New Order and Old Institutions: South Africa and the institutional work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

The paper contributes to literatures on settlements and institutional maintenance work. It does so by unpacking post-settlement legitimation efforts required to maintain contentious institutions between previously conflicting actors. Settlements often necessitate the maintenance of institutions from the past whose legitimacy is dubious for the new regime. We study the role played by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in re-legitimating and maintaining the institution of the armed forces in the transition from apartheid to democracy. Maintaining this legitimacy required collaboration between the incoming government as well as the apartheid era armed forces. We term these unexpected collaborative efforts ‘reluctant accommodation work’. Our findings show that the lines of allegiance may be more fluid than currently depicted in the literature. Actors that previously conflicted need to find an interest in collaborating in their efforts to shape central institutions. Second, we show that for settlements to shape the field, they need to agree on the terms of collaboration, what we term ‘passage points’, as well as engage in public ceremonies to broadly legitimate the settlement and the institution it seeks to preserve.

Keywords

apartheid institutional maintenance work reconciliation settlements South Africa

Introduction

On 16 August 2012, South African police units gunned down workers from the Marikana Platinum Mine who were protesting for better working conditions, killing 34 and injuring 78 (see Alexander, Lekgowa, Mmope, Sinwell, & Xezwi, 2013; Marinovich, 2017). This police response bore striking semblance to that of the Apartheid era armed forces (Newham, 2015). The Marikana massacre created outrage not only because of the human suffering it caused and its effect on labour relations in post-apartheid South Africa. It also raised questions about the role of the institution of the armed forces in post-apartheid South Africa (Alexander, 2016; Gumede, 2015; Newham, 2015). In this paper, we understand institutions as social structures, having cultural, normative and legislative underpinnings that give them legitimacy (Scott, 2005). As such, the armed forces can be understood as an institution key to the functioning of the state. The extent of lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians seen in the Marikana massacre had last been seen in 1976 during the apartheid era (Alexander, 2016; Gumede, 2015). The event served as a reminder of the arguments earlier put forward by numerous observers (see Anglin, 1995; Mashike, 2007; Moon, 2006) that, institutionally, the armed forces’ collective orientations that had been nurtured during apartheid were maintained after the settlement to end apartheid. In the eyes of many, maintaining institutions forged during apartheid, such as the military, was illegitimate (Goldstone, 1994). How this contested institution was maintained and re-legitimated in a context of the broader institutional changes that accompanied the end of apartheid is the focus of this study.

Institutional maintenance work research has highlighted how actors may maintain institutions despite opposition (e.g. Dacin, Munir, & Tracey, 2010; Lok & de Rond, 2013; Micelotta & Washington, 2013). Typically, these efforts include actions such as reinforcing policing efforts to ensure compliance as well as enabling work to facilitate new legislative and coercive barriers to institutional change (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 230). However, research increasingly points to the important role played by settlements reached between previously conflicting actors in shaping institutional dynamics (e.g. Helms & Oliver, 2015; Helms, Oliver, & Webb, 2012; Rao & Kennedy, 2008). Settlements signal the end of a period of open conflict between key actors in the field (Foley, 2007). Settlements are a crucial yet understudied facet of the context in which actors seek to maintain institutions, often shaping the range of possibilities available to other actors (Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2000).

The maintenance of institutions following settlements is a particularly arduous task. Often, winning challengers may in the past have rallied against and de-legitimated the same institutions that they now need to maintain for the stability of the new order, following a settlement with former adversaries. (Clark & Newell, 2013; Parsons, 1951). As such, the maintenance and re-legitimation of these institutions is not a given. Other actors in the field may not accept settlements nor the institutions they seek to maintain, creating conflict (Guzman & Holá, 2019; Helms & Oliver, 2015; Hudson & Okhuysen, 2008). Nonetheless, maintaining these contentious institutions is often necessary for the functioning of the new institutional order (Parsons, 1951). Thus, there is an apparent paradox. When challengers and incumbents reach settlements, they often find a functional need to maintain institutions that may have been the locus of previous conflict. Yet, doing so poses significant legitimacy risks to the settlement and the institutions concerned. Van Wijk, Stam, Elfring, Zietsma and den Hond (2012) and O’Mahony and Bechky (2008) suggest that key to understanding this dynamic are the post-settlement socio-symbolic efforts engaged in by former conflicting actors to legitimate institutions that are to be maintained. In this paper we ask: How do losing and winning incumbents engage in joint efforts to produce a settlement and the post-settlement practices that maintain and legitimate contested institutions? We currently know little about what these unexpected post-settlement joint efforts to re-legitimate and maintain contested institutions involve.

To address this question, we conducted a historical case study of the maintenance of the armed forces in the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. This transition was characterized by negotiations and the reaching of a settlement between the apartheid regime and its opponents, the African National Congress (ANC) being the most influential. The settlement and formal end of apartheid in 1994 saw sweeping institutional changes in South Africa. However, some apartheid era institutions were maintained and continue to play a central role in the new South Africa. After apartheid, the armed forces continued to be a central pillar of the South African state (Gumede, 2015; Newham, 2015), despite being the face of the apartheid order that systematically terrorized and repressed the black majority. They were seen as illegitimate in the eyes of the majority black population who had proposed alternative institutions for maintaining peace in the new regime (Diala, 2001; Moon, 2006). Following DiMaggio and Powell (1991), we take the continued central role of the institution of the armed forces in post-apartheid South Africa as a reflection of its legitimacy in the new order. Studies suggest that South Africa’s post-settlement Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the public hearings it held played a central socio-symbolic role in the re-legitimation of the institution of the armed forces (Moon, 2006). Thus, we studied the socio-symbolic efforts displayed in the settlement’s official documents and the TRC public hearings, that implicated both outgoing and incoming incumbents in the maintenance of the armed forces. The strategies deployed provide an object lesson in how actors may grudgingly accommodate to other actors in the field in an effort to re-legitimate de-legitimated institutions.

