Institutional Environments and Modern Actorhood

Among the major challenges in contemporary new institutional theory (NIT) are the examination of content of legitimacy, legitimacy processes within organisations, analyses of components of institutional environments and the cognitive representation of institutions. The proposed project draws on these challenges for developing an empirically grounded theory of the legitimacy of organisational units. NIT proposes that legitimacy of any actors in Western societies (e.g., individuals, groups, organizations, national states) encompasses their ascribed affect- controlled goal orientation, openness for advice from others and consideration of collective interests. The project investigates how these dimensions vary across three specific components of the institutional environment (national institutions, organizational contexts, and professional roles), which components of the institutional environment are particularly relevant in social representations and how important the respective dimensions are for attribution of legitimacy. The substantive area for investigating actorhood is practitioners` understandings of what is a `good` human resource (HR) department. The study focuses on three research questions: (1) what understanding of HR department is typical for professional roles, organisational models and national polities? (2) Which component of the institutional environment mostly influences their understanding? (3) What is the importance of the particular dimensions for obtaining legitimacy? In addressing these questions, an empirically grounded theory of HR departments can be elaborated that incorporates different accents of national polities, organisational patterns and professional roles and presents specifications and variation. The project provides an important step towards developing an empirically grounded middle range theory of evaluation. The project makes contributions to NIT and to HRM research: The study extends NIT by localizing the meaning of an institutionalized (Western) ideal of actorhood and by examining its shapes in the context of particular institutional environments. It empirically tests rather than presumes what components of the institutional environment `count` for the enactment of an institution and assesses which of the institution`s core dimensions is most important for obtaining legitimacy. The project also contributes to the debate on professionalism of HR specialists by broadening the contemporary narrow focus on HR departmental roles and by disentangling country, organisational and constituency-specific views about professionalism. The substantive area of empirical investigation is an analysis of British and German managers` and works councils` understandings of `good` HR departments. Data for addressing the research questions are generated from episodic interviews with 40 managers and works councils of four organisations in Britain and Germany and a complementary survey for 500 respondents from the participating organisations.

During the employment relationship employees encounter a variety of situations, in which conflicts with the employer emerge and in which the human resource department on behalf of the employer seeks to end the conflict and reach a consensus with employees. These situations encompass but are not limited to adaptations of employment contracts, agreements on training and development activities, promotion, and employee performance evaluation. This research project uses data from a comparative study of employees in French and German subsidiaries of a U.S. multinational professional service firm to gain insights on employees understanding of the employment relationship across socio-economic settings by exploring employees narrated positive and negative experiences with the human resource department of their firm. Findings show that in the German setting, employees from different qualifications and hierarchy levels display a functional understanding of the employment relationship, and that this functional understanding holds across multiple situations in which they coordinate the employment with the human resource department. This understanding is grounded in the principle of productivity, which justifies and accepts unequal treatment across employees based on differences in the technical expertise of employees. Conflicts between employees and employer are rooted in questions of whether decisions on the employment relationship contribute to productivity enhancement. For settling conflicts, employees seek evidence from the human resource department in the form of statistics and productivity records. In contrast, in the French context the understandings of the employment relationship of administrative staff, consultants, and managers are rooted in contradictory principles and employees use different principles across situations rather than applying one coherent principle throughout the employment relationship. The method of episodic interviewing that was further developed in this project is useful for both analysing expectations to actors situationally and for capturing the expectations towards actors comprehensively. In addition, it facilitates comparing variations of self-understandings between socio-economic settings. The study findings imply that employers and their responsible human resource departments need different strategies for addressing possible conflicts with employees across socio-economic settings: while the dominance of the productivity principle in the German setting suggests a situationally invariant strategy for the human resource department, the findings from the French setting suggests the need for developing for each situation a specific compromise that aligns contradictory justice principles. This implies different competences from human resource managers.