When legitimacy becomes a constraint [electronic resource] : lessons from an ethnographic study of human resources work
Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.

It has become almost axiomatic in the social sciences to associate legitimacy with success. Scholars of strategy and entrepreneurship link a firm's legitimacy to profits, competitive advantage, and the ability to attract funding (Stuart, Hoang, and Hybels, 1999; Zott and Huy, 2007). Population ecologists note that legitimation is positively correlated with survival (Carroll and Hannan, 2004; Dobrev and Gotsopoulos, 2010). Neo-institutionalists associate legitimacy with such positive outcomes as resource acquisition (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), avoidance of sanctions (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson, 2006), and unquestioned cognitive or normative acceptance (Morrill, 2008). These findings provide ample evidence for what seems a rather intuitive notion: Legitimacy is a formidable social achievement that, on the whole, benefits those who achieve it. Such a sanguine view of legitimacy, however, is not so much inaccurate as incomplete. By definition, legitimacy is perceived congruence with "some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions" (Suchman, 1995: 574). In geometry, congruence is an equivalence relation between two (or more) figures. In the social world, the relation is crucial; it highlights the intersubjective nature of legitimacy. An entity may be congruent with the norms, etc., deemed desirable by its relevant audience, and thus be considered legitimate. Once established, however, such congruence continues to be expected by the audience -- regardless of the entity's desires to change the basis of its legitimacy. Existing research routinely overlooks this potential downside. This dissertation explores the constraining effects of legitimacy within a ubiquitous contemporary occupation: human resource management. HR's recent history includes two well-documented efforts to enhance its own legitimacy: the "invention" of equal opportunity and related compliance procedures, grounded in the U.S. government's protection of employment rights (Dobbin, 2009; Edelman, Uggen and Erlanger, 1999); and the construction of a "strategic" HR mandate, grounded in the competitive, profit-oriented dynamics of the market (Dyer and Holder, 1988; Ulrich and Brockbank, 2005). Ethnographic examination of the tension between these aspects of contemporary HR work uncovers an irony unnoticed in prior studies of occupational legitimation: that in striving for greater legitimacy, an occupation may end up with a set of work practices and a related identity that stubbornly resist subsequent revision. This phenomenon is labeled a legitimacy trap, and this dissertation provides both empirical support for its existence and theoretical grounding for its utility. The empirical support draws on three different types of data that were collected over the course of a year-long field study in the HR departments of two high-tech companies: (1) a "census" of the composition of the HR departments in both companies; (2) more than 700 pages of field notes documenting the daily work of 14 different HR practitioners; and (3) semi-structured interviews with these same informants, and with a random selection of 47 of their internal clients. The two research sites were similar on many dimensions, but differed on a key aspect: One of the companies had recently reorganized its HR function to conform to a popular strategic HR template (Ulrich et al., 2009). Between-company comparison of coded field data revealed dramatic differences in HR demographics, time use, and attitudes, attesting to the influence of the strategic HR movement in one of the companies. Within-company comparison between HR and non-HR perceptions, however, showed a similar pattern at both firms: HR workers downplayed their compliance duties, while their non-HR associates asserted that regulatory compliance was the primary reason for HR's existence. That is, HR's internal audience continues to associate HR's legitimacy with the enforcement of anti-discriminatory practices, despite HR's concerted efforts to distance itself from this regulatory version of legitimacy in favor of a more market-oriented version (i.e., "strategic" HR). This analysis makes three theoretical contributions. First, the dissertation articulates the idea of counter-intentional consequences, a unique type of unintentional consequences in which purposive action results in structural outcomes that undermine the actor's original intent. This insight builds on Giddens' (1984: 11-12) cryptic mention of the role of unintended consequences in linking action and structure. Second, the dissertation extends the institutional logics perspective by showing how institutional logics provide rudimentary systems of legitimation. From these raw materials, an occupation may fashion a legitimacy claim -- which then in a sense "claims" the occupation. Finally, the dissertation contributes to a more balanced view of legitimacy. Like all elements of social structure, legitimacy both enables and constrains action. When the undesired constraints become salient and entrenched, the result is a legitimacy trap.