This is a case study of top management in a Swedish pulp industry at Skutskär. After decades of proactive response to change, starting in 1976 the pulp industry experienced a rapid and significant restructuring. In 1992, and after a prolonged hold on local investments, came a large‐scale investment with major labor reductions, which created a local crisis. The aim of this study is to analyze how top managers of a local business plant perceive and explain their citizenship relationship to (...) the community of the company town during a transition period from 1976 to 2007. Our study shows that too much reliance on top management cost reduction requirements and not caring, or underscoring, local social concerns created gaps and local stakeholder distrust. We discuss how prolonged distrust of the company to bear social responsibility ended up in a broken relationship between the company and the local community. Our case indicates at least two problems that must be handled for successful corporate citizenship. First, the traditional control‐oriented management view is too narrow and not adjusted to today's citizenship reality, including how to handle corporate social responsibility. Second, we can see a possibility where the conceived needs on a global corporate level may lead to situations to obscure local needs and consequences. (shrink)

The treatment of employees during downsizing and corporate restructuring raises many ethical issues. To provide a common framework for understanding ethical decisions facing organizations delivering the news of dismissal to affected employees, Integrative Social Contracts Theory and the research on social exchange was used to integrate existing research on employee dismissal. Of particular importance was determining the criteria necessary to manage the dismissal process within ethical boundaries. Three basic criteria, which together represent a variety of contractual and transactional (...) obligations, are proposed as necessary for an ethical approach to dismissal; 1) advance warning of the job loss, 2) open communication, and 3) institutionalized support services. The frequency with which organizations meet these criteria is examined using a geographically dispersed, cross-organizational sample of 770 involuntarily displaced professional employees. In addition, the effect of such an ethical approach to dismissal on individual psychological and financial outcomes is examined. Findings are discussed as they relate to the implicit contract between employee and employer and organizations' responsibility to employees during corporate restructuring. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented time in history. Surrounding this pandemic are many enormous uncertainties across the globe. Severe consequences have assessed for the incomes of almost 84% of employers and 68% of self-employed who are working and living in countries that are or have went through a phase of closing workplaces. Similarly, the global rate of unemployment is also expected to be increased in the coming years as 54% of employers worldwide are running their businesses in the hardest-hit (...) sectors. All of these clearly show the uneven impact of the Coronavirus crisis which will remarkably compound already present inequalities, difficulties, and vulnerabilities. The economic ramifications for 186 countries under the crunch of the COVID-19 pandemic is also considered tremendous for Pakistan. The core aim of this research was to test a new conceptual framework depicting the ramifications of restructuring processes carried out by management for their organizations amidst the COVID-19 pandemic on an Institute’s reputation as an employer brand. It also investigates the impact of perceived restructuring on a corporate brand promise made by the university or institute from the viewpoints of other key stakeholders and potential job seekers. The current study had proposed four hypotheses and according to the results of Structural Equation Modeling, the direct hypothesis based upon the relationship between restructuring and employer branding has been rejected. This study shows that restructuring and employer branding has a negative and insignificant effect on each other. The second direct hypothesis of the study that measures the effect of restructuring on corporate branding has been accepted. A corporate brand is a kind of a hub and it considers how an institute treats and deals with all of its stakeholders. It is different from employer brand as the perceptions of employees were the main focus. So, according to the results restructuring did not cause massive damage to the overall outlook of the institute. Furthermore, for the purpose of mediation analysis, the maximum likelihood method by bootstrapping was adopted to test the indirect hypotheses of the study. Crowdsourcing was introduced as a mediator in this study with restructuring, employer, and corporate brand all together in one framework, which is the novel aspect of this study. There are two indirect hypotheses and according to the results both of them did not show any insignificant results. Firstly, the study analyzed mediation among crowdsourcing, restructuring, and employer branding which was fully accepted as the results showed full mediation between these constructs. Secondly, the study analyzed mediation among crowdsourcing, restructuring, and corporate branding which was partially accepted as results showed partial mediation between these constructs. (shrink)

It is important to talk about corporations as a class, about trade agreements, and about government policy; but without examining specific examples of how real corporations actually shape the world to suit their purposes, we stand little chance of understanding the determinative forces behind government policy and trade agreements, and even less chance of affecting them. This article uses the metaphor of “genetics” (inherent character) to examine two major transnational corporations operating at the extremes of restructuring life.

