Legal Environments and Organizational Governance: The Expansion of Due Process in the American Workplace
Abstract
This article examines the effect of legal environments on the expansion of due process in organizational governance. Event-history analyses of personnel practices in 52 organizations show that the civil rights mandates of the 1960s created a normative environment that threatened the legitimacy of arbitrary organizational governance. This precipitated a diffusion of formal grievance procedures for nonunion employees. Proximity to the public sphere, number of employees, and structural differentiation of the personnel function rendered organizations more vulnerable to normative pressure. Variation along these dimensions explains variations in the rates of rights expansion across organizations.
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Firms with human resources departments, diversity staff and HR consultants became significantly more likely than their peers to adopt a range of different diversity measures.
“As personnel departments took charge of diversity management, and became dominated by women, the profession became the leading local advocate of diversity programs in most companies; firms with human resources departments, diversity staff and HR consultants became significantly more likely than their peers to adopt a range of different diversity measures (Dobbin et al., 1993, Dobbin andKelly, 2007”
From Are Diversity Programs Merely Ceremonial? Evidence-Free Institutionalization (2017) · cites this paper as Edelman, 1990
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- Authors
- Edelman, L. B.
- Corresponding author
- Edelman, Lauren B.
- Venue
- American Journal of Sociology
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1990-05
- Volume
- 95
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1401-1440
- ISSN
- 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5390
- OpenAlex
- W2000416441
- Cited by
- 822
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 41 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 23 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 32 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 37 · 2016: 38 · 2015: 44 · 2014: 29 · 2013: 28 · 2012: 27
- FWCI
- 15.40
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Journal of Sociology (publishedVersion)
- Berkley Law Scholarship Repository (University of California, Berkeley) (submittedVersion)
- American Journal of Sociology
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Management and Organizational Studies
- Social Sciences › Public Administration › Labor Movements and Unions
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Management Theory and Practice
- Keywords
- due process, organizational governance, personnel practices, grievance procedures, 1960s, non-union workers, legal environment, normative pressure, public sphere, organizational legitimacy, personnel function, workplace rights
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