Organization and Legal Environment: The Social Construction of Civil Identity Single Registry in Brazil
Keywords:
Legal environment. Social actors’ engagement. Legality. Framing. Civil Identity Registry.Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the social construction of the Brazilian legal environment around the Federal Act 9.454/1997, which established the Civil Identity Registry in Brazil (RIC). We argue that the promulgation of the law is not enough for its social effectiveness; instead it depends on the articulation of public and private organizations on constructing answers to the legal text. We analyze how these organizations mobilize material and relational assets and frame their responses to legal rules. This study assumes that the applicability of legal texts is deemed on their interpretation, reach and validity in organizational fields. This implies different conceptions of legality. As such, we consider public and private organizations as engaged agents in politics of production and maintenance of meanings. Our research covers the period from 1997 to 2011, which comprehends the gap between the legal validity and the social effectiveness of the Federal Act 9.454/1997. We use longitudinal data based on documentary sources and sectional retrospective data based on semi-structured interviews. Thematic based qualitative content analysis was performed. We use a priori and emergent categories. The results show that both public and private organizations were engaged in the development of a shared interpretation of the law, although with different interests. Moreover, the findings revealed actions in conflict with institutionalized norms and contradictory to existent laws – but they were legitimized because of their adherence to a socially shared notion of legality. In conclusion, we argue that the notion of legitimacy and legality are intertwined through the shared meanings given to laws in an organizational field. As such, we contend the theoretical proximity between organizational institutionalism and sociology of law in order to consider the legal environment as partial content of the institutional context of organizations.
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