Ruth Yeoman

An Evaluative Framework for Mutual and Employee-owned Businesses

ABSTRACT Mutual and employee-owned businesses (MEOBs) continue to experience a revival in the UK, be it through the growth of building societies and financial mutuals, or the success of employee-owned businesses. In addition, government has promoted MEOBs by transferring public services into new corporate forms, citing reports of resilience and long-term success of MEOBs. Yet despite these developments, there appears to be some ambiguity as to how to evaluate the performance of MEOBs. The lack of a coherent framework that takes the values, principles and structures into account when assessing outputs and outcomes results in a narrow understanding of MEOB performance, often focused on quantitative measures irrespective of the values and principles held by these types of organizations, and indeed their purpose. In an effort to advance such work, this paper seeks to outline a framework to evaluate mutual and employee-owned businesses taking account of a variety of dimensions that affect how MEOBs do business, and the outcomes they produce, to broaden the idea of performance by joining up values and principles that are at the centre of the mutual model with the outputs and outcomes that are being created.

Fairness and Organizational Performance: Insights for Supply Chain Management

For this briefing document we review the organizational fairness literature with a focus on the supply chain context. Supply chain fairness is an under-researched topic and we seek to close this gap through a systematic literature review. We draw upon key contributions to the psychology, economics and organizations studies literature to illuminate the salient features of fairness in social and economic systems, such as supply chains. This briefing document highlights that fairness influences economic behaviour and firm performance in important ways. The literature shows that fairness in organizational practices can foster various sources competitive advantage and hence improve organizational performance. While there is a robust literature on fairness in the human resources management (HRM) domain, fairness perceptions by other stakeholder groups are underexplored and warrant further research attention. Moreover, while the business case for supply chain fairness is well established, other salient issues remain under-researched in the academic literature. We explore avenues for future research.

A Review of the Empirical Literature on Meaningful Work: Progress and Research Agenda:

Meaningful work is a topic of importance in core domains of human resource development (HRD) such as employee engagement, motivation, and personal development. However, there is little consensus over what comprises meaningful work or concerning the antecedent and outcome factors associated with meaningfulness. Prior theorizing has tended to conflate conceptual and empirical arguments, and hence, we lack clear insight into factors related to employees’ experience of meaningfulness. To address these gaps, we undertook an analysis of the empirical literature relating to meaningful work. In all, 71 studies met the inclusion criteria. We focused on the question, “What is the empirical evidence base concerning meaningful work, and how can this inform theory and practice in HRD?” The synthesis revealed dominant trends alongside significant gaps in understanding. We highlight the practical implications of our analysis for the HRD field and propose avenues for future research on meaningfulness within HRD.

Meaningful Work, by Andrea Veltman: New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. viii + 237, £55 (hardback).

of ordinary objects’ [240], some corresponding to more common-sense ways of thinking of objects, some corresponding to ways demanded by physics, it seems natural, to me at least, to understand that variability as being sensitive to a variety of more or less abstract sortals. It is unclear how a sortal-abstract perspective can account for this variety; it is easy for a sortal-perspectivalist to do so. Despite these worries, I think that this an excellent book. It is clearly written and makes a novel contribution to the metaphysics and semantics of complex objects. It is, moreover, an excellent teaching resource since it lays out many of the standard positions and solutions to the problems of ordinary objects with great clarity, before presenting the advantages (as Sattig sees it) of his hylomorphic perspectivalism.

Proliferating Meaningful Work: Meaning-Making and an Ethic of Care

Serious political attention to the organisation and content, of work is lacking. To remedy this neglect, my objective is to outline the normative content of a political and social agenda which aims at proliferating the experience of meaningfulness in all kinds of work, where meaning- fulness is structured by the bipartite value of meaningfulness. To that end, I identify the importance of each person being able to engage in the creation and maintenance of a repertoire of positive meanings, from which they draw to create the practical identities giving them a sense that their lives are worth living. Widespread participation in positive value generation requires an opportunity structure which fosters the relevant capability formation and status equality7 through institutional arrangements for democratic participation. Furthermore, positive value generation depends upon our being able to distinguish between more or less meaningful work, for which we require a critical conception of meaningful work constituted by a standpoint from where we can reflect and make judgements between different kinds of meanings and values. In order to provide the tools for evaluative meaning-making in the content of work, 1 draw upon critical social theory to specify a positive critical conception of meaningful work which distinguishes between meaningful and non-meaningful work from the standpoint of an ethic of care.