Prior research showed that corporate divestitures could help firms restore their strategic controls and long-term focus. This suggests that divestiture activities may have implications for firms’ commitment to corporate social responsibility following divestitures. Drawing from the attention-based view of the firm, we examine this underexplored yet important research question. We propose that firms’ divestiture scale is positively associated with their commitment to post-divestiture CSR. However, this relationship is weakened among firms facing pre-restructuring financial decline and selling more (...) related businesses, but strengthened among divesting firms with a new CEO. Using a longitudinal dataset of U.S. firms, we found support for most of our hypotheses. These findings suggest that corporate divestitures may offer a meaningful path to stakeholder value creation through better CSR performance. (shrink)

The restructured globalized economy has provided women with employment opportunities. Globalisation has also meant a shift towards self-regulation of multinationals as part of the restructuring of the world economy that increases among others things, flexible employment practices, worsening of labour conditions and lower wages for many women workers around the world. In this context, as part of the global trend emphasising Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the 1980s, one important development has been the growth of voluntary Corporate (...) Codes of Conduct to improve labour conditions. This article reviews from a feminist interdisciplinary perspective the broad academic literature on women workers, covering the more classical debate on women workers in the industrialization process and entering into women workers in the global supply chains and women workers and corporate codes of conduct. The main argument is that this research on women workers is crucial to frame the issues of business ethics and in particular CSR and Codes of Conduct in the context of women in the global political economy. When this crucial knowledge is ignored, then the ethical policies of the companies also ignore the real situation of the women workers at the bottom of their supply chains. (shrink)

This issue brings together a selection of articles based on presentations at two Conferences in 1997. The aim has been 1) to offer clearer and more understandable descriptions of the major trends and relationships that are involved in the structural transformations that are occurring in food systems at all levels; 2) to help develop better theoretical and conceptual tools to aid us in analyzing such restructurings and their dynamics; and 3) to clarify a number of practical issues facing those seeking (...) to promote more sustainable and just food systems, especially at the local level. With only one exception, all the articles here focus on Western economies where food systems are highly commodified, globally integrated, corporate, and state structures have been restructured by a series of neo-liberal reforms in recent years. In pointing out the problems with these food systems, the articles also discuss various possibilities for structural reforms for more healthy, sustainable, just, and equitable food systems and societies. (shrink)

A promotion of concepts of corporate family and employee participation as well as euphemisms which stress employee-employer long-term continuity makes the loss of loyalty flowing from downsizings and mass firings as well as corporate restructurings more difficult both for the employer and employee. The promotion of reciprocal obligations between employer and employee misleads both into a belief system which is to their mutual disadvantage.Corporate semanatics that soften employment realities and the implications of dislocation with positive rhetoric increases (...) the sense of failure and guilt on the part of both employer and employee. Unrealistic expectations create hostility. If employment dislocation is seen as part of a continual economic evolution, not shrouded in semantic double-speak, loss of employment no longer becomes an outrageous afront to the dignity of those involved but rather a normal process of economic change and renewal. (shrink)

Corporations despite their status as legally fictitious persons are not such, and to confound them with real persons in even the minimal legal sense is to negate much of the force of the concept of rights when applied to the society. When corporations have rights individual rights become meaningless. While corporations may need some form of protection to make them financially feasible investments, they need not be given the full protection of rights which are assigned to the individual. A much (...) attenuated version of corporate rights is warranted. I would argue against Werhane's notion of a corporation possessing “secondary rights” which can be asserted only after the claims of individual rights have been met. Ibid., p. 62.One solution to the problems raised in this essay would be to ascribe rights to individuals only. This could occur without interfering with the financial independence of the corporation by a simple legal prescription that individuals within a corporation be held responsible for their activities and that the corporation p e r se not be blamed for individual actions. This is consistent with the judgments against the Nazi war criminals who were denied the defense of justifying their actions on the basis of following orders. Responsibility for those actions which are the result of the workings of the “invisible hand” cannot be ascribed to any individual or group of individuals. Donaldson is helpful on this point in recommending an “office of social responsibility” be created as part of the corporation to monitor those actions which otherwise escape scrutiny. Donaldson, Corporations and Morality, p. 207.A more radical solution is to restructure the corporation in such a way as to introduce the element of democracy in the workplace. Opponents would argue that such a practice would diminish the profit-making potential of the corporation by limiting the discretion of the corporate officers in making decisions. Similar arguments have been advanced against the democratic state. Yet democratic states have proven to be viable institutions capable of effective action and demonstrably more survivable than the authoritarian regimes which are the analogs of the corporation.Given the current hierarchical structure of the corporation and its ability to dissolve in the face of questions of responsibility, individual accountability is the only viable solution. This requires that members of the corporation not find cover behind the “invisible hand.” This in turn necessitates the granting of a greater degree of discretionary power to corporate functionaries at all levels. We cannot be responsible for a state of affairs over which we have no effective control. The courts would make the ultimate decision as to the assignation of responsibility in particular cases of corporate crime, with the stipulation that the ascription be to an individual and not “the corporation.” By making corporate officers individually responsible for their actions a much more effective deterrent to corporate crimes would be created. Corporations can easily afford most of the fines that are imposed on them, and corporations cannot be put in prison.The view of the corporation advanced here puts it in a legal and moral position greatly inferior to that of the individual as well as the state. Consequently, corporate needs and welfare must remain a tertiary concern. The rights of the individual must figure primarily, and the welfare of the state as preserver of those rights secondarily, in social policy decisions. The libertarian vision of the corporation is therefore a misguided result of the conflation of the corporation and the individual in the legal and moral realms. Corporations and individuals are ontologically distinct entities and must be recognized as such. The failure to do so has enabled corporations to abrogate individual rights with legal and moral impunity. Such a situation is inconsistent with the demands of a rights-based democracy. (shrink)

