Ola Bergström

Exercising Social Responsibility in Downsizing: Enrolling and Mobilizing Actors at a Swedish High-Tech Company

This paper critically examines the claim made by previous research that companies exercise corporate social responsibility (CSR) by responding to stakeholder interests. It is based on a field study of the events following the announcement of collective redundancies at a Swedish high-tech company. Although more than 10,000 workers were dismissed, the company was accepted as being socially responsible. The study reveals that this outcome was the result of a process whereby corporate representatives managed to enrol and mobilize a network of actors into being faithful to, and defending, their definition of social responsibility. This indicates that a company can assume an active role in the construction of the same network of actors that it is asked to respond to and impose upon other actors its own definition of what it means to be socially responsible. As a result, the translation of CSR within the network of actors may reinforce the powerful position of the company, rather than curb it.

Organizing sustainable development : From diffusion to translation

Policy changes towards global sustainable development have important consequences for how these policies are organized. New and alternative models of organizing tend to emphasize indirect control r ...

Irish Butchers Rather than Irish Meat: Trade Union Responses to Agency Work in Sweden

Trade unions are often considered as being against the use of agency workers in the workplaces that they represent. As opposed to standard permanent employment, temporary agency work is often regarded as a more precarious form of work that serves the purposes of employers seeking to reduce labour costs, enhance flexibility and avoid employment regulation. However, trade unions may also see benefits of using agency workers as experience of them increases. When examining how agency workers are established in an organization, the mechanisms available to resolve inconsistencies between the perceived benefits and disadvantages needs to be recognized. Rather than conceiving of trade unions as being opposed or in favour of the use of agency workers, the analysis of trade union responses needs to be grounded in a different perspective. This article is an attempt to formulate such a perspective on trade union responses to agency work as being based on understanding the process of establishment rather than polarized responses. The argument is supported by an empirical study of a food manufacturing company in Sweden that increasingly turned to agency workers as a source of labour.

Workforce reduction across borders: The role of legal frameworks:

This article reports on a case study of a Swedish multinational corporation where human resource practices were successfully transferred to its foreign subsidiaries in the context of extensively regulated host country institutional environments, offering an opportunity to provide a deeper understanding of the role of legal frameworks when transferring human resource practices within multinational corporations. The findings indicate that the transfer of human resource practices was not simply a matter of passively adapting to host country legal frameworks. A more balanced conceptualisation of the role of legal frameworks in human resource practice transfer is needed, including a view of law as negotiable and open to interpretation and that host country institutional environments can also contribute to and support multinational corporations to transfer human resource practices across foreign subsidiaries.

Increasing commitment after downsizing: the role of involvement and voluntary redundancies

ABSTRACT Workforce reduction is often found to have a negative impact on the remaining workers. This study examines a case where organizational commitment increased among the remaining workers after a workforce reduction programme. Following the process in which the workforce reduction programme was implemented, the paper identifies several elements in the way the workforce reduction was implemented that may have contributed to the increasing commitment among the remaining workers. More specifically, the involvement of workers’ representatives, the way the workforce reduction was communicated, how the future of the workplace was framed and how workers were offered a choice to leave voluntarily, were identified as important for the remaining workers’ reactions. The paper thus contributes to previous research by adding to our understanding of how involvement and the nature of voluntary redundancies can affect the remaining workers, and can therefore also provide more specific recommendations to change managers of how to manage redundancies in a way that does not reduce the capability of the company in the future.