Our findings make a number of contributions to the literature. We capture how post-settlement legitimation strategies shape institutions, an area that a number of scholars have called for (O’Mahony & Bechky, 2008; van Wijk et al., 2012). We propose a two-phase model of post-settlement institutional maintenance, based on distinct strategies of ‘reluctant accommodation’ between former adversaries. During the settlement, former enemies negotiated privately to structure ‘passage points’ (Clegg, 1989), referring to an assemblage of socio-symbolic devices acting as channels facilitating and legitimating the maintenance of an institution from the old to the new regime. Post-settlement, reluctant accommodation work involved the public enactment of these passage points. The desired outcome of this process is the maintenance and re-legitimation of the contested institution in the public eye.

Literature Review

Settlements shaping institutions

The institutional maintenance work literature has highlighted how actors may maintain institutions (e.g. Currie, Lockett, Finn, Martin, & Waring, 2012; Lok & de Rond, 2013; Micelotta & Washington, 2013). In some instances, institutional breaches may be ignored, deemed as not warranting attention (Lok & de Rond, 2013, p. 197), while in other instances there are varying degrees of situated repair work to ‘mend’ the unfolding situation and maintain the institution (Ramirez, 2013). However, there is a growing stream of work within institutional analysis that is influenced by conflict management (Helfen & Sydow, 2013; Helms et al., 2012; Rao & Kennedy, 2008). These contributions suggest paying greater attention to the ways in which settlements between conflicting actors shape the evolution of institutions and fields. Institutions and fields are shaped not only by the purposeful actions of actors, embodied in approaches such as institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Phillips & Lawrence, 2012) but also by negotiations and settlements between previously conflicting actors (Barley, 2008; Rao & Kennedy, 2008). Settlements are a vital, but understudied, facet of the contexts with which actors seek to influence institutions, having a role in determining what is possible or not within the field (Phillips et al., 2000). Often, these are settlements between contesting elites within the field of incumbents and challengers (O’Mahony & Bechky, 2008; van Wijk et al., 2012). Settlements often have a stabilizing effect (Coser, 1956, p. 188), although they sometimes trigger changes in the field (Helms et al., 2012; Helms & Oliver, 2015; Rao & Kennedy, 2008; van Wijk et al., 2012). In this paper, we are interested in how settlements between former field incumbents and successful challengers may maintain institutions that were de-legitimated during the previous conflict.

The central issue is how previously conflicting actors re-legitimate and maintain institutions following truces. Legitimacy can be understood as a generalized perception or assumption that the actions and existence of an entity are desirable, proper or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions (Suchman, 1995, p. 574). Scott (2005) argues that institutions rest on regulative, normative and cognitive pillars of legitimacy. Institutional change or stasis pivots on the legitimacy of the institutions concerned (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Scott, 2005).

Settlements and post-settlement institutional maintenance work

Settlements are often fractured and riddled with suspicions, shaped by dynamics such as power games, ideological differences and disparate vested interests (Helms & Oliver, 2015; O’Mahony & Bechky, 2008; Rao & Kennedy, 2008; van Wijk et al., 2012). Settlements often involve the maintenance of institutions that were previously sources of conflict (Clark & Newell, 2013; Parsons, 1951). Parsons (1951) explains that the dilemma for actors that successfully challenge incumbents is that they cannot create new orders from scratch; they often require institutional framing drawn from the previous order. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) make this argument in terms of symbolic and material capital, converging with Parsons in the conviction that even in the event of an outright victory for challengers, they often still need to maintain certain institutions and manage relations with losing incumbents. Functional necessity that maintains institutions from the past implies a degree of collaboration between former adversaries as institutional incumbents. Unpacking this dynamic is key to understanding how settlements shape institutions and their maintenance. However, maintaining institutions and the participation of former incumbents risks the stability of the field (De Luca & Sekeris, 2012; Guzman & Holá, 2019), which may not accept the settlements and institutions maintained (Clark & Newell, 2013). Settlements sometimes generate resistance, with negative effects for the disputants’ legitimacy, leading to field disruptions (Helms & Oliver, 2015). For example, Guzman and Holá (2019) found that the settlement between the Colombian government and the FARC rebel group that sought to maintain FARC as a key political actor was resisted by the population at large. Similarly, De Luca and Sekeris (2012) found that, following settlements between previously conflicting property owners in Latin America that attempted to maintain the status quo saw conflict increase among organized groups of landless individuals that did not find the settlement legitimate.

Paradoxically, while studies have argued that settlements stabilize the field (Balzarova & Castka, 2012; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Thornton, 2002), a growing number of studies point out that sometimes settlements also cause disruptions because of the legitimacy crises they may trigger in the field (Balzarova & Castka, 2012; Honeyman, 2001; Hudson & Okhuysen, 2008). Van Wijk and colleagues (2012) suggest that post-settlement socio-symbolic efforts engaged in by former conflicting parties are key to understanding when and how settlements between previously conflicting parties create stability. In essence, these post-settlement efforts enable structuring of field dynamics by legitimating settlements as well as potential institutions that these may seek to preserve.

Research Context: South Africa’s Transition from Apartheid to Democracy

We address the research question through a historically rich qualitative study of the maintenance of the armed forces in the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. We understand this setting to be an extreme case (Yin, 1981). First, the settlement ending apartheid had an impact on all the social structures of South Africa. Second, the normative, moral and cognitive underpinnings of apartheid differed strikingly from those of the incoming ‘rainbow nation’, making the settlement and the maintenance of institutions from the apartheid era particularly challenging.

Contentious transition

As a nation, South Africa has a long history of social frictions stemming from both the oppression of black people by white settlers from different European countries, notably the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, as well as from cleavages between distinct nations in the black population. With the election of the National Party in 1948, apartheid was adopted as formal government policy. Segregation became formally organized and enforced through a set of laws and regulations. From its inception, the regime was contested by several diverging movements inside the country, creating episodic conflicts (Cooper, Aureli, & Singh, 2007; Diala, 2001). By the mid-1980s, because of mounting domestic and international pressure, it was evident that apartheid’s days were numbered (Clark & Worger, 2013; Du Bois & du Bois-Pedain, 2008), something that the president of the Republic, de Klerk, acknowledged by opening confidential negotiations with Nelson Mandela.

