Juliane Reinecke

University of Oxford | OX · Saïd Business School

We study the influence of a pervasive Western organizational mentality – clock-time orientation – in market-based models for human development. While a linear, clock-time orientation optimized for markets is meant to enhance efficiency, coordination and control, it may be unsuitable for managing emergent, complex and indeterminate processes such as...

While the deliberative democracy approach to ethics seeks to bridge universalist reason and contextual judgment to explain the emergence of intersubjective agreements, it remains unclear how these two are reconciled in practice. We argue that a sensemaking approach is useful for examining how ethical truces emerge in equivocal situations. To unders...

Global labour governance has typically been approached from either industrial relations scholars focusing on the role of organised labour or social movement scholars focusing on the role of social movement organisations in mobilising consumption power. Yet, little work has focused on the interaction of the two. Using an exploratory case study of th...

While scholars have explained how business has increasingly taken on regulatory roles to address social and environmental challenges, less attention has been given to the process of how business is made responsible for wicked problems. Drawing on a study of ‘conflict minerals’ in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we examine the process through whic...

Social movement scholars typically have focused either on how social movements strategically use collective action frames to confront targets and mobilize supporters, or on how targets respond to social movements. Few have captured the interactional dynamics between the two. This neglect tends to obscure how an extant collective action frame may sh...

Processes are fundamental to supply chains and their management. Yet, traditional research approaches to supply chain management (SCM) reflect only a limited understanding of process, offering accounts that overlook the constitutive role of dynamically interrelated processes and how their interplay over time shapes the trajectories of supply chains...

With the looming planetary emergency, the future will be anything but an extension of the past. Yet theorizing the future poses a peculiar problem. By definition, it is not present yet. The conundrum of the future is that it requires conceptualizing and theorizing what is not (yet) observable and does not (yet) exist. Scholars have called for more...

The effectiveness of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in tackling grand social and environmental challenges depends on productive dialogue among diverse parties. Facilitating such dialogue in turn entails building common ground in form of joint knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions. To explore how such common ground can be built, we study the ro...

This curated debate provides a discussion on impact and its relation to practice-based scholarship, i.e., scholarship grounded in the social theories of practice. Five experienced senior scholars reflect on conceptualizations of impact, how it can be created and disseminated, and on the role of practice-based scholarship in this process. The author...

One of the greatest challenges of multi-stakeholder partnerships lies in forging a shared understanding and obtaining and sustaining commitment among parties representing different interests and goals. While previous studies have emphasised the importance of developing shared frames for enabling collaboration and collective action through frame ali...

In recent years transnational private regulators have emerged and multiplied. In this book, experts from various academic disciplines offer empirically grounded case studies and theoretical insights into the evolution and resilience of these bodies through crises. Transnational private regulators display considerable flexibility if compared to publ...

Care—concern for and attending to the needs of the particular other we take responsibility—requires enacting time in a way that clashes with the industrial ‘clock time’ dominating our lives. Ethicists of care have highlighted the tensions between the temporalities involved in caring as a situated, relational and processual practice and the organiza...

Transnational labour governance is in urgent need of a new paradigm of democratic participation, with those who are most affected - typically workers - placed at the centre. To achieve this, principles of industrial democracy and transnational governance must come together to inform institutions within global supply chains. This book traces the dev...

Globalisation has placed democratic institutions under severe pressure as economic actors seek to take advantage of the disjuncture between national political governance and transnational economic activity. This chapter provides an introduction and overview as to the key themes to be addressed in the book. In particular, we highlight the debate bet...

Transnational labour governance is in urgent need of a new paradigm of democratic participation, with those who are most affected - typically workers - placed at the centre. To achieve this, principles of industrial democracy and transnational governance must come together to inform institutions within global supply chains. This book traces the dev...

Central to our argument is that “representation gaps” may be filled to some extent by alliances being built by actors at different points in the supply chain and based on the two different logics of representation: representation as structure and representation as claim. Using the Accord as the empirical context, Chapter 5 analyses how and when rep...

Institutions of transnational industrial democracy are emerging, as demonstrated in the book. However, the relationship between these transnational structures and national systems has often been overlooked. Chapter 7 thus focuses on the relationship between transnational industrial democracy and national institutions in Bangladesh: the relationship...

The supply chain model has become the dominant mode of production in the globalised economy. While much attention has been placed on the downwards economic pressures of the model, little attention has been placed on the consequences for democratic participation. This chapter casts light on this area by examining how the supply chain model undermine...

