Regulating Grand Challenges: The Evolution of Human Resource Managers' Framing of the UK Gender Pay Gap Regulations

It has been argued that the absence of research into how HR practitioners interact with the legal context is an important omission in HRM scholarship. Drawing on longitudinal interview data, this paper addresses this research gap by examining how HR managers frame a new legal mandate, namely the gender pay gap regulations, and how those frames evolve over time. The study finds that HR managers seek to make sense of the regulations through a diagnostic frame of organisational risk composed of three elements, namely uncertainty, ambiguity, and opportunity cost. Two types of prognostic frame are also invoked to understand the regulations, firstly as a risk to be mitigated through normalisation, neutralisation, and disassociation, and secondly, as an opportunity to be leveraged as an impetus for change and an enhancer of HR's influence. The study sheds light on the factors that affect the nature and evolution of frames, including the extent of stakeholder interest and internal engagement.