‘I Have a Newborn at Home’: Multi-actor Attributions and the Implementation of Shared Parental Leave

Abstract

This article studies the organizational implementation of public policy, specifically shared parental leave (SPL) legislation (2015), through the lens of attribution theory (that is, actors’ inferences for why policies are implemented by their employing organization), drawing on 26 in-depth interviews with a range of actors in a British university. Our findings highlight that attributions vary between different organizational actors despite SPL being an externally-mandated, unavoidable policy. Our key contributions are to study attributions associated with under-considered external policy, highlight the unintended intra-organizational variations in these attributions, and explore how the co-existence of varying actor attributions impacts policy implementation.