Transnational labour governance is in urgent need of a new paradigm of democratic participation, with those who are most affected - typically workers - placed at the centre. To achieve this, principles of industrial democracy and transnational governance must come together to inform institutions within global supply chains. This book traces the dev...

Transnational labour governance is in urgent need of a new paradigm of democratic participation, with those who are most affected - typically workers - placed at the centre. To achieve this, principles of industrial democracy and transnational governance must come together to inform institutions within global supply chains. This book traces the dev...

This Chapter brings together key themes running through the book. Its central argument is that the Rana Plaza disaster initiated a number of responses which had at their centre the aim of building institutions for worker representation across global supply chains: transnational industrial democracy. However, to adapt to the political and economic c...

While much attention has been paid to creating deliberative and representational institutions at the transnational level, little focus has been placed on the creation of representative structures at the workplace level. Chapter 8 explores mechanisms of developing transnational industrial democracy at the workplace level. Efforts aimed at promoting...

The Rana Plaza disaster did not happen as an isolated incident: it was just the latest and largest of a series of fatal incidents in the Bangladesh garments sector. This chapter seeks to locate why such deadly events were associated with the Bangladeshi sector and identifies the key obstacles to achieving meaningful worker representation. In additi...

Chapter 3 focuses on the challenges and opportunities of transnational worker representation and their consequences for the development of more democratic governance institutions. We examine these from two key theoretical perspectives. Starting from the notion of associational democracy, we differentiate between two logics of democratic representat...

Chapter 6 explores in greater detail why transnational industrial democracy yields a different approach to labour governance by presenting a structured comparison between the Bangladesh Accord for Fire and Building Safety (the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (the Alliance). The latter was a parallel initiative set by 29 mainly...

Organization Theory is an academic journal dedicated to the development and dissemination of novel theory in the domain of organizational scholarship. At the same time, an increasing chorus of organizational scholars have advocated for “impact”—broadly defined as producing societal benefit beyond the realm of academia. In this editorial, we questio...

Wicked problems are causally complex, lack definite solutions, and re-emerge in different guises. This paper discusses how new ways of organizing emerge to tackle changing manifestations of wicked problems. Focusing on the wicked problem of poverty, we conducted a longitudinal study of Fe y Alegria (FyA), one of the world’s largest non-governmental...

Time and temporality are central to strategy and strategic management. Yet, relatively little attention has been paid to what organizational members do to shape temporal phenomena that are important for strategic outcomes. In this essay, we define temporal work as any individual, collective, or organizational effort to influence, sustain or redirec...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) aspirations by companies have been identified as a motivating factor for active employee participation in CSR implementation. However, a failure to practise what one preaches can backfire and lead to attribution of hypocrisy. Drawing on a qualitative study of an award-winning sustainability pioneer in the cosme...

Private governance raises important questions about democratic representation. Rule making is rarely based on electoral authorisation by those in whose name rules are made—typically a requirement for democratic legitimacy. This requires revisiting the role of representation in input legitimacy in transnational governance, which remains underdevelop...

Despite growing attention to framing contests as important discursive struggles in articulating societal challenges and their solutions, most research focuses on competition over which frame becomes dominant. The process of how macro-level master frames themselves are subject to processes of meaning elaboration is less well understood, yet central...

Despite growing attention to framing contests as important discursive struggles in articulating societal challenges and their solutions, most research focuses on competition over which frame becomes dominant. The process of how macro-level master frames themselves are subject to processes of meaning elaboration is less well understood, yet central...

Private governance raises important questions about democratic representation. Rule-making is rarely based on electoral authorisation by those in whose name rules are made-typically a requirement for democratic legitimacy. This requires revisiting the role of representation in input legitimacy in transnational governance, which remains underdevelop...

Moments of crisis may serve as critical junctures for imagining alternatives. As the future has become increasingly volatile and precarious in these unsettled times of pandemic, climate emergency, rising inequality and an ever looming digital (r)evolution, there is a great need and opportunity to develop theory that can guide society towards its fu...

In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide an illustrative overview of how food has been approached in organization studies. We focus on the organizing of food, that is the organizational efforts that leverage, shape, and transform food. Against this backdrop, we distinguish the agency of organizations and the agency of food and ex...