Negotiations to end apartheid began in 1990 between the apartheid regime and opposition groups, of which the ANC was the most influential. The negotiations and eventual settlement were contentious in the eyes of many in the nation. At the onset of negotiations, 19 groups were present (Sparks, 1996). Several later withdrew, notably the Inkatha National Cultural Liberation Movement (INCLM) that wanted greater autonomy for a Zulu homeland. During negotiations, as they had in the struggle against apartheid, Inkatha and ANC supporters frequently clashed, including the Boipatong Massacre in 1992 in which 45 people died (Potgieter, 2015). Several conservative white groups saw no need to negotiate nor reach a settlement. More extreme organizations, such as the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), viewed the negotiations and imminent settlement as a surrender to communism and threatened civil war if President de Klerk handed power to Nelson Mandela (Sparks, 1996). From February 1990 to April 1994, nearly 15,000 people died in political violence (Jeffery, 2000). Apartheid formally ended with the election of Nelson Mandela as national president on 24 April 1994.

Problematic role of armed forces

The need for effective armed forces became paramount for the survival of the ‘new’ South Africa because of the tumultuous nature of the period from 1990 to 1994, with a growing threat of civil war. The most well-trained and effective forces were those of the apartheid regime; however, in the new order their continuing existence posed a legitimacy crisis (Anglin, 1995). At the onset of the negotiations to end apartheid, the armed forces were seen as illegitimate in the eyes of the nation that remembered only too well their response to growing challenges from opposition groups (Moon, 2006). Any role for the armed forces following the settlement was potentially contentious, given the centrality of martial law to apartheid rule (Stemmet, 2015), rule that accorded the armed forces unprecedented powers of search, seizure and incarceration (Cilliers, 1998); powers that were abused by using chemical weapons, poisoning water supplies, orchestrating disappearances and sanctioning murder (Diala, 2001). As the Goldstone Commission, tasked with investigating the escalation of violence, observed: ‘For many South Africans, the police and the army are not perceived as fair, objective or a friendly institution’ (Goldstone, 1994).

The need to maintain the contested armed forces

When negotiations started, opposition groups led by the ANC pushed for the creation of an alternative National Peacekeeping Force (NPKF) drawn from the protagonists of armed struggle against the military forces (Cilliers, 1998), an idea that was short-lived (Anglin, 1995). The NPKF, established in 1994, was quickly seen to be a failure. Several notable operations resulted in the deaths of civilians, eventually requiring the intervention of the apartheid era South Africa Defence Forces to restore calm. The fragile nature of the transition and the growth in numbers of armed groups wanting to secede from the new South African state threatened civil war. As such, the centrality of well-trained apartheid era armed forces for a functional South African state (Boraine, 2001; Moon, 2006; van der Merwe & Chapmen, 2008) was evident, despite their lack of legitimacy.

Epilogue: The ‘maintenance’ of the armed forces

Following the formal end of apartheid and subsequent TRC hearings, there were minor changes to apartheid’s powerful military monolith (Cilliers, 1998). Army structures were preserved and non-white armed groups who had fought against apartheid were assimilated into the apartheid army structure to form the re-labelled South African National Defence Forces (SANDF) (Mashike, 2007). Many former SADF officers still occupied senior military management ranks (Cilliers, 1998). A significant element of the leadership stayed in place while others left to pursue careers in business, academia and security consultancy (Mashike, 2007). Almost no prosecutions resulted from the TRC hearings, even for actors not granted amnesty (Bubenzer, 2009; Du Bois & du Bois-Pedain, 2008; van der Merwe & Chapman, 2008, p. 104).

Scholars argue that the TRC hearings played a central socio-symbolic role in re-legitimating the armed forces and enabling a peaceful transition to democracy (Moon, 2006). In their absence, the construction of a unified nation might not have been possible (Boraine, 2001; Moon, 2006; van der Merwe & Chapman, 2008). The role of the TRC was to contribute to catharsis and national healing of the injustices of apartheid (Christodoulidis, 2000). The TRC invited both victims and perpetrators to testify publicly about gross human rights violations they witnessed or participated in between 1960 and 1994, including members of the liberation movements. The TRC was composed of three committees: the Human Rights Violations (HRV) Committee, the Reparation and Rehabilitation (R&R) Committee and the Amnesty Committee (AC). In what follows, we analyse closely how the TRC was structured in the settlement and the content of the armed forces’ hearings conducted by the HRV Committee to understand how this institution was re-legitimated and maintained.

Research Data

We engaged with different sources of data in our efforts to understand the maintenance of the armed forces. Initially, we acquired a rich understanding of the context by reading books, newspaper articles and historical websites that positioned the TRC hearings as the key event in public acceptance of the maintenance of the armed forces. Then, we collected documents referring to negotiated efforts at structuring the TRC. Our document collection began in 1990 when a negotiated settlement was first explicitly mentioned as the most viable option by the apartheid regime and opposition groups. We ended in 1999, after the TRC hearings had ended and the position of the armed forces in the ‘new’ South Africa had been cemented.

Due to political sensitivity, negotiations took place behind closed doors, leading to a methodological challenge typical of studying such manoeuvring. Thus, for the negotiations period, we relied on the few internal documents publicly released by the ANC in preparation for negotiations as well as documents released during negotiations. We also studied the settlement and policy documents that emerged from the negotiations as well as the subsequent legislation passed. Such documents reveal the interests at play as well as areas of convergence among negotiators and their attempts to channel the attention of the public in some directions and not others (Princen, 2015; Zahariadis, 2016).

The dataset became substantial. First, we gathered all the transcripts of the public hearings of former armed forces. Second, we also gathered their amnesty application forms, aimed at listing all offences associated with a political objective the applicant had witnessed or participated in and for which s/he requested amnesty. Third, we used transcripts of the public TRC hearings based on these applications and additional investigations (conducted by the Commission staff) related to acts committed by actors, organizations and institutions. The minutes from hearings, recorded, broadcast and transcribed in situ by the Commission staff, provide a comprehensive account of how the different sets of actors – the former members of the SADF and the South African Police (SAP), their lawyers, the TRC’s judges, chairpersons and investigators – interacted publicly to explore past crimes and potentially grant amnesty. The transcripts of the Special Hearings of the Armed Forces include those of the apartheid era SADF, the newly formed SANDF and the SAP. These hearings took place in Cape Town on October 7 to 10, 1997. They also include the State Security Council hearings, which occurred in Johannesburg on October 14, 1997 and Cape Town on December 4 to 5, 1997, as well as the transcripts from hearings on Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW), which took place in Cape Town from June 8 to July 31, 1998. In total, our dataset comprised more than 2,202 pages. We obtained these documents from the South African government’s Department of Justice archives (http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/).

