Resistance at the top: exploring re-railing in meetings

This study explores the perpetual struggle between policymakers and bureaucrats in top-level meetings within organizations. We examine how senior bureaucrats resist their superiors’ policymaking and introduce the concept of ‘re-railing’ to identify senior bureaucrats’ resistance by redirecting the organization when a top-leader’s policymaking strays from established norms or goals. The research, based on 27 interviews and 3-year ethnographic fieldwork in Israeli military headquarters, identifies two main re-railing strategies: open resistance during meetings and subversive actions between meetings. Bureaucrats who maintained deference rituals while re-railing often achieved favorable outcomes. Findings reveal top-leadership meetings as practices of contest rather than alignment, thereby unmasking the fragility of leaders’ control. Rather than depicting meetings as primarily decision-making spaces, the study suggests they can be understood as recursive sites where frontstage deference rituals coexist with backstage struggles of policymaking. The findings bear implications for literature on policymaking, strategy-as-practice, and the underpinnings of organizational meetings.