An ethnographic study of business ethics in a multinational biopharmaceutical company

Today’s business world is increasingly globalized and increasingly complex and therefore requires companies to operate across multiple countries, cultures and modes of work. Companies are met with demands from shareholders and civil society to manage their business in a responsible and ethical way, and social media channels will ensure broadcasting of companies who fail to comply with these requests no matter where they operate. Companies are therefore keen to live up to corporate ethical standards and communicate to their environments about their ethical business conduct. Sometimes, such efforts materialize into ‘ethics offices’, which are corporate functions with the responsibility for ‘ethics programs’ that are put in place to ensure ethical conduct within companies. With empirical point of departure in one such ethics program in one company and theoretical point of departure in the concept of ‘Recontextualization’ and ‘Ordinary Ethics’, this study investigates what happens when an ethics program travels to business units abroad and how it is recontextualized within these new national contexts. The study explores business ethics as a practical endeavor within different ‘vocational communities of practice’ in the company and further investigates how the ethics program is interpreted and enacted within these communities. The aim is to contribute to academic communities with a theoretically and empirically founded understanding of ethics as practice and of local interpretations of a business ethics program. The aim is also to contribute with insights for companies who seek to ensure adherence to such ethics programs across complex organizations

An ethnographic study of organizational change in a bank

This dissertation is based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of organizational changes in a Nordic bank. Taking as a point of departure, an empirical observation of lower-level organizational members consistently identifying other organizational changes as radical than those indicated by top management, this study pursues how organizational members construct organizational changes through an emic approach. The field of organizational change has historically been characterized by a number of dominant dichotomies, such as ‘planned – emergent change’, however, this study explores and challenges the existing dichotomies. With an aim of going beyond the existing dichotomies of the field, the study draws on process philosophy. Grounded in the assumption that phenomena are always in a state of becoming, this dissertation contributes to the field with a study of organizational changes which are not a priori determined organizational changes such as mergers, acquisitions, or reorganizations. Instead, organizational changes are viewed as fluid phenomena that are part of everyday work activities, constructed by the organizational members themselves

Transnational Struggles to Change International Taxation

In the contemporary age of global capitalism, international taxation – the taxation of income earned from cross-border economic activity – has become a high-stakes issue. International taxation touches upon the foundations of modern society as an arena for struggle between nation-states and other stakeholders concerning government revenues, economic markets, political ideas, and – above all – social change. However, most existing research on international taxation and, indeed, on the global political economy at large, is dedicated to studying the effects of stable structures and sees change through periodic snapshots of evolving orders. As a result, the dynamic processes enabling and governing change remain underexplored. This dissertation promotes a change-oriented approach to studying complex international contexts that unites insights from International Political Economy on global political-economic orders and from Sociology on micro-social struggles over power and authority. These insights enable an analysis of the dynamics of change in international taxation, and I set out a conceptual language emphasizing the modes, contexts, and sources of change . To develop my analysis, I apply a relational, qualitative and case-based methodology to study developments in international taxation across four levels: Global tax governance, the transnational field of corporate taxation, expert policymaking, and professional practice. I find that systemic change is underway in the core institutional foundations of global tax governance, namely an expansion of multilateral cooperation, institutionalized enforcement, and sovereignty-pooling by states. These changes are entwined with changes in state activism, geopolitical shifts, austerity, populism, and economic transformations. Those broad political changes reverberate in the transnational field of corporate taxation, which has seen a swift ascent of critical activist influence, politicization, destabilization of the dominant professional-technical logic, and increasing conflict over established social hierarchies. Expert policymaking has largely resisted the challenges of critical outsiders, but its historical isolation from popular politics and new expert resources is under scrutiny, opening possibilities for new patterns of influence in technical expert proceedings. In professional practice, the core of everyday work remains remarkably stable despite, and because of, broader social change, as professional identities are entwined with transnational (political) institutions

Evidence from the Italian Electricity Sector

It is generally accepted that institutions are important for economic development. However, whether the performance of regulated utilities within a country is affected by the quality of institutions is yet to be investigated thoroughly. We analyse how the quality of regional institutions impact performance of Italian electricity distribution utilities. We use a stochastic frontier analysis approach to estimate cost functions and examine the performance of 108 electricity distribution utilities from 2011 to 2015. This unique dataset was constructed with the help of the Italian Regulator for Energy, Networks, and Environment. In addition, we use a recent dataset on regional institutional quality in Italy. We present evidence that utilities in regions with better government effectiveness, responsiveness towards citizens, control of corruption, and rule of law, also tend to be more cost efficient. The results suggest that national regulators should take regional institutional diversity into account in incentive regulation and efficiency benchmarking of utilities