Beating the advertising drum for the employer: How legal context translates into good HRM practice

Abstract

The legal context is constitutive for the legitimacy of HRM practices. In this paper, we use an institutional work approach to investigate how a legal mandate requiring em ployers to state the minimum pay in job advertisements in Austria was translated into a legitimate HRM practice over time. In this process, HR practitioners translated the law into an HRM practice going well beyond the legal requirements. In contrast to merely constraining HRM practice, we find HR practitioners actively engaging with the legal context. In the discursive struggle over a legitimate translation of the law into practice, actors speaking ‘for HRM’ were mostly HRM consultants and service providers building on an individu alist and unitarist frame of reference for employment rela tions. Our findings contribute to a contextualized under standing of HRM practices by considering the interaction of HR practitioners and legal context