In this paper, we explore the specific nature of material-based legitimation and examine how it differs from other forms of legitimation. Prior studies of institutional legitimacy have predominantly focused on the discursive and iconic aspects of legitimation, with much less focus placed on the role of materiality. To advance our argument, we intro...

Time and history have emerged as prominent subjects of interest in organization studies. This volume stands testament to the recent foregrounding of time and history as focal objects of organizational study and scholarship. The precise relationship of temporality and history to processes of change remains under-theorized, and we lack a coherent set...

Process studies of organizations focus attention on how and why organizational actions and structures emerge, develop, grow or terminate over time. Time, timing, and temporality, are inherent to organizational process studies, yet time remains an under-theorized construct that has struggled to move beyond chronological conceptions of “clock” time....

The management of working conditions in global supply chains has become a pressing issue in supply chain research and practice. In absence of effective public labour regulation, most of the focus to date has been on the emergence of private labour governance that often takes the form of supplier auditing and compliance with codes of conduct. The qu...

The construct of pluralism has allowed us to see a world where parties could pursue divergent interests, sometimes to the point of conflict, and still work together to realise goals. In response to changing models of employment that are threatening many of the values and interests core to workers and society, new readings of pluralism have emerged...

Organization and management researchers praise the value of care in the workplace. However, they overlook the conflict between caring for work and for coworkers, which resonates with the dilemma of care allocation highlighted by ethicists of care. Through an in-depth qualitative study of two organizations, we examine how this dilemma is confronted...

While political CSR scholarship has focused on the role of dialogue between MNCs and civil society actors at the transnational level in creating global governance standards, we seek to understand how political CSR might play out at the “coalface” where labour rights violations occur. We draw on insights from Industrial Democracy to examine how poli...

From casualties in textile factories to child slavery on cocoa farms, firms are repeatedly involved in horrendous incidents and immoral business practices. Statutory regulation as well as entrepreneurial efforts on an individual level to improve these circumstances are limited and widely ineffective. Instead, another idea is becoming increasingly p...

This article reviews the existing literature on SWFs and the firm, focusing particular attention on the implications of the rise of SWFs strategic agility and HRM. This paper outlines three main channels through which sovereign wealth fund (SWF) investment has implications for employees. First, SWFs influence macroeconomic environments, and hence a...

Despite retailers spending significant sums on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and other related initiatives little progress is being made in terms of developing substantive improvements in working conditions for production workers. Two key weaknesses can be identified which operate on different levels: • First, at the level of production, CS...

Organizational scholars have examined how social movements generate institutional change through contentious politics. However, little attention has been given to the role of prefigurative politics. The latter collapses expressive and strategic politics so as to enact the desired future society in the present and disrupt the reproduction of institu...

Global supply chains are not just instruments for the exchange of economic goods and flow of capital across borders. They also connect people in unprecedented ways across social and cultural boundaries and have created new, interrelated webs of social relationships that are socially embedded. However, most of the existing theories of work are mainl...

Corporate social responsibility is often framed in terms of opposing constructions of the firm. These reflect, respectively, different accounts of its obligations: either to shareholders or to stakeholders (who include shareholders). Although these opposing constructions of corporate responsibility are diametrically opposed, they are also much more...

How is moral legitimacy established in pluralist contexts where multiple moral frameworks co-exist and compete? Situations of moral multiplexity complicate not only whether an organization or practice is legitimate but also which criteria should be used to establish moral legitimacy. We argue that moral legitimacy can be thought of as the property...

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Industrial Democracy are two paradigmatic approaches to transnational labour governance. They differ considerably with regards to the role accorded to the representation of labour. CSR tends to view workers as passive recipients of corporate-led initiatives, with little attention paid to the role of unions....

The aim of this essay is to revisit Guy Debord’s critical theory of the spectacle as formulated 50 years ago in the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ in light of the contemporary production of spectacles. Debord’s arguments about appearance, visibility and celebrity are echoed in the way organizations increasingly focus on their brand, image, impression,...

Qualitative Methods in Business Ethics, Corporate Responsibility, and Sustainability Research - Volume 26 Issue 4 - Juliane Reinecke, Denis G. Arnold, Guido Palazzo

The global coffee sector has seen a transformation towards more ‘sustainable' forms of production, and, simultaneously, the continued dominance of mainstream coffee firms and practices. We examine this paradox by conceptualizing the underlying process of political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) as a series of long-term, multi-dimensional in...