Research Methods

To build a model of institutional maintenance and legitimation following a settlement, we drew on grounded theory techniques (Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013; Strauss & Corbin, 2007) and insights from process research (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013). Our analysis was composed of three stages: (1) identifying phases in the transition process; (2) analysing archival data in-depth; and (3) constructing a theoretical model. We elaborate our analysis in detail hereafter.

Identifying phases in the transition process

First, we went through several rounds of reading our dataset to obtain a rich understanding of the structure and meanings associated with the transition from apartheid to democracy. Archival data is ‘particularly suitable for tracing event chronologies, meanings and discourses over long periods of time’ (Langley et al., 2013, p. 2012). After this, we sought to gain an overall image of the process through which the army was maintained by following event chronologies, meanings and discourses. That is, we ‘zoomed out’, an approach suitable for relating micro-processes to macro-outcomes (Nicolini, 2009). Using techniques of ‘temporal bracketing’ (Denis, Lamothe, & Langley, 2001; Langley, 1999), we identified two phases reflecting discontinuity in the actions of the main set of actors participating in the settlement. These phases were temporally, organizationally and strategically distinct. First, former army incumbents and members of the ANC engaged in private negotiations to reach a settlement outside the public gaze. Second, there were publicly held TRC hearings that sought to redeem some institutions and former members through official amnesty. While different, these phases reveal continuity in overall meanings and discourses, aimed at defining and stabilizing the new regime while maintaining some institutions from the past.

Analysing archival data in-depth

In the next stage of our analysis, we ‘zoomed in’ to obtain a fine-grained understanding of the discourses and practices at play in each phase of the process separately, by conducting a detailed coding of the data. Using an interpretivist lens (Gioia et al., 2013), all three authors first performed an exploratory sentence-by-sentence coding of the same documents using Nvivo12, to compare interpretations and to reach an agreement around a coding scheme for each phase of the process. The initial categorical codes provided descriptive labels (Miles & Huberman, 1994) pertaining to what was said or written in documents, by different actors. We then compared these first-order codes, grouping similar codes in order to develop theoretically framed second-order constructs. We ended-up with two coding structures, one for each phase of the process.

Phase 1: Private negotiations and settlement

Our analysis of the four public documents that were released to inform the public about the ongoing negotiations and settlement shows that their central aim was to set the basis for the legitimacy of the new regime and its institutions. Our categorical codes captured narratives echoing the cognitive, normative and regulatory dimensions of legitimacy. We identified instances in which actors were ‘orchestrating a public confession’; building cognitive associations between the TRC and socio-symbolic signals from tribunals and justice. We linked these to the theoretically framed construct of ‘Grounding cognitive legitimacy around the idea of justice.’ We also identified efforts at ‘Developing a narrative of reconciliation’ as a morally superior alternative. We have grouped these efforts under the second-order construct ‘Grounding normative legitimacy around a narrative of reconciliation.’ Finally, our analysis shows the emergence from the negotiations of restrictions on the range of crimes committed during apartheid that would be investigated and the emergence of a category of crimes for which amnesty could be granted. We labelled this ‘grounding regulatory legitimacy around a restriction of crimes’ inquiry’ in our second-order constructs.

Phase 2: The TRC hearings

Our analysis of the public hearings again revealed the centrality of legitimation techniques employed by all interacting actors, with the common aim of maintaining and redeeming the armed forces. Starting with descriptive labels such as ‘Perpetrator asking for forgiveness’, ‘Perpetrator displacing responsibility for past crimes’, or ‘Chairperson reaffirming the importance of truth-telling’, we formed second-order constructs. We did so after several iterations between the data and the literature on institutional work, paying particular attention to the typologies of maintenance and repair work (Currie et al., 2012; Herepath & Kitchener, 2016; Kroezen & Heugens, 2019). We identified three broad set of practices pivotal in legitimizing the maintenance of a contested institution. ‘Mimicking recognizable structures’, ‘Realigning to the new values’ and ‘Deflecting sanctions’ were pivotal in legitimizing the maintenance of a contested institution.

Constructing a theoretical model

Finally, we ‘zoomed out’ again to identify the overlaps and the consequences of different sets of activities over different periods of time, and used visual artefacts as tools to refine our theoretical model (Langley & Ravasi, 2019), extracting elements of continuity and dependence between the phases. Despite the deployment of distinct forms of reluctant accommodation work (from a phase of private negotiations to a phase of public staging), these efforts were mainly aimed at (1) constructing and (2) enacting cognitive, normative and regulatory legitimacy for the threatened institution. That is, the terms for the re-legitimation of the armed forces had been set during the first phase of the process. During the second phase of the process, these were the channels used to bring the rest of the nation on board with maintaining the institution of the armed forces.

Drawing from Clegg (1989), we labelled these channels ‘passage points’, understood as an assemblage of socio-symbolic devices for repositioning the institution, enabling cognitive, normative and regulative re-legitimation of its taint. These passage points are the pivotal outcomes of reluctant accommodation work. Our analysis shows that passage points need to be created within the settlement and publicly enacted throughout post-settlement efforts to facilitate and legitimate the travel of an institution from the old to the new regime. We elaborate on these findings below.

Findings

The question of how conflicting incumbents engage in joint efforts during and after a settlement to maintain a highly contested institution in which they share common interests provides the topic. We label these efforts ‘reluctant accommodation work’ to capture both the aversion to compromising with the enemy and the need to do so. First, conflicting incumbents engaged in structuring the ‘passage points’ around new cognitive, normative and regulatory legitimation underpinnings within the settlement. Second, they publicly enacted these ‘passage points’ through three salient sets of practices – mimicking recognizable structures, re-aligning to new values and deflecting sanctions. In what follows, we elaborate on these findings.

