Corporate Responsibility and a Firm's Reasons for Acting

Standards have become widespread regulatory tools that promote global trade, innovation, efficiency, and quality. They contribute significantly to the creation of safe, reliable, and high-quality services and technologies to ensure human health, environmental protection, or information security. Yet intentional deviations from standards by organizations are often reported in many sectors, which can either contribute to or challenge the measures of safety and quality they are designed to safeguard. Why then, despite all potential consequences, do organizations choose to deviate from standards in one way or another? This book uses structuration theory—covering aspects of both structure and agency—to explore the organizational conditions and contradictions under which different types of deviance occur. It also provides empirical explanations for deviance in organizations that go beyond an understanding of individual misbehaviour where mainly a single person is held responsible. Case studies of software developing organizations illustrate insightful generalizations on standards as a mechanism of sensemaking, resource allocation, and sanctioning, and provide ground to rethink corporate responsibility when deviating from standards in the ‘audit society’.

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Employee Satisfaction in Labor-Owned and Managed Workplaces: Helping Climate and Participation Spillover to Non-Owners

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13063278 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (6) ◽

pp. 3278

Author(s):

Renée De Reuver ◽

Brigitte Kroon ◽

Damian Madinabeitia Olabarria ◽

Unai Elorza Iñurritegui

Keyword(s):

Survey Data ◽

Corporate Responsibility ◽

Employee Satisfaction ◽

Multivariate Analyses ◽

Archival Data ◽

Temporary Employees ◽

Employment Contracts ◽

Employee Wellbeing ◽

Worker Cooperatives ◽

Different Levels

In contrast to shareholder-owned organizations, worker-owned cooperative organizations foster employee wellbeing such as employee satisfaction as an important outcome by itself. Due to expansions and economic fluctuations, larger worker-owned cooperations nowadays use mixtures of employment contracts resulting in varying shares of co-owners, contracted and temporary employees in workplaces. In the current paper, we research if this situation challenges the moral commitment of worker cooperatives to their employees, which derive from the cooperative philosophy on corporate responsibility. Where previous research contrasted employee wellbeing in worker cooperatives with share- holder owner organizations, this paper describes how various shares of co-owners in workplaces change mediating processes of helping climate and workplace participation and ultimately result in different levels of employee satisfaction. Archival data combined with survey data of 5907 employees in 99 hypermarkets were tested with multivariate analyses, and indicated that the helping climate and workplace participation positively mediated the association between the share of co-owners in hypermarkets and employee satisfaction. The findings imply that traditional worker-owned cooperatives, where a majority of all workers are owners, had more success in fostering cooperative values as a strategic outcome.

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