ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how executive search has legitimated its intermediary function within highly skilled elite labour markets through, firstly, normalising the need for such a set of services and, secondly, through qualifying the nature of executive search services and who delivers them. It examines forms of institutional work that operate beyond formal regulatory bodies that are important in facilitating the legitimisation of executive search. The first form of institutional work that needed to be accomplished in order to legitimise executive search's intermediary position in elite labour markets was to position the new profession as the accepted, and indeed expected, form of elite labour market intermediation. The second form of institutional work necessary to legitimise the intermediary function of executive search within elite labour markets centres on specifying what service clients can expect when engaging an executive search firm to seek talent.