Phase 1: Negotiating privately to structure passage points

In the first phase, reluctant accommodation work takes the shape of private negotiations in the making of settlements. Conflicting incumbents focus on articulating the conditions under which the process of re-legitimation of the contested institution will take place, in the form of three passage points: grounding cognitive legitimacy around the idea of justice, grounding normative legitimacy around a narrative of reconciliation and grounding regulatory legitimacy around a restriction of crimes’ inquiry. (Additional data extracts are available in Appendix A.; appendices are available in the Online supplemental material)

Grounding cognitive legitimacy around the idea of justice

Socio-symbolic devices were assembled around the idea of ‘reconciliatory justice’ based on public truth-telling. The structure of the TRC, albeit not a trial, echoed similar material and discursive elements. The Explanatory Memorandum to the Parliament Bill, 1995 noted: ‘The Committee made on Amnesty will be chaired by a judge’; the reason being ‘because its function will include the weighing and judging of evidence.’ The appointment of categories of professionals such as judges, lawyers, investigators, etc. resonates with recognizable structures of justice. Cognitively, doing this qualifies some members appearing before it as perpetrators and others as victims. These identifications were symbolically important in marking the shift in formal identities from one regime to the other. Authorities from the past became perpetrators in the present; rebels from the past became victims of an unjust regime in the present. More broadly, the public perception that justice has been served regarding crimes of the past committed by the army was essential to achieve a political settlement. This idea of justice was actively linked to truth-telling: ‘Full disclosure is required in terms of the interim Constitution and demands an inquiry into the state of mind of the person responsible for the act, omission or offence in respect of which amnesty has been granted’ (Explanatory Memorandum to the Parliament Bill, 1995). ‘The President believes – and many of us support him in this belief – that the truth concerning human rights violations in our country cannot be suppressed or simply forgotten. They ought to be investigated, recorded and made known’ (Introduction to first TRC hearings by the Minister of Justice, Mr Dullah Omar, 1995).

Cognitively, truth-telling is tied to the idea of confession. Rooted in Christian philosophy, the act of confession, or admitting one’s sins, is considered as a necessary step for redemption. The work of influential leaders such as Desmond Tutu helped in tying the practice of truth-telling to the idea of redemption. Through such cognitive links, this passage point opened the possibility for the army and its former incumbents to be redeemed in the new regime, through a justice-like process, after having publicly acknowledged wrongdoings.

Grounding normative legitimacy around a narrative of reconciliation

Conflicting incumbents emphasized a new set of moral values encompassed in a narrative of reconciliation. For instance, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation act 34 of 1995 reads that ‘The Constitution states that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for Ubuntu but not for victimisation.’ Reconciliation built on traditional African values of Ubuntu (Battle & Tutu, 2009; Gaim & Clegg, 2021; Samkange, 1980) as well as ideas in Afrikaans Protestantism that superseded earlier religious support for apartheid (van der Merwe & Chapman, 2008). These values were deeply rooted in traditional beliefs on both sides of the conflict, predisposing acceptance of reconciliation as morally superior to punishment. Making reconciliation the central value facilitated the normative re-legitimation of the army. Reconciliation presumes that people forgive their former enemies. Forgiveness – which also echoes Christian values – translates in providing amnesty to perpetrators of crimes. Reconciliation also points at the possibility of creating a national unity based on togetherness rather than segregation, as stated by Minister of Justice, Mr Dullah Omar in 1995:

A critical question which involves all of us is how do South Africans come to terms with the past. In trying to answer this important question honestly and openly, we are fortunate in having a President who is committed to genuine reconciliation in our country and to the transformation of South Africa into a non-racial, non-sexist democracy based on a recognition of universally accepted human rights.

Hence, reconciliation laid the foundation for the army to gain normative legitimacy, because it positioned the idea of forgiveness and unity as morally superior to retribution.

Grounding regulatory legitimacy around a restriction of crimes’ inquiry

Socio-symbolic devices allowing a careful restriction of crime investigations laid the grounds for a regulatory re-legitimation of the army. Not all crimes committed by the apartheid era armed forces would be aired to the nation. In the negotiations, it was agreed to create categories of crimes for which amnesty could be granted. As announced in the Explanatory Memorandum to the Parliament Bill (1995): ‘Amnesty may be given for acts, omissions or offences described as “acts associated with a political objective”.’ Several criteria had been established for deciding if a criminal act had been associated with political objective, among them, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34 of 1995, which stipulates

(a) The motive of the person who committed the act, omission or offence; (b) the context in which the act, omission or offence took place, and in particular whether the act, omission or offence was committed in the course of or as part of a political uprising, disturbance or event, or in reaction thereto; [. . .] (e) whether the act, omission or offence was committed in the execution of an order of, or on behalf of, or with the approval of, the organisation, institution, liberation movement or body of which the person who committed the act was a member, an agent or a supporter.

Constructing a category of crimes motivated by political objectives in opposition to crimes stemming from malevolent intent, a priori suggests that people can commit crimes despite their own goodwill. Hence, this passage point opens up the possibility for legally marking a distinction between the atrocities that have been committed and the moral responsibility of the perpetrators. In all documents, the notion of what constitutes a political objective remains blurred and opaque. By tying the category of crimes motivated by political objectives to the broader context in which the offences took place – the investigation is also bracketed in time – it was also possible to distance the organizational strategies of the past from the potential strategies that would have been followed in a different political context. The careful restriction of the investigation around a newly created category of crimes constituted a passage point aimed at facilitating the regulatory re-legitimation of the army and its incumbents.

Phase 2: Staging a public enactment of passage points

After pre-emptively facilitating the cognitive, normative and regulatory re-legitimation of the army, conflicting incumbents engaged in a new type of reluctant accommodation work: they publicly enacted each of the previously negotiated passage points by mimicking recognizable structures of justice, realigning to new values and deflecting sanctions. We elaborate these practices below. (Additional data extracts are available in Appendix B.)

Mimicking recognizable structures

TRC hearings publicly enacted a quasi-trial performance. A trial delivers justice and staging and performing it as such enhanced the proceedings’ symbolic legitimacy in the eyes of the nation. Members of the armed forces performed a role in the hearings that resembled an orthodox trial; alleged perpetrators pleaded guilty and put themselves at the mercy of the court. To do so, they submitted an amnesty form, were usually represented in the hearings by a lawyer and publicly told of their role as members of an army that committed atrocities during the apartheid era. Performing the perpetrator’s role involved disclosing information, asking for forgiveness, and acknowledging violation of human rights by the army. Sometimes, outgoing incumbents took the opportunity to address the nation and sought redemption by apologizing. For example, the opening statement by General Adriaan Vlok (former Minister of Law and Order in South Africa and former Minister of Correctional Services, State Security Council Hearings) is an illustration.