In recent decades, the governance of food safety, food quality, on-farm environmental management and animal welfare has been shifting from the realm of ‘the government’ to that of the private sector. Corporate entities, especially the large supermarkets, have responded to neoliberal forms of governance and the resultant ‘hollowed-out’ state by instituting private standards for food, backed by processes of certification and policed through systems of third party auditing. Today’s food regime is one in which supermarkets impose ‘private standards’ along (...) the food supply chain to ensure compliance with a range of food safety goals—often above and beyond those prescribed by government. By examining regulatory governance in Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom we highlight emerging trajectories of food governance. We argue that the imposition of the new private forms of monitoring and compliance continue the project of agricultural restructuring that began with government support for structural adjustment schemes in agriculture and that these are most evident in the UK and Australia where neoliberalism is an entrenched philosophy. However, despite Norway’s identity as a social democracy, we also identify neoliberal ‘creep’ into the system of food governance. Small-scale producers in all three nations are finding themselves increasingly subject to governance through private, market-based mechanisms that, to varying degrees, are dominated by major supermarket chains. The result is agricultural restructuring not through the traditional avenues of elected governments, but via non-elected market operatives. (shrink)

Organizational restructuring involving mass layoffs is an integral part of the corporate strategic landscape. While aimed at increasing a company’s efficiency and profitability, it often falls short of desired objectives, partly due to negative consequences for remaining employees, the so-called “survivors”. As workforce reductions may jeopardize a company’s legitimacy, we develop a model that links the change in post-restructuring employee productivity to the factors that help mitigate legitimacy issues. By using a comprehensive and innovative dataset of (...) class='Hi'>restructuring announcements reported by European companies over the post-crisis period, we analyze the moderating effect of the restructuring extent on the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and economic justification as legitimacy tools in counterbalancing the negative effects of job reduction measures. Our findings reveal that in reactive layoffs, induced by financial difficulties, initially high levels of CSR help lessen negative effects of restructuring on employee productivity in low-extent restructuring events; while in high-extent restructuring events employee productivity is supported by continuing investments in CSR. We provide evidence that both the level and dynamics of CSR practices play a significant role, and their effect on employee performance is conditional on the restructuring context. (shrink)

Adopting a comparative UK/US approach, this article argues for the need to rethink corporate bankruptcy theory in the light of developments in the finance market. It argues that these developments have produced an effective mechanism, in large cases, for selecting between companies which will be worth more if they continue to trade and companies which ought to be allowed to fail, so that corporate bankruptcy law need no longer concern itself with steering creditor choice away from a sale (...) of the business and assets and towards a restructuring. Moreover, it suggests that whilst the automatic stay remains a central tenet of corporate bankruptcy law where the market decides that the business and assets should be sold, in cases where the market sees more value if a company continues to trade, corporate bankruptcy law may operate very well without a stay as a resolution procedure for deadlocked negotiations. The article identifies that in many large restructuring cases the only liabilities that are implicated are financial liabilities, and queries the extent to which the distributional concerns of the progressive movement, and US federal bankruptcy law, apply where losses are shared amongst sophisticated financial institutions. It ends with an explanation of why the analysis is limited to large cases, an indication of areas for further research and a note of caution for the future. (shrink)

