Legitimating Organizational Secrecy

Clarke, Nicholas and Higgs, Malcolm and Garavan, Thomas (2024) Legitimating Organizational Secrecy. Journal of Business Ethics. ISSN 0167-4544

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Abstract

This paper brings into focus the concept of organizational secrecy by senior managers in the context of a major strategic change program. Drawing on interviews with senior managers over the course of 12 months and a narrative methodology, our findings show that senior managers employed seven discursive legitimation strategies to justify keeping secret that the organization intended to downsize, and these emerged at various stages as the change project evolved. We labelled these discursive legitimation strategies as (1) Naturalization, (2) Rationalization, (3) Moralization, (4) Authorization, (5) Proceduralization, (6) Valorization and (7) Demonization. We bring a new perspective to our understanding of discursive legitimation by showing how these rhetorical justifications become salient as they are anchored to meta-narratives describing work practices and values associated with the organization’s culture. A key finding from our study is that managers use discursive legitimation to manage the ethical implications of secrecy through facilitating moral disengagement. Discursive legitimation helps explain how moral disengagement can move from the individual to a collective level.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.1007/s10551-024-05763-3
Dates:	Date Event 5 July 2024 Accepted 13 July 2024 Published Online
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Organizational Secrecy, Discursive Legitimation, Downsizing
Subjects:	CAH17 - business and management > CAH17-01 - business and management > CAH17-01-04 - management studies
Divisions:	Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences > Graduate School of Management
Depositing User:	Gemma Tonks
Date Deposited:	12 Jul 2024 16:32
Last Modified:	08 Aug 2024 13:41
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/15657

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