened me but it didn't look clean-cut enough, a bit too scruffy … that's why I got these [shows interviewer a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles] they really look the part don't they? There's nothing in them (laughs), the glass isn't proper; it's just normal glass frames, but it makes me look the part. (HB)

| HABITUS CLEFT
As time progressed, participants were able to enact corporate masculinity with increasing naturalness, using symbolic cultural capital to "play the game" in Ferguson. However, it is important to not over-state the extent to which participants' corporate masculinities create a sense of belonging for them within Ferguson. Participants experience ongoing "hidden injuries of class" on account of their backgrounds. As put by JJ: "I'll never be an old London "still look down on us and always will no matter what" (TT). Participants' ability to learn and enact corporate masculinity has anchored them, though not fully integrated them, within Ferguson.
Some local recruits from atypical socioeconomic backgrounds "failed" their probations and were "dropped" by the company (i.e., not employed post-probation). Participants talked about them in disparaging terms: those guys had the golden ticket but they were so small-town and small-time basically immature they weren't willing to grow up and embrace it, too immature to move on from who they were when they were teenagers. ( These quotations suggest participants believe dismissal from Ferguson was the fault of the "dropped," for their failing to conform to corporate masculinity (i.e., failing to work past 7 p.m.). Seemingly, participants internalized the organizational doxa that corporate masculinity is "better" than working-class masculinity; and that local recruits have an almost moral obligation to conform to corporate masculinity once employed. It also reveals the divisions between how "working-class lads in working-class jobs" define "working hard" in comparison with men from working-class backgrounds employed in PSF roles. Working-class men in working-class roles typically see "working hard" as being rooted in physical labor, associated with industrial and manufacturing work; and see their leisure time as something earned (Giazitzoglu, 2014, p. 335). However, participants have come to see "working hard" as manifested in acts like "working late" and "delivering to clients." There is also a sense of sacrifice associated with participants' definition of working hard: they are disciplined to do without leisure time in order to deliver in the context of their field.
Outside of work, the corporate masculinity learned and enacted by participants is, however, seen to impaireven "poison"-participants' social relationships in their communities of origin. Participants suggest working-class friends and family members they "grew up with" and "knew back in the day … seem to like me less now" (EO), "think I've changed for the worse" (BT), and "tell me I'm a cunt like straight to my face" (CT

| DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
In this study, we set out to investigate how recruits from nonprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds learned the rules of the corporate hegemonic masculine game at a PSF and developed appropriate forms of cultural capital to play it successfully. By focusing on participants' narrated experiences over time, we have documented in detail how corporate masculinity is enacted in this field. Our study builds on extant literature which recognizes that a form of corporate masculinity is hegemonic in PSFs (Connell, 2012;Connell & Wood, 2005;Gregory, 2016), elucidating the classed micro-level symbols and codes of corporate masculinity. It exists in codes ranging from vocal accents to how one wears a suit, shirt and tie, to knowledge of restaurants. It is also a configuration of masculinity with geographical connotations, associated with London rather than post-industrial northern British spaces. This advances our understanding of corporate masculinity, from a term that refers to the hegemonic white, male "face of the firm" (Gregory, 2016) to a classed phenomenon, made up of symbolic cultural capital that has to be learned and enacted.
Our analysis uniquely unveils the classed nature of masculinity in professional organizations, and the kind of "learning" that this entails for white working-class men who might at first sight seem well positioned to embody "the ideal worker" (Acker, 2006). The small amount of work that does consider the exclusion of professional white working-class men (e.g., the special issue of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion on "Critical Reflections from Men in the Field"; see McKearney, 2014) has generally focused on white, male academics' accounts about how the combination of whiteness and working-class masculinity relates to them "doing" academic research, and the sense of guilt they feel for their privilege (e.g., Hearn, 2014). While such work is interesting, it fails to emphasize the inequality that exists between typologies of men within organizational structures, on account of those men's contrasting classed masculinities. It also fails to point to how class establishes a hierarchy of masculinities between men, and the pressures on working-class men to learn the rules of middle-class, corporate masculinity, to build a career in PSF contexts.
The longitudinal research design enabled us to unveil participants' learning process over the years. Drawing on rich data, we have shown that "learning the rules of the game" of a PSF is a dynamic process, infused with struggle.
Specifically, participants' working-class backgrounds cause them "hidden injuries of class" (Sennett & Cobb, 1972) in Ferguson and experiences of embarrassment and shame, akin to the experiences of the working-class professionals analyzed by Kallschmidt and Eaton (2018) and McLeod, O'Donohoe, and Townley (2009). Also, we have illustrated the symbolic violence inherent in participants' learning. Participants are seen as lesser by incumbents in their field, on account of their class backgrounds, and judged negatively against middle-class men, despite them being "better programmers." Simultaneously, we have shown how participants progressively adhere to the field's doxa which results, for some of them, in looking down on features of their own social class of origin. Furthermore, we have revealed the habitus cleft encountered by participants and the associated hysteresis effect experienced, as a result of participants failing to belong in either the working-class contexts they knew pre-employment, or the PSF field they entered post-employment.
We finish by making a plea to critical diversity scholars to integrate social class into future research that attempts to empirically investigate and understand how social norms create marginalization in organizations. We suggest class should join more established themes like ableism, ageism, heteronormativity, and whiteness as a key site of power inequality within organizations. Our longitudinal design allowed us to capture the complex and GIAZITZOGLU AND MUZIO -15 contradictory dynamics of learning to navigate a field, whereby success requires a transformation of one's classed practices and, ultimately, oneself, and is likely to entail lasting contradictory feelings. We encourage future research to employ a longitudinal design where possible, to see in more detail how class is "lived" as a source of diversity and marginalization over time. The contradictions we uncovered are not limited to the workplace but, as one's social trajectory starts in the family and the community, are likely to cut across multiple fields and social roles. Future research is warranted that explores how social mobility changes one's "difference" both at work and beyond.