Transnational Professional Service Firms and Institutional Change: The Case of the Milan Financial and Professional Service Sub-Field

There is now an extensive literature documenting the way transnational professionals and professional service firms respond to and shape institutional environments of the host-countries they operate in. This paper develops such debates and examines the way that transnational professional service firms, through their activities in Italy, both responded to and helped shape institutional change. In particular we focus on the way in the legal sector a new sub-field emerged in Milan as local actors learned about transnational financial market practice, from transnational law firms and relationships with other such sub-fields, this resulting in the production of new institutionalised understandings and practices that differentiated the corporate law environment in Milan from that in other Italian cities.