Lauren Edelman (May 11, 1955 – Feb 7, 2023) was an outstanding scholar of organizations and its interface with legal systems. To commemorate the one-year anniversary of her passing, we dedicated this month’s episode to two of her best-known works that studied how organizations in the US responded to the introduction of the Civil Rights Act and navigated its ambiguity in the course of operationalizing it through the availability of grievance procedures supporting those who have been discriminated against. Together, both articles laid the foundation for broader understandings of how organizations respond as new laws are enacted, particularly those that potentially impact the organizations’ market logics and conceptions of its efficiency.
The first article is “Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law,” appearing in the American Journal of Sociology in 1992. The article’s thesis was that laws regulating the relationships between employees and their managers tend to be ambiguous, leaving open for interpretation how to operationalize the law. In the matter of the Civil Rights Act, the law established general direction that discrimination against persons according to their “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” was illegal, yet failed to clearly define “discrimination.” Thus, it was left to organizations to sort out the meaning of the term and measure compliance with the law.
More generally, Edelman established three factors that cause organizations to have to mediate new laws. In addition to the (a) ambiguities in the law, she also showed that laws that (b) constrain or dictate organizational procedures and (c) specify weak enforcement mechanisms are likely to leave organizations grappling with how to comply. As a consequence, organizational responses such as establishing new offices or positions to deal with the law and its consequences, may become institutionalized should they succeed in gaining legitimacy. For example, a response that withstands or avoids subsequent legal challenges are likely to be adopted by other organizations.
The second article explores this theme further through an examination of grievance procedures that organizations established to attempt to resolve matters of alleged discrimination from the inside. In “The Endogeneity of Legal Regulation: Grievance Procedures as Rational Myth” from 1999, Edelman and two co-authors looked at how myths and stories contributed to the development of what the organizations considered to be reasonable or appropriate responses to new legislation. This endogenous process complements the exogenous responses to new laws explored in the 1992 article. Her study uncovered various myths about how organizations sought to shield themselves from legal liability by having grievance procedures in place, independent of how effective such procedures were in reducing discrimination and independent of the overall aim of the original law to punish discriminatory actions. Moreover, these rational myths can be legitimized through the judicial process as courts may come to view the presence of such procedures as evidence of sufficient and reasonable efforts by the organization to comply. On the other hand, courts may also disagree with the myth and hold the organization liable for discrimination regardless, and the study uncovered various factors contributing to the judicial response. Thus, these works formed an important part of the foundation for research in the intersections of organizations and the legal systems in which they work.
You may also download the audio files here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Supplement
Read with us:
Edelman, L. B. (1992). Legal ambiguity and symbolic structures: Organizational mediation of civil rights law. American journal of Sociology, 97(6), 1531-1576.
Edelman, L. B., Uggen, C., & Erlanger, H. S. (1999). The endogeneity of legal regulation: Grievance procedures as rational myth. American journal of Sociology, 105(2), 406-454.
To Learn More:
Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint!. Duke University Press.
Berrey, E., Nelson, R. L., & Nielsen, L. B. (2017). Rights on trial: How workplace discrimination law perpetuates inequality. University of Chicago Press.
Castilla, E. J., & Ranganathan, A. (2020). The production of merit: How managers understand and apply merit in the workplace. Organization Science, 31(4), 909-935.
Dobbin, F., & Kelly, E. L. (2007). How to stop harassment: Professional construction of legal compliance in organizations. American Journal of Sociology, 112(4), 1203-1243.
Reynolds, C. (2022). Repurposing Title IX: How sexual harassment became sex discrimination in American higher education. American Journal of Sociology, 128(2), 462-514.
Silbey, S. S. (2005). After legal consciousness. Annu. Rev. Law Soc. Sci., 1, 323-368.
