Law at Work: The Endogenous Construction of Civil Rights

Abstract

This chapter extends extant theory on organizational response to law by proposing a theory of law as endogenous—that is, as generated within the social realm that it seeks to regulate. As organizations respond to legal ideals by themselves becoming legalized, they shape social understandings of law and of the meaning of compliance. Courts, as actors within the same broad social environments—or organizational fields—as organizations, tend to incorporate ideas about law that have arisen and become institutionalized within these fields. Thus, as law becomes progressively institutionalized in organizational fields, it is simultaneously transformed by the very organizational institutions that it is designed to control.