Legitimating Organizational Secrecy

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.