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Turning lead into gold: How conflict shapes field settlements in Canadian mining
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Author: Sean Buchanan, U. of Manitoba
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This study examines the role of conflict in a field settlement over time. Drawing from a 20 year longitudinal study of a settlement around the issue of social and environmental sustainability in Canadian mining, I elucidate how conflict between incumbent firms and an internal governance unit (IGU) shapes and modifies a settlement in unexpected ways. In contrast to research that views conflict as destructive to field settlements, I demonstrate how conflict serves multiple and evolving roles in field settlements. Specifically, in periods where an IGU has a high degree of power, conflict can be ‘productive’ for a settlement by working to increase the legitimacy of a settlement to both incumbents and challengers in the field. In periods of low power for an IGU, conflict may be ‘destructive’ for a settlement and may lead to an internal weakening of the settlement which hurts its legitimacy to challengers in the field. However, I demonstrate how this destructive aspect of conflict can be mitigated by resistance strategies aimed at restoring the legitimacy of the settlement to challengers. I discuss the implications of my findings for research on settlement durability in organizational fields defined by contested issues and IGUs in settlement processes.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Institutional and Emotional Dynamics on the Dark Side of Legitimacy: Anti-Corruption at SMEs
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Author: Stefan Schembera, U. of Zurich
Author: Andreas Georg Scherer, U. of Zurich
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We explore the dark side of legitimacy, i.e., situations when legitimacy is largely taken-for- granted while negative consequences for society are not revealed. We build on a case study of anti-corruption at small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Normally, SMEs do not receive much public attention and are not scrutinized. As a result, their legitimacy is not contested, but taken for granted. By contrast, MNCs often have problems with societal approval due to higher public scrutiny, NGO activism, and frequent scandals reported in the media. We identify that, typically, SMEs seek to maintain and justify their status-quo of taken-for-granted legitimacy by applying a set of rationalizations (e.g., “we are too small to matter”; “if everybody else does it...”). We argue that such SMEs avoid anti-corruption policies and public surveillance to delib-erately “stay off the anti-corruption radar”. Surprisingly though, our inductive study reveals that there are two dynamic paths away from the dark side of legitimacy, and that emotions tend to be a crucial trigger for such dynamics. We thus contribute to the institutional theory literature by arguing that emotions, both positive and negative, are crucial for developing theory on institu-tional change in the absence of clear or dominant institutional pressures.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Institutional legacies: Examining the interplay between emotions and imprinting
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Author: Mia Raynard, WU Vienna U. of Economics and Business
Author: Royston Greenwood, U. of Alberta & Edinburgh U.
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Finalist for OMT Division Best Paper on Environmental and Social Practices Award
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Employing a longitudinal, mixed-method research design, we examine how variations in the imprinting processes of three political eras spawned different contemporary understandings of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in China. As an authoritative regime, China provides an illuminating counterpoint to studies from Western capitalist contexts – which tend to emphasize highly agentic processes wherein entrepreneurial individuals creatively navigate, and selectively acquire resources from, their external environments. Such depictions are complicated in the Chinese context because of the presence of the Communist Party of China, whose influence permeates every facet of society. Our comparative examination revealed important differences in how the regimes mobilized and regulated emotions in support of political objectives and institutional projects. By articulating these differences, our study provides theoretical leverage for explaining why certain imprints may be more resilient than others.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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The human-ecological apparatus: Extraction and error in an Alaskan commercial fishery
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Author: Jason Good, EGADE Business School
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The dearth of management research on sustainable development in natural resource extraction contexts is problematic in the face of increasing global rates of change in ecosystem dynamics. This study aims to help remedy this mismatch by both analyzing the human and natural organization that constitutes natural resource extraction contexts, as well as how that organization can produce undesired effects on natural systems. This study asks, how does organization constituted by both humans and nature form in a natural resource extraction context? How does this organization result in undesired effects on natural systems? To answer these questions, this study builds an analytical framework from the literature on sociomateriality and then applies it to qualitative interview, observational, and archival data from a two-year ethnography of commercial fishing practices in an Alaskan trawl fleet. This application reveals an organizational whole constituted by both human and ecological activity, as well as internal mechanics in this context. Drawing from the sociomaterial literature, this study theorizes the whole as a ‘human-ecological apparatus,’ which is a mode of natural resource production that operates through the organized entanglement of human and non- human activity. The findings further suggest that apparatuses have the paradoxical effect of simultaneously creating assemblages and silos: they merge disparate activities into assemblages, yet at the same time they render their relationship more abstract. The findings suggest that this effect is due to the indirect nature of the materiality that the apparatus produces, and through which it operates. Effects of the assembled yet abstractly- related activities tends to ancillary, and often unexpected, negative impacts on the assembled activities. We argue that such apparatuses, and such effects, prevalent both in natural resources extraction contexts and organizational contexts more generally.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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