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This article explores how legal intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change. We suggest the increasing complexity and ambiguity of legal rules coupled with the shift from government to governance provide legal intermediaries greater opportunities to influence law and social change. Drawing from new institutional sociology, we suggest rule-intermediaries shape legal and social change, with varying degrees of success, in two ways: (1) law is filtered through non-legal logics emanating from various organizational fields and (2) law is professionalized by non-legal professionals. We draw from case studies in the United States and France to show how intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change.

Adopting an intra-organizational viewpoint is essential to grasp legal intermediation. To deepen our understanding of such phenomena, this chapter proposes a qualitative and “multi-level” approach drawing on insights from the neo-institutional literature, policy ethnography analysis and the research on legal intermediaries. Such a perspective is particularly suited to capture the complexity and the depth of institutional change. Using the 12-hour work legal mechanism of derogation in the context of French public hospitals as an example, this chapter highlights how both macro-level actors (actors of a “reform network”), and micro-level ones (hospital directors) contribute to the shaping and framing of legality in French public hospitals. Results show that variation in how those actors use law depends on the local configuration. Second, results demonstrate that the legal games they play are not merely based on symbolic and superficial compliance with the law, but also on outright manipulations and conscious rule-breaking.

The reforms that have been promoted in public organisations in developed countries since the 1970s are said to impose changes in professional bureaucracies by promoting self-governance and institutional autonomy and by challenging professionals’ status and their values and standards. Taking the specific case of Portugal, this paper intends to contribute to understanding to what extent professional bureaucracies, like hospitals and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), have been affected by changes in state policies and how the professionals involved have responded to these organisational changes. Based on an empirical qualitative study the paper concludes that there are significant differences in the way the state changed the regulatory framework and the professional archetypes in hospitals and HEIs and that professionals give heterogeneous responses to these changes.

This paper offers a cross-cultural examination of emotion management in two service organizations: a Japanese specialty shop and a chain of grocery stores in the US. Building on an overview of service culture in the US and its domestication in Japan, we provide an analysis of the two organizational case studies, focusing on their common initiation of a “behavior campaign,” its normative character, perceptions, and repercussions. The paper concludes by focusing on the comparative aspect of the analysis, locating the organizational management of emotions in the context of national culture, and focusing on the organizational use of broader emotional blueprints of socialization related to collectivism and individualism, such as “shame” (in Japanese culture) and “guilt” (in North American culture).

Within hierarchical relationships, subordinates are expected to obey the existing order and to function well. Their deviance or organisational misbehaviour is usually regarded negatively and as a threat to the system. However, there seems to be a paradox: Subordinates' deviance and (occasional) misbehaviour does not threaten organisational hierarchy but often re-establishes or even strengthens hierarchical order even though it challenges it. In itself, this phenomenon is quite self-evident. What is less clear is when exactly subordinates' deviance might contribute to the (further) stabilisation, continuation and persistence of the hierarchical social order and when it might be indeed system threatening. For interrogating the specific conditions and consequences of subordinates' deviance within organisational settings, the concept of crossing of boundaries will be introduced and differentiated into weak, medium and strong crossings. The concept will then be applied to subordinates' deviance in the realms of social action, interests, identity and norms and values.

Purpose – This chapter seeks to contribute to our understanding of how the delivery of customer service shapes the development and expression by workers of resistance, misbehavior, and accommodation. Workers at three call centers enjoyed customer service and endeavored to enhance its importance. At the same time, however, they knew it to be emotionally wearing and, on occasion, morally dubious.

Methodology – The chapter draws on interviews with and a survey of call center employees and management and trade unions.

Findings – The chapter explores how workers used the aesthetic skills that underpin “good” customer service to subvert management objectives and give vent to their frustration with disgruntled customers.

Social implications – Even in the most closely controlled and monitored situations, people are capable of developing unanticipated and often ingenious responses to regimens that are antithetical to their immediate interests.

Originality – The exploration of how call center workers use their customer service and aesthetic skills to undermine managerial control.

Research on employee training has largely focused on either the employer or employees, and has investigated the likelihood or amount of training rather than the content of training. Our understanding about how organizations decide to focus on different skills therefore remains constrained. To address this issue, the current study examines what affects training consulting organizations’ focus on different types of training, and in particular, their focus on personal development training, a highly popular type of training in recent years. Training organizations have become an increasingly important supplier in the training field. Building on the neo-institutional perspective of organizations, I propose an institutional analysis of training organizations. I argue that at a fundamental level, the kinds of skills organizations consider useful (such as specific-technical, general-technical, human relations, and personal development skills), are affected by the shared organizing principles of their time, and I draw on the research on managerial ideology to understand how such shared frameworks evolved over time. Training organizations try to conform to the dominant organizational model at their founding in order to gain legitimacy for their product offerings and convince their clients of the efficacy of their services. The focus of training is thus shaped by the dominant organizational model at founding and tends to stay with training organizations. Specifically, I argue that training organizations founded later in time, when the participatory citizenship model of organization became dominant, are more likely to focus on personal development. I analyze a 10% random sample (N=269) of the population of training organizations in 1994 with logistic models. Empirical results are consistent with the proposed link between the skills trained and the dominant organizational model at the training organizations’ founding. Characteristics of training organizations focused on personal development are also compared with those focused on other types of training. The implication of this study for the classic question, “why do employers provide general-skill training?” is discussed.