This article empirically investigates how Chinese executives and managers perceive and interpret corporate social responsibility (CSR), to what extent firms' productive characteristics influence managers' attitudes towards their CSR rating, and whether their values in favour of CSR are positively correlated to firms' economic performance. Although a large proportion of respondents express a favourable view of CSR and a willingness to participate in socially responsible activities, we find that the true nature of their assertion is linked to entrepreneurs' instincts of (...) gaining economic benefits. It is the poorly performing firms, or rather, firms with vulnerable indicators -smaller in size, State-owned, producing traditional goods and located in poorer regions that are more likely to have managers who opt for a higher CSR rating. Managers' personal characteristics per se are not significant in determining their CSR choice. Moreover, controlling for other observed variables, we find that managers' CSR orientation is positively correlated with their firms' performance. The better-off a firm is, the more likely its manager is to get involve in CSR activities. Firms with better economic performance before their restructuring would sustain higher postrestructuring performance. (shrink)

The transformation from industrial social work to corporate social responsibility points out a definite shift in the realm of social work vis-á-vis goal, objective and priorities of business. Over the past several decades social workers around the world have successfully been able to integrate with the modern production and business processes, particularly in addressing the emergent needs of the industrial population like those arising out of the psychosocial impact of workforce alienation, over-specialization, competitiveness, and stress and fatigue on their (...) life. Over all these years, as there has been a major transformation in defining human beings in the context of business from human resource to human capital, the corporate has also been restructuring its role in revitalizing its human resources alongside taking care of the vast external stakeholders (customers) through its new slogan of ‘corporate social responsibility’. But this new configuration lends itself to the process of self-examination and the litmus test remains: Is corporate social responsibility a new area structured to delineate the corporate's idea of greater variety of social services for humankind; or just one more catchphrase used to establish the fact that business houses are doing ‘a lot more’ than mere expansion of industrial social work; or has there been a change in the principal objective and priority of the corporate at the back of starting these programmes—from curbing loss to ‘just making profit’? (shrink)

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is considered by many to have made the most sweeping changes affecting corporate governance since the Securities and Exchange Acts of 1933 and 1934. About 4 years after its passing, however, many governance experts question whether the time and expense of compliance engender any real reforms. This article examines whether corporations have restructured their boards in response to the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley and finds evidence that companies are implementing changes that should strengthen the monitoring (...) ability of their boards. (shrink)

Recent structural innovations in global commerce present difficult challenges for legacy understandings of responsibility. The rise of outsourcing, sub-contracting, and mobile app-based platforms have dramatically restructured relationships between and among economic actors. Though not entirely new, the remarkable rise in the prevalence of these “not-quite-arm’s-length” relationships present difficulties for conceptions of responsibility based on interrogating the past for specifiable actions by blameworthy actors. Iris Marion Young invites investigation of a “social connection model of responsibility” (SCMR) that is, in many ways, (...) better suited to this new commercial reality. Scholars working to understand corporate responsibility have invoked Young’s model to some good effect, though often superficially and uncritically. In this paper, we look closely at Young’s social connection model and its potential for helping us understand corporate responsibility in a radically networked world. (shrink)

Corporate governance in the European Union (EU) has been traditionally seen as a problem of harmonizing or co-ordinating national systems. Here the focus is on the interactions between corporate governance on the one hand and macroeconomic policy on the other. It is argued that the function of corporate governance is a process determined by a structurally embedded dynamic game between major stakeholders and the corporation. The article argues that Economic Monetary Union (EMU) institutions and policymaking, as elements (...) of the institutional environment in which this game is embedded, determine particular parties’ bargaining power and through this the outcome of the corporate governance game and its trajectory. The main focus is on the bargains between labour and financial capital with the corporation, which is mostly destabilized in the EU–EMU environment. The findings carry an important message for post-crisis restructuring. (shrink)

We examine the impact of family firms’ historical ownership on corporate fraud. Our results show that restructured family firms from state-owned enterprises are more likely to violate and commit more fraud than entrepreneurial family firms. This finding is robust to the difference-in-difference-in-differences estimation, an instrument variables regression, fixed effects research design, and propensity score matching (PSM) approach analysis. Mechanism analysis shows that restructured family firms result in lower financial performance, high labor redundancy, inefficient investments, and cash volatility. Therefore, restructured (...) family firms have a stronger incentive to conceal these problems through corporate fraud. Furthermore, the effects of family firms’ historical ownership on corporate fraud are weakened for a more extended period after SOE ownership reform and the restructuring approach adopted by equity takeover. (shrink)

