Legal Environments and Organizational Governance: The Expansion of Due Process in the American Workplace

Abstract

This article examines the effect of legal environments on the expansion of due process in organizational governance. Event-history analyses of personnel practices in 52 organizations show that the civil rights mandates of the 1960s created a normative environment that threatened the legitimacy of arbitrary organizational governance. This precipitated a diffusion of formal grievance procedures for nonunion employees. Proximity to the public sphere, number of employees, and structural differentiation of the personnel function rendered organizations more vulnerable to normative pressure. Variation along these dimensions explains variations in the rates of rights expansion across organizations.