Sustainability transitions have been studied as complex multi-level processes, but we still know relatively little about how they can be effectively governed, especially in transnational domains. Governance of transitions is often constrained by the equivocality of sustainability goals, the idiosyncrasy of niche experiments and the multiplicity of...

While scholars have explained how business has increasingly taken on regulatory roles to address social and environmental challenges, less attention has been given to the process of how business is made responsible for wicked problems. Drawing on a study of ‘conflict minerals’ in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we examine the process through whic...

The global coffee sector has seen a transformation towards more ‘sustainable’ forms of production, and, simultaneously, the continued dominance of mainstream coffee firms and practices. We examine this paradox by conceptualizing the underlying process of political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) as a series of long-term, multi-dimensional in...

This theoretical paper explores how moral legitimacy of practices is established in contexts of moral multiplexity. Existent research conceptualizes moral legitimacy as the result of organizational fit, or surface level conformity, with a dominant societal-level moral scheme. We argue that when actors are faced with a situation of moral uncertainty...

This article extends the notion of political CSR by examining how the practice and meaning of CSR are shaped through interactions between NGOs and corporate actors. Focusing on the evolution of coffee sustainability standards, we argue that political CSR can be understood as the process of challenging and defending “value regimes”, which align and...

Research has shown that management practices are adapted and ‘made to fit’ the specific context into which they are adopted. Less attention has been paid to how organizations anticipate and purposefully influence the adaptation process. How do organizations manage the tension between allowing local adaptation of a management practice and retaining...

We examine the process through which responsibility for ‘wicked problems’ is socially constructed and attributed to particular actors. Private companies have taken on increasing responsibilities for what were previously considered public issues. However, what counts as public or private responsibilities especially in the context of wicked problems...

We study the influence of a pervasive Western organizational mentality – clock-time orientation – in market-based models for human development. While a linear, clock-time orientation optimized for markets is meant to enhance efficiency, coordination and control, it may be unsuitable for managing emergent, complex and indeterminate processes such as...

In this paper we discuss the relation of embodied protest and public space in Occupy London. We draw on Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer – the excluded included life embodied by the figure of the homeless, refugee and so forth – to analyze how in protest camps embodied protest relates to resistance against sovereign power . Drawing on primary dat...

Global supply chains are part of the corporate strategy of many multinational companies, with often adverse effects on labor conditions. While employment relations scholars focus on a production-oriented paradigm, revolving around interactions between employers, workers, and government, much of the activism motivating the development of private lab...

This article seeks to demonstrate the value of an “interactional framing” perspective to study social movement dynamics. While the notion of framing has been used to study how social movement activists strategically use frames to achieve a specific purpose, much less attention has been paid to how frames emerge from interactions. Drawing on a quali...

Multi-stakeholder standards co-developed by business and civil society have been celebrated as powerful tools to promote ethical governance. Democratic participation rooted in Habermasian discourse ethics has been argued as a powerful way to ensure fair outcomes. However, the desire to be fair in developing standards may not always translate into f...

The “value problem” or the process through which actors assign value to goods is central to the functioning of markets. While economists have emphasized market price as the principal measure of value, sociologists and organizational theorists have focused more on the influence of the social, cultural and ethical values on value. Few studies however...

In this paper, we investigate the role of key industry and other stakeholders and their embeddedness in particular national contexts in driving the proliferation and co-evolution of sustainability standards, based on the case of the global coffee industry. We find that institutional conditions and market opportunity structures in consuming countrie...

The growing number of voluntary standards for governing transnational arenas is presenting standards organizations with a problem. While claiming that they are pursuing shared, overarching objectives, at the same time, they are promoting their own respective standards that are increasingly similar. By developing the notion of ‘standards markets,’ t...

The “value problem” or the process through which actors assign value to goods is central to the functioning of markets. While economists have emphasized market price as the principal measure of value, sociologists and organizational theorists have focused more on the influence of the social, cultural and ethical values on value. Few studies however...

The cocoa industry is suffering from a number of interconnected problems: Be this the over-aged tree stocks, the repercussions of disease and pest infestation, the political instability in West Africa, a lack of agricultural professionalism, an absence of infrastructure, or the shortcomings of the educational and financial systems in the cocoa-grow...

Amid concerns for a regulatory void in transnational fields, the principle of private regulation has become institutionalized. Many sectors have seen the emergence of multiple and overlapping standards. When comparing the sectors, there is considerable variation in standard multiplicity. We build on three institutional perspectives that have been...