Summary The purpose of this study was to illustrate and analyze the organizational change the Swedish voluntary sports club IF Björklöven went through in connection with the corporation formation of its representative team. The study was made with institutional theory as a theoretical frame of reference. Particularly important for the shaping of the study was a theoretical model by Greenwood and Hinings. The data was collected using semi-structured interviews with seven respondents representing different parts of the organization. The results show (...) that the change process was driven and enabled for the most part by the offer of SEK 22.5 million from an external financier. The restructuring has brought about a change in the way Björklöven thinks about the outcome, purpose, structure and goals of the organization, now that the organization is moving towards a more market-oriented way of organizing. (shrink)

This article explores union attempts to control pension fund investment for the debate on financial restructuring in the United States. It puts popular control of finance into comparative and historical perspective and argues that laws and politics help explain why the flow of finance is corporate controlled. First, changes in the legal regime—the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974—put constraints on labor’s ability to influence investment decisions. This is evident when comparing (...) single- and multi-employer plans, where the laws had different consequences. Second, attempts to reform these laws failed. Had they been successful, Carter’s proposed economic revitalization plan in the run-up to his failed reelection in 1980 would have created new ways for unions to control and redirect retirement investment for social purposes. The reform failure is treated as a “suppressed historical alternative” through a comparison with a successful reform in Quebec, Canada, which gave unions broad controls over the Solidarity Fund in 1983. The findings suggest, somewhat counter-intuitively, that legal restrictions need to be loosened for democratic control of finance to be possible. For pension funds, more regulations led to more corporate control, not less. (shrink)

Drawing on calls by researchers to examine corporate scandals involving potential conflicts of interest or compromise to professional independence involving the actuarial profession, this article outlines one such case. The consulting actuaries – to a large Australian listed company, James Hardie Industries Limited – found themselves advising two parties in a corporate restructuring where the interests of each were sometimes competing and the interests of the public appeared to be ignored. The James Hardie case is instructive in (...) a number of ways: first, it demonstrates the subtlety with which conflicts of interest or pressures on professional independence can arise; second, it demonstrates how important professional issues can be obfuscated by more obvious and pressing financial and strategic issues; and finally it demonstrates that adherence to professional codes of conduct and the ease with which professional ethics can be compromised when those codes are vague and transgressions are rarely actionable. The James Hardie case highlights structural issues in the employment of consulting actuaries which presents risks to the profession. It demonstrates that the combination of an aggressive corporate management with a strategic agenda reliant on consulting actuaries that have a vested interest in promoting and maintaining valuable relationships, both financially and professionally, results in ethical challenges. (shrink)

Drawing on calls by researchers to examine corporate scandals involving potential conflicts of interest or compromise to professional independence involving the actuarial profession, this article outlines one such case. The consulting actuaries – to a large Australian listed company, James Hardie Industries Limited – found themselves advising two parties in a corporate restructuring where the interests of each were sometimes competing and the interests of the public appeared to be ignored. The James Hardie case is instructive in (...) a number of ways: first, it demonstrates the subtlety with which conflicts of interest or pressures on professional independence can arise; second, it demonstrates how important professional issues can be obfuscated by more obvious and pressing financial and strategic issues; and finally it demonstrates that adherence to professional codes of conduct and the ease with which professional ethics can be compromised when those codes are vague and transgressions are rarely actionable. The James Hardie case highlights structural issues in the employment of consulting actuaries which presents risks to the profession. It demonstrates that the combination of an aggressive corporate management with a strategic agenda reliant on consulting actuaries that have a vested interest in promoting and maintaining valuable relationships, both financially and professionally, results in ethical challenges. (shrink)

Walter Adams and James W. Brock's Dangerous Pursuits offers conventional wisdom regarding the alleged evils of the corporate restructuring and financial innovations of the 1980s. Adams and Brock disregard how economic regulations enacted in the 1930s and 1940s led to passive investors and managerial control that furthered conglomerate acquisitions strategies of the 1960s and 1970s. This situation was undone in the 1980s with the rise of active investors and entrepreneurs who attempted to wrest control from established managers and (...) companies so as to focus corporations on single lines of business, increasing efficiency and performance. The employment, productivity, consumer, and budgetary impacts of mergers and acquisitions were much more positive than Adams and Brock allow. (shrink)

Is restructuring an underhanded way to make the rich richer and the poor poorer? Or is it necessary, although bitter, medicine for an ailing economy? In The Ethics of the New Economy: Restructuring and Beyond, professionals from the fields of philosophy, ethics, management, as well as those representing the groups affected by restructuring, tackle thorny ethical issues. Referring to concrete case studies, these timely essays discuss a variety of topics, including justified and unjustified restructuring; employers’ obligations (...) during the restructuring process; equity issues; the rise of part-time employment; the effects of restructuring on communities; the internal risks faced by restructuring corporations; deprofessionalization in health care; the consequences of restructuring in the developing world; philanthropy and cause-related marketing; corporate “judo” and restructuring; and responsible and irresponsible restructuring. (shrink)

