Explaining workers’ resistance against a health and safety programme: An understanding based on hierarchical and social accountability

The seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of workers’ resistance to health and safety measures has been explained in various ways, for example through production or efficiency pressure, risk-taking behaviours or problematic safety cultures. This article addresses resistance but analyses it through the lens of hierarchical and social accountability. In a case study of a Swedish paper mill, a health and safety programme is resisted by workers even though it enjoys support from the local trade union. Explanations for this is found in the socialising form of accountability that conditions how workers perceive of work-related health and safety. The aspects of work identity, facilitation and visibility are identified and understood in terms of accountability. Who you are, how you perform work, and what is visualised is filtered and evaluated through horizontal relationships rather than in terms of hierarchical accountability to the company.publishedVersio

Organizational sustainability identity: Constructing oneself as sustainable

In the literature, organizational sustainability identity tends to be treated as something that is ‘engineered’ within business organizations through control, reporting, target setting, strategic communication, and other instruments. Through a case study of a company mainly active within the recycling industry, an alternative understanding is given. A distinct organizational sustainability identity is, rather, a social construct based on perceptions of the core operations as “sustainable in themselves” and collaborative work with customers that is perceived as entailing sustainable solutions. Understood in this way, organizational sustainability identity has relatively little to do with formal controls such as codes, policies, reports used by management to position the company as sustainable. Rather, for organizational members, the process of constructing oneself as sustainable builds on convictions about the core operations and the possession of specific capabilities manifested in customer relations. The article adds to current literature through its constructivistic approach and through identifying underlying beliefs that condition the process of forming an organizational sustainability identity

Explaining workers’ resistance against a health and safety programme: An understanding based on hierarchical and social accountability

The seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of workers’ resistance to health and safety measures has been explained in various ways, for example through production or efficiency pressure, risk-taking behaviours or problematic safety cultures. This article addresses resistance but analyses it through the lens of hierarchical and social accountability. In a case study of a Swedish paper mill, a health and safety programme is resisted by workers even though it enjoys support from the local trade union. Explanations for this is found in the socialising form of accountability that conditions how workers perceive of work-related health and safety. The aspects of work identity, facilitation and visibility are identified and understood in terms of accountability. Who you are, how you perform work, and what is visualised is filtered and evaluated through horizontal relationships rather than in terms of hierarchical accountability to the company

The professional logic of sustainability managers : Finding underlying dynamics

The role of the Sustainability Manager (SM) is expanding. Whether SMs are turning into a new profession is under debate. Pointing to the need for a distinct professional logic to qualify as a profession, we identify what is contained within a professional logic of SMs. Through analyzing ambiguities present in the role of the SMs, we show that there is no specific distinct professional logic of SMs, but rather a meta-construct building on market, bureaucratic, and sustainability logics. In addition, we point to the complex configurations of and relationships between these underlying logics. The complexities also explain why the SMs differ from traditional professions and why it is problematic to talk about a ‘SM profession’. Rather, SMs are ‘organizational professionals’. The article builds on 21 interviews with SMs working for Swedish companies