I would like to express my unqualified regret towards any person and or organisation which was innocently disadvantaged or prejudiced by my actions. In the cruel struggle for survival it was often the case that there was no mercy shown and unacceptable things were done and mistakes made. I also made mistakes and I’m sorry that my fellow South Africans had to suffer in the process as a result of my actions and I’d like to offer my unqualified and sincere apology to those people.

During the widely broadcast TRC hearings, the new incumbents, represented by the TRC chairperson, regularly restated that the TRC sought full disclosure:

I would like to also welcome members of the media without whom our work would be far less we think, particularly in terms of involving not only those who are here today, but so many people across the nation, both in terms of radio coverage, in terms of TV and the print media. (Chairperson, SADF Hearings)

The chairpersons’ presence reinforced the sense of a quasi-trial structure, in which they played the role of a neutral actor whose role is to ensure that justice is delivered.

The findings revealed that former incumbents did not always play along with the roles scripted in the staging. Some rejected the whole notion of needing to confess before the nation:

The revelations of such actions in the present peacetime situation can result in extensive damage to the State: the trust of the population in leading figures of the State and the image of the State abroad. This cannot be conducive to reconciliation. In this sense, I have been and still am sceptical about this Commission’s ability to achieve the goal of reconciliation. In my view reconciliation will be better served by letting the divisions of the past be and rather encourage all our people to join forces to tackle the immense problems facing our country. (General Malan, Chief of the SA Army and Defence Forces, former Minister of Defence, head of army during apartheid era, Address to the TRC)

At times, the chairperson and particularly victims’ lawyers expressed frustration at the lack of openness of former incumbents.

[. . .] even though we have before us, your explanation with regards to people acting mala fide in some situations or people pursuing personal agendas and so on, what we have as a Commission before us is reams and reams of testimony of people actually dying at the hands of bureaucrats or of security police persons and so on, so it seems to me that is not one or two or a few people who are acting mala fide, but it seems to me that there was a systematic almost regular pattern of abuses [. . .] (Ms. Wildschut, human rights activist and commissioner of Truth and Reconciliation, State Security Council, Public Hearings)

Such frictions helped construct a sense of ‘sincerity’ in the enactment of a quasi-trial.

Realigning to the new values

Departing from the normative legitimacy passage point, former army leaders had the opportunity to realign the army publicly with the new narrative of reconciliation and democratic unity. Former army members linked their professional occupation to higher values, such as maintaining peace and security:

Your Grace, soldiers are often perceived as men who only pursue conflict. This is not the case if one takes cognisance of all the peace keeping and peace making operations over the past years in many parts of the world. [. . .] This definition, I would like to submit, more closely describes the true mission of military forces, namely to restore peace so that former adversaries can become friendly again. Soldiering is not a selfish profession, as a true soldier is prepared to lay down his life for his fellow citizens and for his country. (General Meiring, former Chief of South African apartheid era Defence Forces (SADF) and present chief of post-apartheid defence forces (SNADF), Address to the TRC)

Leaders of the army also distanced it from morally ambiguous actions of the past, perpetrated under the command of the former regime. ‘It sometimes happens that in peacetime, when people look back on periods of conflict and war, they are astounded that man can act against himself with such cruelty. Upon such retrospection many things appear inexplicable and morally difficult to justify’ (General Malan, Chief of the post-apartheid Army and Defence Forces, former apartheid era Chief of Defence Forces and Minister of Defence, address to the TRC). Re-contextualization and normalization of army strategies during conflicts, emphasizing the difficulties of doing their job in a context of war, accompanied practices of distanciation.

I say this here today to pay tribute to the officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs who fought a lonely battle out in the corners of the world to curb our growing isolation and to avert the imposition of economic sanctions. They never received medals in grand parades, they just suffered quietly and endlessly, their story remains to be told. (Mr. R. F. Botha, former apartheid era Minister of Foreign Affairs, Security Council, Public Hearings)

By reintegrating professional occupations within the army into the new moral narrative of peace, reconciliation and unity, by presenting past actions as flowing from a disgraceful context rather than from an ideology, former incumbents suggest that their institution and professional commitments could be trusted to serve the new nation, building normative legitimacy. Outgoing incumbents also tended to provide anecdotes of past actions that were in line with the narrative of reconciliation.

It was – I attended a business lunch in Johannesburg where I suggested many years ago to a number of well-to-do companies, I said, I asked them how many blacks you have got on your boards and not one of them had any. And then I didn’t dictate, I didn’t prescribe, I just said gentlemen with a view to the future don’t you think it might be a good thing to start recruiting some black people to serve on your boards so that they can get training, training in business, in business management etc.? (Mr. R. F. Botha, former apartheid era Minister of Foreign Affairs, Security Council, Public Hearings)

Recalling past actions that could be considered morally and normatively sound in terms of the new order helped construct continuity by reducing the distance between past and present ethics of the institution of the armed forces. The discourse on reconciliation and unity was appropriated and championed by outgoing incumbents, despite their implication in the previous apartheid regime:

Of course, the levels of crime and violence are horrific. Of course things are said by individual members of the ANC that are distressing, but then it is the duty of all, black and white, brown and Asian, to enter into debate with each other and analyse our clashing standpoints within the framework of free speech and association and that we can now do today without the contamination of racial prejudices. We can debate on policy and premises that are no longer race or colour bound. (Mr. R. F. Botha, former apartheid era Minister of Foreign Affairs, Security Council, Public Hearings)

Members of the armed forces presented themselves as new, redeemed men, completely detached from the old regime’s morality based on distinctions and separation. As such, they were ready to be members of an institution born anew, ready to embrace a novel set of moral values. Outrage at past crimes and regrets at past actions was sometimes expressed, often for crimes for which amnesty could be granted or crimes for which specific perpetrators could not be identified. Showing publicly that the armed forces could accommodate new values and act in the service of a democratic, united regime were repair attempts building normative legitimacy. A positive discourse was nurtured in performances by the perpetrators as well as the TRC.

