Redrawing Foucault's social ontology

I propose that Foucault‟s works, since he wrote Discipline and Punish, rely on an implicit meta-theory that is compatible with the fundamentals of Critical Realism. To this end I examine the status of truth, methodology and social ontology used by Foucault. If this thesis is correct, then a critical realist reading of Michel Foucault would avoid some of the pitfalls that have been attributed to his works - such as constructivism, determinism, localism, and reductionism. Moreover, this understanding of Foucault‟s works would also offer novel and challenging perspectives for researchers adopting a Foucauldian and/or critical realist study of organizations

'Ethics' as a discursive resource for identity work

This article analyses how participants in a not-for-profit service organization (the `Incubator') drew on understandings of 'ethics' in order to make sense of their individual and collective selves. Identities are theorized as being constituted within discursive regimes, and notions of ethics are conceived as discursive resources on which individuals and groups may draw in their attempts to author versions of their self and organizational narratives. We show how conceptions of ethics were a rich vein on which organizational members drew to elaborate narratives that legitimated particular modes of working and which cohered an otherwise quite disparate community of individuals. The research contribution of this article is twofold. First, we discuss how a discourse focused on ethics may be a strategic resource for identity work. Second, we analyse how talk and writing about issues of ethics are implicated in relations of power and ongoing struggles for control over organizations conceived as discursive spaces. In so doing, this article advances our understanding of ethics as discursively complex constructions, which require the micro-analysis of language practices in situated contexts for actio

Free Riding in Australia

Free-riding has long been a contentious issue in Australian industrial relations. This article gauges the nature and location of free-riding in Australian workplaces, drawing on the 2004 Australian Worker Representation and Participation Survey. Of the 39.2 percent of employees who could join a union in their workplace and who do not, 51.7 percent may be characterized as deliberately free-riding. A similar proportion of employees may be described as 'passive beneficiaries', for whom the costs of membership are greater than the benefits, or for whom the net benefit is not perceived to be positive. Although free-riding is found to reduce as age and tenure increase, and to increase with higher income, supervisory responsibilities and full-time employment status, when free-riding is regressed against a range of personal and workplace characteristics only tenure and supervisory responsibilities retain significance. In general, instrumental motivations prevail over the ideological, personal, organizational and worker characteristics included in this analysis. The implications of these findings for union renewal in the current context are discussed