Crossing the divide: Labour relations professionals and the managerial embeddedness of social dialogue

Within companies, Labour Relations Professionals (LRPs) are the primary actors responsible for implementing institutional requirements concerning social dialogue. However, academic literature has paid little attention to these actors and their agency. Drawing on embeddedness research in employment relations and brokerage research, this study conceptualises and investigates the managerial embeddedness of social dialogue. This concept refers to the normative implication of the work made by LRPs to give social dialogue a greater centrality within organisations by directly involving line and middle managers rather than maintaining it at the boundaries of the company. The empirical study focuses on the implementation of a recent reform requiring French companies to reorganise employee representation. It is based on 81 semistructured interviews conducted over a 2‐year period and the collection of documents from three large companies. The results show that, in order to involve line and middle managers in social dialogue, LRPs have redefined the norms governing the functioning of social dialogue bodies and processes. More specifically, they apply the norms of managerial rationality to these bodies and processes. Finally, this article contributes to the literature concerned with the adoption of social dialogue bodies (particularly in response to institutional requirements) by highlighting a kind of trade‐off. In the cases studied, increasing the embedding of social dialogue within the organisation leads to the adoption of the norms of managerial rationality.