Lauren B. Edelman

Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law

Laws that regulate the employment relation tend to set forth broad and often ambiguous principles that give organizations wide latitude to construct the meaning of compliance in a way that responds to both environmental demands and managerial interests. Organizations respond initially by elaborating their formal structures to create visible symbols of compliance. As organizations construct and institutionalize forms of compliance with laws, they mediate the impact of those laws on society. The author uses data from a nationwide survey of 346 organizations to develop models of the creation and institutionalization of organizationally constructed symbols of compliance following the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Legal Environments and Organizational Governance: The Expansion of Due Process in the American Workplace

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.

Diversity Rhetoric and the Managerialization of Law1

This article examines the rise of diversity rhetoric in U.S. management and how that rhetoric reframes ideas inherent in civil rights law. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of the professional management literature (mid‐1980s–mid‐1990s) illustrate a managerialization of law, a process by which legal ideas are refigured by managerial ways of thinking as they flow across the boundaries of legal fields and into managerial and organizational fields. The managerial conception of diversity adds a variety of nonlegal dimensions of diversity (e.g., personality traits) to the legally protected categories like race and sex, and it disassociates diversity from civil rights law.

When Organizations Rule: Judicial Deference to Institutionalized Employment Structures

This article offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of legal endogeneity—a powerful process through which institutionalized organizational structures influence judicial conceptions of compliance with antidiscrimination law. It finds that organizational structures (e.g., grievance and evaluation procedures, antiharassment policies) become symbolic indicators of rational governance and compliance with antidiscrimination laws, first within organizations, but eventually in the judicial realm as well. Lawyers and judges tend to infer nondiscrimination from the mere presence of those structures. Judges increasingly defer to organizational structures in their opinions, ultimately inferring nondiscrimination from their presence. Legal endogeneity theory is tested by analyzing a random sample of 1,024 federal employment discrimination opinions (1965–99) and is found to have increased over time. Judicial deference is most likely when plaintiffs lack clout and when the legal theories require judges to rule on unobservable organizational attributes. The authors argue that legal endogeneity weakens the impact of law when organizational structures are viewed as indicators of legal compliance even in the face of discriminatory actions.

Law at Work: The Endogenous Construction of Civil Rights

This chapter extends extant theory on organizational response to law by proposing a theory of law as endogenous—that is, as generated within the social realm that it seeks to regulate. As organizations respond to legal ideals by themselves becoming legalized, they shape social understandings of law and of the meaning of compliance. Courts, as actors within the same broad social environments—or organizational fields—as organizations, tend to incorporate ideas about law that have arisen and become institutionalized within these fields. Thus, as law becomes progressively institutionalized in organizational fields, it is simultaneously transformed by the very organizational institutions that it is designed to control.

The Legal Lives of Private Organizations

Series preface Introduction Part I Legality in the Shadow of the State: Influence through regulatory enforcement: Bargain and bluff: compliance strategy and deterrence in the enforcement of regulation, Keith Hawkins Rational choice, situated action and the social control of organizations, Diane Vaughan Explaining corporate environmental performance: how does regulation matter?, Robert A. Kagan, Neil Gunningham and Dorothy Thornton Influence through social construction: Legal ambiguity and symbolic structures: organizational mediation of civil rights law, Lauren B. Edelman The strength of a weak state: the employment rights revolution and the rise of human resources management divisions, Frank Dobbin and John Sutton The endogeneity of legal regulation: grievance procedures as rational myth, Lauren B. Edelman, Christopher Uggen and Howard S. Erlanger Part II Legality in the Shadow of Organizations: Inter-organizational legal Culture: Non-contractual relations in business: a preliminary study, Stewart Macaulay Professional innovation: corporate lawyers and private lawmaking, Michael J. Powell 1993 The hired gun as facilitator: the case of lawyers in Silicon Valley, Mark C. Suchman and Mia L. Cahill Intra-organizational legal culture: Competing institutions: law, medicine, and family in neonatal intensive care, Carol Heimer Cops, counsel, or entrepreneurs: the shifting roles of lawyers in large business corporations Robert L. Nelson and Laura Beth Nielson Bargaining in the shadow of social institutions: competing discourses and social change in workplace mobilization of civil rights, Catherine R.Albiston Part III Legality in Macro-Historical Perspective: When the haves hold court: speculations on the organizational internalization of law, Lauren B. Edelman and Mark C. Suchman Index.

The More You Talk, the Worse It Is Student Perceptions of Law and Authority in Schools

Prior works have established the association between students’ perceptions of school discipline and both behavioral and academic outcomes. The interplay between disciplinary fairness and students’ perceptions of their rights, however, warrants further investigation. In an effort to better understand the development of students’ perceptions of school disciplinary climates amid variation in school legal environments, we identified students’ perceptions of their due process rights based on 5,490 student surveys and 86 in-depth interviews in New York, North Carolina, and California high schools. We then examine the link between students’ perceptions of their due process rights, their past experiences with school discipline, and their perceptions of school disciplinary fairness. While quantitative results reveal a negative relationship between students’ perceptions of their rights and perceptions of disciplinary fairness, our qualitative data bolster this finding and deepen our understanding of students’ perceptions, illustrating students’ complex, varied, and often vague understandings of their due process rights when faced with disciplinary sanctions. As prior work has underscored the critical relationship between students’ perceptions of their schooling experiences and educational outcomes, uncovering this negative relationship is an important step toward understanding how variation in perceptions of rights may have consequences for students’ educational outcomes.

Law: The Socio-Legal Perspective

The sociolegal perspective on law portrays law as dynamically intertwined with society, politics, markets, science and technology, culture, and other social institutions. In this view, law is seen as a set of socially institutionalized norms of varying degrees of formality, ranging from statutes and judicial decisions at the formal end of the spectrum to socially institutionalized norms and cultural understandings that become embedded in everyday life at the informal end of the spectrum. Law is envisioned as deeply embedded in society rather than as autonomous in relation to the citizens and organizations that it is designed to regulate. The sociolegal perspective tends to emphasize three broad dimensions along which law matters to social life: regulatory, procedural, and constitutive.