Institutionalizing Precariousness? The Politics of Boundary Work in Legalizing Agency Work in Germany, 1949–2004
Organization Studies, (May 2015)DOI: 10.1177/0170840615585338
Abstract
The legalizing of agency work in Germany is used as an illustrative case for exploring and theorizing how contests about regulating organizations’ labor practices are played out through the politics of boundary work. By combining the idea of inter-field relations from the theory of strategic action fields with considerations about boundary work within and between organizational fields, this paper explains the recent proliferation of agency work as the outgrowth of a long-term legalization contest. By taking a historical perspective, it illuminates how the boundary work of (former) incumbents and (new) challengers modulates institutional dynamics. Based on qualitative primary and secondary material, the findings reveal how the politics of boundary work facilitate power reversals in organizational fields by allowing defeated parties to survive in a field’s niches, to cross a field’s boundaries, and to rebuild their intervention capacity as well as by making incumbent coalitions erode over time.