Bureaucratic Legacies and Resistance: How Mission-Committed Officials Sustain Enforcement in Converted Institutions

Abstract

The National Labor Relations Act no longer protects the right to unionize because business organizations and their allies have succeeded in redirecting the statute to protect their interests over workers’ right to collective action. This paper examines how processes of conversion have reshaped the agency charged with enforcement—the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). I argue that conversion does not produce institutional collapse but rather internal fragmentation, creating space for normative subcultures of enforcement. Drawing on interviews with NLRB officials and publicly available agency documents, I find that mission-committed officials sustained the agency’s original pro-worker mission through two strategies: mining latent legal resources within the statute and building external partnerships for proactive enforcement. These enforcement subcultures differ from the “pockets of effectiveness” identified in developing countries—they operate within fragmented institutions rather than controlling whole agencies, requiring strategic adaptation to shifting political conditions.

The findings bridge historical institutionalism and public administration scholarship, showing how bureaucratic legacies enable resistance to institutional change. They also illuminate urgent questions about whether such resistance can survive systematic civil service dismantling, with implications beyond labor law for understanding mission-driven governance under authoritarian pressure.