Marianne Forman

The Social Shaping of the Participation of Employees in Environmental Work within Enterprises - Experiences from a Danish Context

The paper deals with the shaping of the participation of employees in environmental work within enterprises. The paper is based on two case studies on Danish enterprises, which, as part of the development of their environmental work, emphasized employee involvement. The cases show that it is difficult to maintain the participation of employees in environmental work, even in enterprises with an intention to do so. The cases contribute to the identification of those situations during the shaping of environmental work in an enterprise where choices concerning employee participation are made: (1) The need of management to involve employees in the environmental work; (2) The competence building among employees and local supervisors; and (3) The stabilization of the environmental work into routines and structures. The theoretical approach draws on organizational theory emphasizing the connection between environmental strategies, measures and competence needs, and the shaping of the participation of employees as social processes formed by the existing culture and the pressure generated by the preventive environmental work.

Inertia and change: lean construction and health and safety work on construction sites

Lean construction has been articulated as a concept that can solve health and safety (H&S) problems at construction sites. The question is whether it is that simple. Lean construction and H&S work can be perceived as two different societal change programmes. The focus in this article is on how organizations implement the change programmes and what new forms of practice they stabilize as a result of the implementation process. In particular, the stabilization of new routines for coupling production planning and H&S work are investigated. Applied theories lie within the areas of change processes in organizations, H&S and construction management. The method was based on three qualitative case studies. Three major Danish contractors were involved in the investigation, and for each contractor a construction project was studied on site over a six-month period. Contractors are project-based companies and it seemed that the change programmes and the stabilized new practices that relate production planning and H&S work at construction sites were dependent on the relationship between the functional departments at the company and the construction project, the organizational location of the key actors that drive the change programmes, the ‘softness’ of the concepts that are implemented and the perception of H&S.

Environmental Management in Product Chains

The product chain — the chain of interacting suppliers and customers, which together make up the activities from raw material extraction to handling of waste connected to a product — plays an important role in the shaping and management of environmental aspects connected to the production and consumption of a product, for example, a piece of clothing. To illustrate, with lack of environmental focus, a retail chain may only be willing to pay a certain price for the product because their business strategy focuses on price competition with the other retailers. Therefore the retail chain does not care about the environmental protection measures taken by their suppliers and the retail chain procurement persons do not control the environmental aspects of the manufacturing at the suppliers’ facilities. In contrast, as an example of proactive environmental management, a manufacturing company may initiate direct supply of organic cotton from a number of small farmers in order to be able to protect their own workers during the manufacturing of T-shirts from the cotton.