Corporate executives, at the behest of Wall Street, have embraced the heresy of upsizing short-term shareholder profits by downsizing the long-term work force. This restructuring of corporate America, which views the corporation as an investment organization rather than a social organization, has created an ethical quandary by removing from the equation a sense of larger-purpose. This paper proposes a new paradigm, LIFESIZING, to address the issues raised by this ethical quandary. The paper will explore the effect the (...) creation of fictitious personhood (Corporations, Government, Wall Street, Unions, etc.) has had on the concept of personal responsibility and common good when responsible individuals are but transient members of such a legal entity. It will briefly recap the history of downsizing, the practice of treating workers as an expense rather than a capital asset, stakeholder theory, and the rise of a "me-first" culture. It will then define and apply LIFESIZING to both the individual and the corporation in an attempt to provide a sense of balance missing from current discourse. (shrink)

Ethical issues that arise because of the transcendent power of globally oriented corporate entities vis-a-vis local communities. Common problems arise from plant closings and automation, here illustrated by cases of restructuring in Indiana. Public use limitations on "eminent domain" decisions are considered. Then attention turns to the lack of constraints available to regulate decisions made by a transnational corporation. Limited applicability of Rawls's contract theory is noted, then ten real-world space-time situations are reported that involve legally uncontrolled harm (...) to locals due to supra-community control by a corporation. (shrink)

In 1942 California corporate agribusiness seized upon racist hysteria and pseudo "national security" issues to manipulate social ideology so that it could unlawfully seize tens of thousands of acres of productive farm land from law-abiding American citizens. It was such seizures that then allowed already existing large-scale capital to further consolidate California's agricultural resources while at the same time restructuring and increasing its concentration of the state's agricultural production and food manufacturing capabilities. Meanwhile, in "the most striking mass (...) interference since slavery with the right of physical freedom," over 120,000 Japanese Americans were placed in concentration camps and illegally deprived of their property and human rights. (shrink)

The shareholder value conception of the firm and its consequences for the functioning of corporations have been studied from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. In this article we examine in more detail than has been done sofar the origins and early adoption of this particular conception. By investigating public business sources from the perspective of field theory, we argue that the rise and early diffusion of “shareholder value” are best understood as a function of the changing power relations (...) in the economic field during the first half of the 1980s. The deep economic recession at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s led to a crisis in the prevailing management beliefs, offering newcomers the opportunity to promote alternative business strategies, among which the shareholder value conception became dominant. The sources studied indicate that the spokespersons of the new business conception were initially wealthy outsiders, corporate “raiders,” who used the economic crisis to oppose management and acquire shares in undervalued firms with the threat of restructuring and selling parts of them in the name of shareholders’ interests. Although these hostile take-overs, or threats of take-overs, were widely contested, the Reagan administration blocked regulation and stimulated the take-over market. The rivalry between “raiders” and public pension funds over the profits of these takeovers led to the founding the Council of Institutional Investors (1985), which adopted the shareholder value doctrine inaugurating the organized activism of public pension funds with regard to the management of firms. It was thus in all likelihood the competition and conflict among different groups of shareholders, primarily corporate raiders and pension funds, that triggered the shift in the balance of power between managers and shareholders. Since managers found profitable ways to adapt to the new balance of power, the shareholder value ideology spread rapidly through the economic field, becoming the dominant business model of North American firms in the second half of the 1980s. (shrink)

Emerging as an intersectional response to social inequalities perpetuated by the mainstream food movement in the United States, the food justice movement is being used by marginalized communities to address their food needs. This movement relies on an emancipatory discourse, illustrated by what I term intersectional agriculture. In many respects, the mainstream food movement reflects contention between marketization (corporate agriculture) and social protectionist (local food) discourses, while the role of food justice remains somewhat unclear as it relates to the (...) mainstream movement. Each movement attempts to restructure the ways in which food is distributed, consumed, and produced, impacting the social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental dimensions of food. Using the lens of Nancy Fraser’s triple movement framework, I construct an interpretation of food justice as the emancipatory pole of what I term the triple food movement to explore the role of food justice as it relates to the mainstream movement. Specifically, I draw upon the cases of black farmers and queer people in the U.S. creating and (re)creating spaces to address their community food needs and counter systems of domination constructed around race, class, gender, sexuality, agriculture, and food. (shrink)

