Legitimating Organizational Secrecy

This paper brings into focus the concept of organizational secrecy by senior managers in the context of a major strategic change program. Underpinned by legitimation theory and utilizing a narrative methodology and a longitudinal investigation, we draw upon data from 52 interviews with 13 senior man...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of business ethics Vol. 197; no. 1; pp. 19 - 38
Main Authors: Clarke, Nicholas, Higgs, Malcolm, Garavan, Thomas
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.02.2025
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Authorization
Business and Management
Business Ethics
Culture
Discourse strategies
Education
Employees
Ethics
Knowledge
Legitimacy
Legitimation
Management
Managers
Narratives
Naturalization
Organizational culture
Original Paper
Philosophy
Quality of Life Research
Rationalization
Secrecy
Senior managers
Strategies
Narrative methodology
Discursive legitimation
Downsizing
Organizational secrecy
ISSN:0167-4544, 1573-0697
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper brings into focus the concept of organizational secrecy by senior managers in the context of a major strategic change program. Underpinned by legitimation theory and utilizing a narrative methodology and a longitudinal investigation, we draw upon data from 52 interviews with 13 senior managers conducted at 3 months intervals over the course of 12 months. Our findings reveal that senior managers utilized seven discursive legitimation strategies to justify keeping secret that the organization intended to downsize, and they used a different mix of legitimation strategies as the change process evolved. We labeled these discursive legitimation strategies as (1) Naturalization, (2) Rationalization, (3) Moralization, (4) Authorization, (5) Proceduralization, (6) Valorization, and (7) Demonization. Theoretically we bring a temporal perspective to understanding organizational secrecy and the central role that discursive legitimation plays. We show that the use of these discursive legitimation strategies are anchored to meta-narratives describing work practices and values associated with the organization’s culture. And that managers use discursive legitimation to manage the ethical implications of secrecy.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:0167-4544
1573-0697
DOI:10.1007/s10551-024-05763-3