Maintaining Legitimacy as a Criticized Institution. How Swedish TWAs discursively defend against criticism

Abstract

Abstract Organizations must maintain legitimacy in the eyes of wider society and clients to achieve longevity and success. However, how does a criticized institution, like the Swedish temporary work industry, maintain legitimacy when being continuously criticized? By interviewing consultant managers and TWA clients, this study examines how consultant managers discursively attempt to maintain legitimacy when responding to criticism, and illustrate how these discursive defense mechanisms become a repertoire for both consultant managers and clients that is reproduced in a fight for legitimacy, and how this effects TWAs and their clients. These discursive defense mechanisms subsequently result in discursive closure, the main theory of analysis for this study. This study secondarily also examines if discursive closure could be a form of institutional work. The study showed that consultant managers have a repertoire of discursive defense mechanisms for criticisms that they and their clients reuse, but that the power of the discursive closures is limited. Finally, the results indicate that discursive defense mechanisms and subsequent discursive closure could be a form of institutional work, not only because discursive defense mechanisms are speech acts, but also because they create accompanying physical actions as well, which facilitates maintaining legitimacy.