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Professional Construction of Law: The Inflated Threat of Wrongful Discharge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Lauren B. Edelman ,
Steven E. Abraham  and
Howard S. Erlanger
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Abstract

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Institutional theories of organizational behavior consistently implicate the professions in explaining the diffusion of new organizational practices; yet there has been little empirical study of precisely what role the professions play. We address that issue by exploring the role of the personnel and legal professions in shaping employers' understandings of law and the threat posed by law. We focus on the implied contract theory of wrongful discharge, a recent common law development that allows employees—under a limited set of circumstances—to sue their employers when they are fired without good cause. We first present an analysis of the actual risk posed by the implied contract theory, based on a survey of published cases in six states. Then, by analyzing articles in professional personnel and law journals, we reveal a striking disparity between the actual threat posed by implied contract theory and the threat as constructed by personnel and legal professionals. Our findings support the argument that the professions play an important role in the diffusion of organizational practices and suggest that the professions' constructions of the environment may critically affect how employers respond to environmental threats.

Type
Legal Culture and Legal Discourse
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , 1992 , pp. 47 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

We gratefully acknowledge support from the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley, where the first author was a visiting scholar while writing this article. We would like to thank Charles N. Halaby, Stephen J. Mezias, and four Law & Society Review reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and Stephen Petterson and Scott Novak for their assistance with the data analysis.

References

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