Clothes Make the Person? The Tailoring of Legitimating Accounts and the Social Construction of Identity

We empirically explore the legitimating accounts for and against policies precluding workplace discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, focusing on how agents working at both the national level and within organizations use broader cultural accounts in building their legitimating accounts in local settings. The diffusion perspective in institutional theory has portrayed how agents import “ready-to-wear” cultural accounts. In contrast, translation theory depicts how agents interpret and adapt cultural accounts as they fashion them into legitimating accounts for a local setting. An alternative would theorize accounts that are neither strictly borrowed nor idiosyncratically tailored. We advanced a third perspective, drawing on frame analysis as it is used in social movement theory. Framing theory attends to both the importance of cultural building blocks and the embedded ways in which agents relate to and shape systems of meaning and mobilize collective action to change social arrangements. We find that legitimating accounts are intertwined with the construction of social identities, which serve to legitimate, on the one hand, an account maker's participation in the discourse and set of claims, and on the other hand, the involvement of proponents and crucial audiences. We suggest that the mobilizing potential of legitimating accounts rests in part on their messages becoming “autocommunicational,” so that listeners identify themselves with the message.