Managers and Lactation Law: Managerialization and De-Managerialization

• In Event: 413 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Refereed Roundtable Session. Table 01. Culture and Organizations
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 11. Law and Policy

Abstract

Laws are interpreted and applied within organizations by human relations (HR) personnel, specializing in such interpretations, as well as supervisory managers who directly oversee the work of employees. Extant research has shown that these HR personnel and managers reframe laws and the laws’ rights-focused goals into goals that fit better within pre-existing managerial goals, such as efficiency and turnover. Particularly over time, this “managerialization of the law” replaces the rights-talk within organizations. This research examines a new law, which gives lactating women workers the right to pump breast milk at work, and examines how this process works over time. By interviewing HR personnel and managers soon after the law was passed, and re-interviewing them several years later, this article both extends and modifies managerialization theory. Specifically, in the first interview both HR personnel and managers engaged in managerialization. However, at the second interview several years later, the managers had begun re-framing the law not into managerial goals but into health-related concerns, “de-managerializing the law,” as result of discussions with the lactating employees whom they managed. The HR specialists who did not directly supervise employees did not experience this shift to health-goals and maintained their managerialization of the law. Thus, this paper confirms the role of HR specialists in reinterpreting the law in the organizational context, while its findings regarding the de-managerialization by supervisory managers builds significantly on the research on how law is transformed by institutions.

Author

• Elizabeth A. Hoffmann, Purdue University