Deflecting sanctions

During the hearings, former army leaders sought to make sure that all actions disclosed to the public fell under the newly created category of ‘acts associated with a political objective’ for which amnesty could be granted. The regulatory legitimacy of the army could be rehabilitated by legally ratifying that past strategy was set by the political objectives of an era no longer existing.

Deflecting sanctions involved practices aimed at obscuring perpetrators’ individual guilt. They did so by connecting past crimes to the specific context of the time: ‘It’s against this background that I firmly believed that the actions in which I took part were correct and justifiable in terms of the existing legislation and views’ (General Vlok, former Minister of Law and Order in South Africa and former Minister of Correctional Services General, Security Council, Public Hearings). Regular reference during the hearings was made to an ambiguous chain of command, making it difficult to trace the origins of commands resulting in death or injury. The ‘need to know’ basis under which the army operated as well as ambiguous terminology for giving orders, suggested that some soldiers might have misinterpreted their duties when committing offences. Hearings included lengthy debates on what the orders given to ‘eliminate’ the opposition actually meant. Senior members of the army stressed that by asking soldiers to ‘eliminate’ people they did not (necessarily) mean to kill them. Yet, soldiers on operations insisted that they understood such orders as meaning to kill. ‘Mr Chairman, I think we should be very careful when we look at the word eliminate. I can eliminate a person by arresting him. I can neutralise him by arresting him. Each case must be dealt with on its own merits’ (General Joubert, former head of apartheid era special forces; Armed Forces Hearings, 7 to 10 Oct 1997). Responsibility for past crimes was displaced to ‘bad apples’ in the hierarchy, the state and past government and other armed organizations (ANC, PAC and MK), as well as to apartheid’s educational and cultural capital. Constituting ‘bad apples’ inside the army’s ranks as deviants from the army’s rules marked deviance as not institution-wide, thus distancing and placing atrocities outside official command. ‘You must not allow that atrocities by individual members of the security forces which because of that gruesome nature, had an influence on all. This must not influence your evaluation of the bigger picture’ (Dr. Barnard, former head of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service during apartheid; State Security Council Hearings, 4 to 5 Dec 1997). The enactment of this regulatory passage point simultaneously protected and distanced the institution of the army and its leaders from legal responsibility for past crimes.

In addition, some topics were simply avoided or silenced. On repeated occasions, former incumbents avoided answering some questions, highlighting the sensitivity of the information, claiming not to be knowledgeable about events that nevertheless occurred under their command or claiming not to remember some events. For instance:

Mr Chairman I can’t comment, I’m sorry. I’ve never been involved. I’ve never been exposed to this. I don’t know anything about this. This is the first time I hear this information. I’m not trying to say that you are wrong, I’m not trying to be funny. (General Malan, Chief of the post-apartheid Army and Defence Forces, former apartheid era Chief of Defence Forces and Minister of Defence, Public Hearings)

Sometimes, this created frustrations on the part of some participants: ‘I find it impossible to believe that those who were involved did not know of the deaths of women and children and innocent civilians in the conduct of that, as you described it, war’ (Dr. Alexander Boraine, deputy chair of the TRC). However, despite these frustrations, members of the armed forces could not be forced to respond to certain lines of questioning.

Finally, both chairpersons and former incumbents sought to ensure that lines of questioning stayed within a space for which amnesty could be granted. Doing so involved trying to avoid implicating former incumbents and the army in crimes that were not committed for ‘political objectives’, despite occasional pushes from lawyers and commissioners for the armed forces to take responsibility for crimes of a non-political nature. There was a clearly defined line between crimes open for amnesty and those that were not. Members of the armed forces needed to be careful that the victims’ lawyers did not expose crimes carrying legal liability. Both chairpersons and perpetrators referred to these categories of crimes and warned the lawyer when the line of questioning might lead to ‘personal attacks’: ‘I remind those who are participating that this is not a court of law. This is not a trial. We are not seeking to incriminate anyone’ (Chairperson, SAP, Public Hearings). Often, representatives of victims would go further in their lines of questioning and point out that questions were not being answered, often in relation to crimes bearing legal liability. When former incumbents felt that they could be personally incriminated for an offence, they would reiterate that they never acted out of personal malice, echoing the negotiated criteria delineating the category of crimes associated with political objectives:

I however have one consolation and that is that I never acted for motives of personal malice or hatred against anybody. I did my duty as I saw it and I would like to add that in this process I was obliged inter alia to authorise the detention of many people. (General Vlok, former Minister of Law and Order in South Africa and former Minister of Correctional Services General, Security Council, Public Hearings)

The regulatory passage point relied on obscuring guilt, avoiding answering some questions and restricting the scope of investigation to ensure that the disclosed crimes would fall under the category for which amnesty would be granted. These practices aided in the regulatory re-legitimation of the army of its former incumbents.

Discussion

The work presented here has several implications for our understanding of settlements and institutional maintenance work. The primary contribution is to our understanding of joint post-settlement re-legitimation efforts implicated in the maintenance of institutions. We capture this in the model in Figure 1. In the sections that follow, we discuss how this study informs the literature.

Figure 1.

Conceptual model of institutional maintenance through reluctant accommodation in a context of regime change.

Reluctant accommodation work

Our study captures a number of dimensions of institutional maintenance work currently unexplored in the literature. First, by contextualizing efforts to maintain institutions within settlements (Phillips et al., 2000), we found contrary mechanisms for institutional maintenance to those highlighted in the existing literature, such as authoring, policing, deterring, mythologizing, embedding and routinizing (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 230). Instead, we found a category of institutional maintenance work that implied a degree of cooperation between former challengers and incumbents. The notion of ‘reluctant accommodation work’ captures this, showing that lines of allegiance may be messier than current theorizations suggest. Differing from studies of institutional work drawing clear distinctions between incumbents and challengers (e.g. Currie et al., 2012; Maguire & Hardy, 2009), these lines are sometimes fluid. Driven by changing interests, former adversaries may engage in the maintenance of an institution previously contested. Far from friendly alliances, necessity and functionality, littered with distrust and contention, drive the engagement. On the part of the successful challengers, what was called for was cooperating with a murderous regime, if maintenance of the institution of the armed forces was to be successful. In the absence of a degree of cooperation, bringing stability to South Africa would have been an almost impossible task. Elsewhere, a counterfactual is provided by the decommissioning of the Ba’athist party military and civil apparatus in post-Gulf War Iraq, leading eventually to the re-formation of that power and knowledge under the aegis of Daesh (Dijkstra, 2017). Thus, we add nuance to current understanding of institutional maintenance work by highlighting that the lines of allegiance are fluid and blurred.

