RESULTATS DU SYSTEME DE PRODUCTION

Strategies and Types

In section 2.2.1 I mentioned how there are three strategies that organisations can employ to gain legitimacy: a) adaptation to the requirements of current audiences; b) choosing among different environments the one whose audience will more likely support the organisation’s practices; and c) the manipulation of the organisation’s environment “by creating new audiences and new legitimising beliefs” (Suchman, 1995: 587) and by creating

“bases of support specifically tailored to their distinctive needs”

(Suchman, 1995: 591).

From the account I provided in this chapter, we can see how the field obtained legitimacy through these three strategies. Specifically, organisations in the field adapted to the social requirements related to the ethics of the embryo through the creation of the Warnock Committee first, and later with the creation of the HFEA. We can also see the field’s ability to cure infertility and render women fertile as an adaptation to society’s requirements for women to be fertile and become mothers (see section 2.3). By creating the Fertility Show, the field also chose an environment that provides it with a supporting audience: as I cited in the previous section, on the Show’s webpage we can

read that the event is “an ideal platform to engage with and increase brand exposure to an extremely targeted, niche audience who are looking for answers and treatments to help them on their fertility journey” (Fertility Show, 2016, italics added). The social norm that it is natural for women to reproduce (section 2.3) can also be applied to this second strategy: if a woman cannot naturally become a mother, then an organisational field able to render her fertile can be viewed as restoring her ‘natural’ role in society. Such a role was thus likely welcomed and not likely to be challenged by the field’s environment.

Organisations also gained legitimacy by manipulating their environment, particularly by creating bases of support centred around their particular needs. From the 1970s until the early 1990s, the needs of the organisations in the field were strongly related to the social acceptance of their practices: practices which did not focus much on the intervention on women’s bodies, but rather on the creation of embryos and on the creation of potential future life.

We can also see how organisations within the field obtained pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy. We can notice how private clinics obtained pragmatic legitimacy through the adoption of ethics protocols and assessments, primarily to protect the profession in light of public concerns coming from the government, the public, patients, and feminist and religious groups (Johnson and Elder, 2015). NGOs and professional associations gained pragmatic legitimacy by virtue of filling two gaps in the field: the former by providing non-medical support to people undergoing or interested in treatment; the latter by filling information gaps and providing prospective patients with technical information about treatment and counselling (3.6).

Moral legitimacy was instead obtained during field emergence thanks to the unchallenged social norms that saw women as

‘desperate’ to become mothers, and that viewed infertility as a taboo that encouraged medicine and patients alike not to publicly discuss women’s infertility and attempts at treatment (Johnson and Elder, 2015; section 3.3).

As presented in section 2.2., cognitive legitimacy is the need for an organisation to obtain “affirmative backing”

(Suchman, 1995: 582) from society. The existence of an organisation will thus need to be conceived as “necessary or inevitable based on some taken-for-granted cultural account”

(Suchman, 1995: 582). By the 1990s and with respect to the field of fertility treatment, the cultural account that was not questioned, and thus was taken for granted, was that of the primary importance of the ethical and legal status of the embryo. This was most evident from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, when public discussions and regulations increased and culminated with the creation of the HFEA. Because legitimacy is a process that adapts to social contexts and is thus evolving (Shocker and Sethi, 1974), the social legitimacy of these organisations, mostly established through regulations on the legal and ethical status of the embryo, had and still has to be maintained. The aim of the analysis I present in chapters 5, 6 and 7 is to show how this is done through discourse at the Fertility Show.

3.8. Conclusion

This chapter has presented how the field of fertility treatment has emerged and how it gained legitimacy from the late 1970s until today. I have discussed infertility and fertility treatment and provided a background with regards to their understanding and organisation in the UK (3.2), and then

proceeded to present the historical and scientific conditions that allowed for the first IVF baby to be born in 1978, as well as the public concerns the event caused (3.3). Section 3.4 was dedicated to the 1984 Warnock Committee Report in response to the increasing public anxiety stemming from advancements in reproductive technologies, whereas section 3.5 presented the 1990 HFE Act and the creation of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. I have introduced the Fertility Show, presented how the Show is marketed also towards exhibitors, and stressed the business-oriented mind set pervading the FCE (3.6). Finally, based on the information provided in the previous sections of the chapter, I detailed how the field of fertility treatment gained pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy (3.7).

The next chapter presents the methodology employed in the study to investigate how field legitimacy is maintained, and presents the approach taken to the analysis of discourse. It introduces the ontological and epistemological foundations of the research, and further presents the process of data collection and analysis before discussing issues of validity and reliability.

CHAPTER 4. RESEARCH PHILOSOPHY AND METHODS 4.1. Introduction

As presented in chapter 1, this thesis is concerned with understanding how organisations at a FCE employ discourses of the female body to maintain legitimacy. The literature review presented in chapter 2 highlighted how: a) within organisation studies, we know little as to how discourses are generated and employed at FCEs, and how such discourses can influence field legitimacy; b) within the four approaches identified in organisation studies and the body, the focus is maintained on the body at work or within the organisation, rather than paying explicit attention to the body as a central entity in itself; c) works within organisation studies and the female body in relation to reproduction have specifically analysed the fertile, pregnant or maternal body, particularly at work; and d) there is a lack of studies focusing on organisational fields and the body.

To address the presented gaps, the thesis addresses this primary research question: How do Field-Configuring Events discursively maintain field legitimacy?

In order to answer this question, I am further guided by the following research questions, specifically in relation to the organisational field of fertility treatment:

At one of the field’s FCEs, the Fertility Show,

(1) How do organisations discursively construct the female non-reproductive body?

(2) What relations are discursively constructed between the organisations at the Show and the constructed bodies?

(3) How are these bodies and relations maintaining field legitimacy at the FCE?

These questions are to be answered by analysing organisations’ use of discourse at the Fertility Show, here approached as a FCE that is defined by, and defining of, specific interactions and discourses (Hardy and Maguire, 2010). For the purpose of this study, I understand both concepts of organisations and bodies as being socially constructed. Further, discourse is here understood as constituting subjects and power relations. These assumptions in turn inform my methodological approach, which involves Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The methods used to gather data are qualitative, and include document analysis and observation.

In this chapter I discuss how data were collected, approached, and analysed following Norman Fairclough’s three-level approach to CDA (1989/2001; 1992; see also 1993;

1995a; 1995b). Specifically, in this chapter I present how: a) the first and second research questions are answered through the collection of documents and observations at the Fertility Show to be analysed through Fairclough’s approach to CDA; b) and the third research question is to be answered through Fairclough’s social practice level of analysis, and utilises the outcomes from the analysis of a) to provide explanations as to how organisations at the Fertility Show maintain field legitimacy through discourses of the female non-reproductive body.

This chapter thus presents the ontology and epistemology informing the study (4.2); the analytical approach focussed on discourse, Discourse Analysis (DA), and CDA in particular (4.3);

the analytical approach taken (4.4 and 4.5); the research design (4.6); the research methods used (4.7); the process of data collection and the analytical framework used to analyse data (4.8 and 4.9); and will conclude by discussing issues of

validity and reliability (4.10), critiques to and limitations of the approach taken (4.11), and reflexivity (4.12).

4.2. Ontological and Epistemological Principles informing