The federal and corporate initiative to technologize education has transformed schools, colleges, and universities into a new frontier for the computer industry. While educational institutions have maintained an equivocal relationship with markets and the state, they had striven to preserve a simulacrum of independence until the early 1980s. Then, neoconservative ideologies and their accompanying discourse on restructuring education discovered in the computer the ideal neutral tool to promote, in its virtual clothes, their gospel. The Clinton administration and big (...) corporations, taking advantage of the myth of the computer and the new vocabulary associated with computers, launched a massive program of wiring schools. The process, still unfolding at a rapid pace, poses grave problems for the teaching profession and the role of schools in society. The author argues that the unethical ways in which computers force their ways into many educational institutions, the values they embody, the contexts of their multiple usages, the hyperfragmentation and increasing commodification of knowledge that they cause through online education, the vocationalization of education, and the atomization of teachers are likely to shrink pedagogical and democratic possibilities both at local and global levels. (shrink)

The increasing corporatization of education has served to expose the university as a business—and one with a highly stratified division of labor. In _Chalk Lines_ editor Randy Martin presents twelve essays that confront current challenges facing the academic workforce in U.S. colleges and universities and demonstrate how, like chalk lines, divisions between employees may be creatively redrawn. While tracing the socioeconomic conditions that have led to the present labor situation on campuses, the contributors consider such topics as the political implications (...) of managerialism and the conceptual status of academic labor. They examine the trend toward restructuring and downsizing, the particular plight of the adjunct professor, the growing emphasis on vocational training in the classroom, and union organizing among university faculty, staff, and graduate students. Placing such issues within the context of the history of labor movements as well as governmental initiatives to train a workforce capable of competing in the global economy, _Chalk Lines_ explores how universities have attempted to remake themselves in the image of the corporate sector. Originally published as an issue of _Social Text_, this expanded volume, which includes four new essays, offers a broad view of academic labor in the United States. With its important, timely contribution to debates concerning the future of higher education, _Chalk Lines_ will interest a wide array of academics, administrators, policymakers, and others invested in the state—and fate—of academia. _ Contributors._ Stanley Aronowitz, Jan Currie, Zelda F. Gamson, Emily Hacker, Stefano Harney, Randy Martin, Bart Meyers, David Montgomery, Frederick Moten, Christopher Newfield, Gary Rhoades, Sheila Slaughter, Jeremy Smith, Vincent Tirelli, William Vaughn, Lesley Vidovich, Ira Yankwitt. (shrink)

Changes brought by the rise of the global economy and the end of the Cold War era have resulted in industry, government, and university rethinking their roles vis-à-vis research and development, basic versus applied research, and the role of corporate research. Since the mid-1980s, industrial research in the United States has been going through restructuring. Interviews with seventy-two scientists and eighteen managers working in six centralized corporate R&D laboratories in high-technology industry show that a new culture of (...) dependence with a mission-oriented approach is replacing the cherished culture of independence with a result-oriented approach. (shrink)

The conventional wisdom is that the best way to alleviate poverty is to provide the maximum freedom for individual entrepreneurs and corporations to create wealth. Drawing on the case of Latin America, this article contends that there are serious defects in analyses based on such assumptions. New technologies and restructuring of international capitalism have accelerated wealth creation worldwide but amid growing inequalities. Technology is mainly controlled by large multinational corporations and not directed at relieving the deprivation suffered by the (...) world's poor. Pervasive, persistent economic inequality and lack of access to appropriate education and training have all been significant in Latin America's failure to develop rapidly during the twentieth century. Most successful “latecomer” countries in the past two hundred years have adopted heterodox autonomous growth strategies, and the authors suggest that such strategies are necessary now to counter the powerful processes that sustain inequality. (shrink)

