This study finds that a significant number of organizations that engaged in managerialization – where the law’s goals, such as equality, are abandoned in favor of management concerns, such as absenteeism – actually succeeded in creating successful compliance with the Lactation at Work Law. The findings contrast with previous studies that have found that managerialized compliance leads to mere symbolic change. The Lactation at Work Law’s stipulated accommodations are more concrete than many other civil rights laws that only provide vague directives, like providing “equal opportunity.” Lactation accommodations were most successful when the organization had preexisting cultural norms of flexible time, worker autonomy, and a history of accommodating a variety of employee needs, as well as available structural resources, such as individual offices or ample private spaces; and the Lactation at Work Law and its accommodations enjoyed sufficient legitimacy throughout the organization.

This book draws on two waves of interviews with human resource personnel, supervising managers, and lactating workers to examine how organizations responded to the Lactation at Work Law. Organizational reactions fall on a continuum, beginning with organizations that refused to comply with the new law. Other organizations that appeared to comply created accommodations that fulfilled the letter of the law, but achieved symbolic compliance that was similarly ineffective; they had refocused their compliance motivation from the law’s ideals, such as equity, to managerial goals, such as reducing absenteeism. Still other organizations similarly shifted from the law’s goals to managerial aims, but, in these organizations, this managerialization of the law produced effective accommodations; preexisting cultural and structural features of the organizations made compliance easy, and workplace lactation enjoyed sufficient legitimacy. Further along the continuum were organizations where compliance was driven by Allies Already, those in management who supported workplace lactation and were poised to create accommodations as soon as the law was in force. The most successful compliance occurred in organizations where supervising managers, through educational conversations with lactating workers, learned more about the benefits of breastfeeding benefits and adopted a morality based on health benefits to children and community wellness.