Passage points and post-settlement stability

Our study also to speaks to the apparent paradox in the literature that settlements sometimes lead to stability in the field (Helms et al., 2012; Rao & Kennedy, 2008) while at other times they trigger conflict (Guzman & Holá, 2019; Hudson & Okhuysen, 2008). Our study suggests that key to understanding how settlements bring stability to the field are the terms of collaboration reached in the negotiations and settlements and the public enactment of passage points to create legitimacy. The fact that ingoing and outgoing incumbents may converge and reach settlements is itself not sufficient to stabilize the field and maintain institutions. Conflicting incumbents need to find common terms assembling sets of socio-symbolic devices as a basis for maintaining cognitive, normative and legislative legitimacy of contested institutions. Importantly, they need terms that communicate broadly, symbolically, publicly. The structuration and enactment of passage points is key to a successful process, something currently overlooked by the literature. Passage points create bridges between the settlement negotiated privately between incumbents and the post-settlement efforts aimed at bringing the public onboard. Passage points allow the formation of alliances and the control over symbolic resources that actors will need to pursue desired outcomes following settlements.

Post-settlement efforts

More broadly, our study emphasizes the importance of post-settlement re-legitimation to stabilize the field. In so doing, our study responds to van Wijk and others (2012) as well as O’Mahony and Bechky’s (2008) stress on the importance of engaging in post-settlement efforts. We show that settlements require post-settlement legitimation work. Put differently, we show that for a settlement to shape institutions in the field, it requires post-legitimation efforts being projected to generalized actors outside the settlement. We show that to create stability within the field, outgoing and incoming incumbents must construct, through reluctant accommodation work, a consistent legitimation strategy to be deployed within and after the settlement.

Our study also advances theoretical conversations on institutional change (Brown, Ainsworth, & Grant, 2012; Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002; van Wijk et al., 2012). We show such change not as an event stemming from the loss of institutional battles to challengers but as a negotiated process requiring differing degrees of coordination between former conflicting parties, if the new institutional order is to gain stability. The notion of passage points that we propose captures the nexus negotiated. Paradoxically, while possibilities for radical institutional change are reduced the nexus negotiated plays a role in accommodating contexts of broader institutional change, adding nuance to arguments within the literature that frame institutional processes as situated within negotiations and settlements (Helfen & Sydow, 2013; Helms et al., 2012; Rao & Kennedy, 2008) while also highlighting the complexity of radical institutional change (Helms & Oliver, 2015; Stark, 1996).

While this study has advanced ongoing conversation on settlements and institutional work, it also points to a number of directions for future research. For a start, the shifting of alliances we observed here is not unusual and we believe that current understandings of institutional work would be enhanced by studies that further engage with how such shifting alliances come into being. In our study, we did not have access to internal negotiation documents but researching how such negotiations play out internally would be important in understanding outcomes of the eventual settlements, and the passage points they converge on and use to restructure the field. This would also open up the avenue to investigate the power games at play as negotiations take place and ultimately how they shape the evolution of institutions and the field.

In terms of many central institutions, the post-apartheid Republic of South Africa established under Black majority rule is an important instance of successful transition from one overarching institutional realm to another. Central to its accomplishment was the effective reconstitution of central institutional pillars of social order, notably the armed forces. In this paper, by focusing on the details of the settlement arrived at through the TRC we have prised open the institutional workings that made this seemingly unlikely transition possible, given the history bestowed by the apartheid regime. Skilled institutional work was entailed in the negotiations that arrived at a settlement. Researching these in detail, we have contributed to understanding how passage points create legitimacy through sets of socio-symbolic devices that constitute cognitive, normative and legislative legitimacy broadly, symbolically, publicly.

In conclusion, while our study addressed a central institution, in whose management both incoming and outgoing incumbents sought common ground, in other central institutional areas, such as land ownership, this has not proven to be the case. Further research needs to address central institutions, such as the historic distribution of land rights and the institutionalized practices framing them, as well as the potential implications these have for the rest of the field and nation. Translating the past framing of social order for the future, while difficult, may well be a far easier task than transforming centuries of racial domination and inequality based upon settlement and land use embedded in institutionally legal property rights that have been inter-generationally transmitted and which reform has thus far framed in individual rights to financial restitution rather than community rights to entitlement (Akinola, Kaseeram, & Jili, 2020).

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-oss-10.1177_01708406211006244 – Supplemental material for New Order and Old Institutions: South Africa and the institutional work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-oss-10.1177_01708406211006244 for New Order and Old Institutions: South Africa and the institutional work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Tapiwa Seremani, Carine Farias and Stewart Clegg in Organization Studies

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-2-oss-10.1177_01708406211006244 – Supplemental material for New Order and Old Institutions: South Africa and the institutional work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-oss-10.1177_01708406211006244 for New Order and Old Institutions: South Africa and the institutional work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Tapiwa Seremani, Carine Farias and Stewart Clegg in Organization Studies

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Carine Farias

Stewart Clegg

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author biographies

Tapiwa Seremani is an Assistant Professor in corporate social responsibility at IESEG School of Management and member of IESEG’s Center for Organizational Responsibility (ICOR). His work focuses on how different actors with diverging interests attempt to influence institutional infrastructures around them with different exercises of power.

Carine Farias is an Associate Professor in entrepreneurship and business ethics at IESEG School of Management and a member of IESEG’s Center for Organizational Responsibility (ICOR). Her research aims at uncovering the sociocultural and ethical dimensions involved in processes of organization-creation.

Stewart Clegg retired from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia as an Emeritus professor and holds visiting appointments at Nova School of Economics and Business, Lisboa, Portugal and at University of Stavanger Business School, Norway. Widely acknowledged as one of the most significant contemporary theorists of power relations, he is also one of the most influential contributors to organization studies. In his career, he has produced about 50 books, several hundred journal articles, with his most cited work being the classic Frameworks of Power.

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