Organizational Response to Legal Change

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How organizations respond to legal change and shape the meaning of such change is crucial to understanding social and economic life in complex, modern societies. Despite the importance of this issue, much of contemporary scientific research focuses on individual behavior and the individual as the unit of analysis even when institutional context is being considered. Only recently are scholars turning their attention to examining organizations in relation to their social, political, and legal environments and the functioning of organizations as entities of social control and social regulation. Dr. Edelman's study of institutional responses to civil rights laws offers an innovative approach to illuminating the role of organizations as a mediating instrument between law and its implementation. Dr. Edelman examines the establishment of Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action offices in organizations, along with their consequences for the handling of grievances and the diffusion of norms, as an institutionalization process. The design of the research calls for six detailed case studies and nationwide telephone/mail surveys to key informants in 300 companies (200 proprietary firms, 50 federal agencies, and 50 colleges and universities), stratified by size, age, and industry. The analysis includes use of event history methods to model rates of adoption of EEO structures and grievance procedures. Dr. Edelman seeks to explain such issues as variation in the autonomy of such structures in organizations, whether internal dispute resolution procedures divert complaints from the courts, and the extent to which such procedures lead to the development of formal rules governing hiring and promotion. This work is especially promising. Substantively it will break new ground in our understanding of organizations' compliance with equal opportunity/affirmative action regulations. Theoretically, it integrates legal theory with organization theory and the literature on organizational compliance. As valuably, it focuses on the important, but often neglected, issue of the impact of ceremonially adopted innovations on organizational practice. Methodologically, the use of event history models to study organizational adaptation is innovative and their application in this context especially apt.