The Legitimacy of Organizational Downsizing in Canada: An Analysis of Explanatory Media Accounts

We track the cognitive legitimation of organizational downsizing over time through an evolution of explanatory accounts in newspaper reports of middle‐management layoffs in Canadian companies from January 1988 to December 1994. We advance an integrative typology of accounts and argue that the form and content of accounts capture sense‐making activity by the press. We find support for our prediction that the form and content of these accounts...