Overcoming Alienation: Irreducible Autonomy and Phronetic Techne in a Practical Rationality of Caring

Never has work appeared to be so divided, intense, separated from our personal control and divorced from our sense of who we are. From Biauners (1964) industrial blue collar workers labouring under changes to the division of labour as a consequence of automation to the ‘managed hearts’ of Hochschild’s (1983) airline attendants, the complaint is that the experience of work has been systematically deskilled and subjectified by a capitalist project which aims to increase profit by appropriating and controlling workers’ agency in the exercise of their skills and the formation of their identities. The critique that contemporary conditions of work are thoroughly alienating opposes deskiiled and subjectified work to the mastery and secure identity of craft work, but, I shall argue, this dualism presents a narrative of work as irretrievably degraded which is not consistent with work as it is experienced by workers. I shall show the limits to the opposition between alienated work and craft work by describing a floor-level of irreducible autonomy in every act of work, which reveals that there is no completely alienated work from which the possibility of autonomous action has been eliminated. I shall propose that the identification of a level of irreducible autonomy enables us to conceptualise personal autonomy in work as fundamentally relational, and the pre-condition for the exercise of political autonomy.

Capability Justice and a Politics of Meaningfulness

In structuring meaningful work using the bipartite value of meaning- fulness, I have drawn attention to how experiencing meaningfulness depends upon our being able to exercise the capabilities and status for meaningfulness, which are formed through our participation in action contexts with agonistic dimensions- By re-conceiving work in this way, we can begin to see the outlines of a programme of social and political action aimed at proliferating meaningfulness in the organisation of work. Of course, meaningful work has always existed, but in most societies it has been an ideal which aims at elite meaning or the maximal degree of meaningfulness for a few. However, a system which institutionalises elite meaning transgresses any scheme of justice which is concerned to meet fundamental human needs, including goods such as meaningful work. Hence, I argue that we should aim at egalitarian meaning or a satisficing level of meaningfulness for all. In this case, the goal is not to guarantee that everyone will find their lives to be actually meaningful, but to secure social arrangements that will provide the relevant capabilities for the functioning of meaningfulness, consistent with the demands of justice (Muirhead, 2004),

‘The Inner Workshop of Democracy’: Agonistic Democratic Practices and the Realisation of Emancipatory Potentials

In Chapter 4, I dealt with the dimension of democratic authority at the level of the organisation necessary for a system of workplace democracy to proliferate meaningful work. In this chapter, I turn to agonistic democratic practices at the level of the task. Despite an extensive literature on economic democracy (DabI, 1985; Albert & Hahnel, 2002; Boatright, 2004; Blumberg, 1968; Cohen & Rogers, 1992; Cohen, 1989; Cohen & Rogers, 1992; Schweikart, 1980; Strauss, 2006; Williamson, 2004; Bowles & Gintis, 1993; Hirst, 1994)1 much democratic theory uncritically assumes that the contemporary experience of work is inhospitable to the political mode of being, and therefore devoid of emancipatory potential.2 Despite this, I have sought to theorise how the active agency of workers can never be entirely eliminated by subjectified and divided work practices, but is, instead, intersubjectively manifested through working with others and upon objects. Furthermore, this intersubjective action gives rise to interpretive differences which will remain as pre-polirical potentials unless revealed through expressive participatory practices. However, if participatory practices are to be generative of interpretive differences, and capable of mediating those differences into positive meanings, making them available for appropriation to the meaningfulness of people’ lives, then they must possess certain characteristics, I shall argue that these characteristics can be specified from an evaluation of agonistic democratic theory.

Confronting Domination: Freedom and Democratic Authority

I argue that the proliferation of meaningful work requires the institution of a system of workplace democracy with the dimensions of democratic authority and agonistic participatory practices. In this chapter, I will explore the first dimension of democratic authority, arguing for a system grounded in the value of freedom as non- domination.

Restoring Dignity: Social Recognition in Practical Identity Formation

As human beings, we are ‘obligatorily gregarious’ (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008: 52), implying that we cannot evade our physical, social, and emotional inter-dependences, from which we derive many of our most important relationships, projects, and sources of meaning. To be inescapably social means that, although we are separate individuals, we are not sovereign. We do not pick and choose our life plans from social materials which exist apart from us — instead, we are already constituted by our relations to others with whom we co-produce and co-sustain the meanings, norms, and values of our intersubjective existence. This means that to experience our lives as meaningful, we require positive self-relation s of self-respect and self-esteem, which are intersubjectively shaped by our relations to others. But realising positive self-relations becomes problematic when our relations to others are such that our valued identifications are misrecognised, or when institutional norms and values make it difficult to achieve a sense of being a valued person, in the contemporary work of social cooperation, stable positive self- relations are increasingly difficult to experience, making the task of forming a practical self-identity a demanding project. I evaluate the limitations of the concept of self-respect in Rawlsian justice, and of the concept of self-esteem in Honneth’ theory of social recognition, both of which mediate recognition through individual achievement.