Denis Harrisson

Intersectoral Alliance And Social Innovation: When Corporations Meet Civil Society

This article analyses an alliance between a public utility company and a consortium of Associations upholding consumer rights. The project consists of developing means in order to help customers with very low income in a collection situation by suggesting payment arrangements that would take account of their financial situation. Inter‐organizational collaboration is a way to increase the capacities of organizations and to apply leverage to existing resources so as to solve social problems more effectively by pooling together resources, skills and knowledge. We examine the making of this social innovation through the arrangements taking in three institutional dimensions: cognitive, normative and regulative. The case study shows that the legitimacy of the agreement was based on recombining the values of fairness and solidarity. The innovation process was rooted in the exchange of knowledge and access to resources based on the expertise of actors. The agreement moved beyond the experimental framework when it was diffused as a newly learned procedure which became an organizational routine.

TQM, Trade Unions and Cooperation: Case Studies in Quebec Manufacturing Plants

This paper examines the implementation of total quality management (TQM) programmes in four unionized plants where trade unions and managers join forces during the implementation process. This joint regulation between local union representatives and managers is supported at the institutional level where the state, private corporations and trade union confederations have paved the way for cooperative practices at the firm level. The economic and social situation of the firm strongly contributes to shaping the involvement of trade unions and labour in this joint regulation. The patterns of transformation resulting from the relations between management and labour are not universal, but are rather an outcome of negotiation between actors on TQM normative needs and the specifics of the social reality of the plant. The settlements between trade union officials and plant managers are experimental and are reached on a local level.