The thesis of this book is that people enter into social contracts because they are different from one another and have incentives to cooperate. In economic life, people have identical interests—namely, their own se- interests—so they have an incentive to compete. The social worlds that we create, or map, and those that are already mapped for us are increasingly complex, and thus the tracking of rationality is not so straightforward, although it is everywhere evident. In a sense, this book grew (...) out of two questions: Why hasn't the United States had a second revolution? Or is the revolution yet to come? Many have discussed the current crises that confront contemporary society, such as great economic inequalities, poverty, the declining quality of jobs, the growing power of corporate elites, and racial antago nisms. I attempt to understand these problems in terms of the radical restructuring of social life by economic and spatial forces. My specula tive thesis is that social organizations must reinforce social contracts and nurture the opportunities for them to be forged. However, contemporary organizations, particularly economic ones, have internalized the princi ples of economic markets, thereby inducing competition and easing out cooperation. In defining social contracts, I draw from Rousseau and also from Marx and his analysis of use value. One hopes that new organiza tional forms based on principles of democracy and community will evolve. In a diverse, multicultural society, this requires great mutual understanding and cooperation and the recognition of differences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 333 Michelle V. Rowley, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Isis Nusair Refusing to Account: Toward a Pedagogy of Tectonic Instability The increasing commoditization of knowledge and corporatization of the academy have led to a drastic restructuring of higher education, and in particular, of public institutions of learning. There is a striking similarity to the strategies enacted across institutions, (...) each governed by modes of efficiency and profitability. These moves have included a preference for larger classes, curriculum decisions that are governed by seats rather than pedagogical possibilities, an expansion of online offerings, tuition increases, and ramped-up bureaucratization, with the latter being accompanied by fewer faculty hires, a greater dependence on contingent faculty, and a swell in the ranks of senior administrative staff. This restructuring has held very specific consequences for women ’s studies programs. While larger classes are not inherently at odds with a student-centered feminist pedagogy, they do require adjustments in order to achieve similar results with our students, and they do exact greater physical and emotional labor from us as instructors. These restructuring strategies have also positioned the field in a Catch22 in that a number of issues that we have lobbied to have valued within the academy have now come into the university’s line of vision only to be redeployed as part of the university’s public relations branding agenda. There are numerous examples if we would but look: campuses that are spotted with banners portraying faculty and students of color —a visual map to the institution’s “embrace of diversity”; committees 334 Michelle V. Rowley, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Isis Nusair that are convened to review the institution’s sexual harassment policy while simultaneously refusing the involvement of women’s studies academics in the process, for whom these are scholarly and intellectual areas of study; the introduction of multicultural general education curricula, where the study of “difference” amounts to a banal presence of one or more categories of “otherness” in syllabi. This list is not exhaustive but the similarity that threads through is the commodification and the PR-ization of issues that sit at the heart of the field of women’s studies. Such cooptation notwithstanding, in this economic climate of profit maximization, small, interdisciplinary programs and departments such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, and LGBT studies have become woefully vulnerable to mergers, downsizing, and elimination.1 Our own program, now defunct, attests to this growing reality.2 So what then is the story to be told for a program that no longer exists? As alumna of Clark University’s now defunct women’s studies doctoral program, we consider the ways in which Clark, under the guidance of Cynthia Enloe, worked to move the field toward a more transnational bent. While we begin with an engagement with Clark’s specific institutional vulnerabilities, we use Clark’s commitment to a transnational praxis as our comparative point of departure to note the ways in which the importance and acuity of a transnational feminist critique have seeped away from the field. At various points in the article, we discuss how our individual trajectories emerged out of a transnational feminist sensibility. We interrogate the ways that the dominant logics of the field continue to be complicit with the very inequities and modes of representation critiqued within transnational feminist discourses. We point to the role that our scholarly pursuits play in an ongoing effort to hold the field accountable to a transnational feminist critique. Finally, 1. See Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Privatized Citizens, Corporate Academies, and Feminist Projects,” in Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 2. The doctoral program at Clark began in 1992 and closed in 2008, graduating twenty-six PhDs and training many more who have gone on to make significant contributions at NGOs among other locations. For example, Parissara Liewkeat and Barbara Schulman have held positions with the International Labor Organization and Amnesty International, respectively. Michelle V. Rowley, Elora Halim Chowdhury, and Isis Nusair 335 we look back at our own training... (shrink)

Mayo Clinic is recognized as a worldwide leader in innovative, high-quality health care. However, the Catholic mission and ideals from which this organization was formed are not widely recognized or known. From partnership with the Sisters of St. Francis in 1883, through restructuring of the Sponsorship Agreement in 1986 and current advancements, this Catholic mission remains vital today at Saint Marys Hospital. This manuscript explores the evolution and growth of sponsorship at Mayo Clinic, defined as “a collaboration between the (...) Sisters of St. Francis and Mayo Clinic to preserve and promote key values that the founding Franciscan sisters and Mayo physicians embrace as basic to their mission, and to assure the Catholic identity of Saint Marys Hospital.” Historical context will be used to frame the evolution and preservation of Catholic identity at Saint Marys Hospital; and the shift from a “sponsorship-by-governance” to a “sponsorship-by-influence” model will be highlighted. Lastly, using the externally-developed Catholic Identity Matrix (developed by Ascension Health and the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota), specific examples of Catholic identity will be explored in this joint venture of Catholic health care institution and a secular, nonprofit corporation (Mayo Clinic). (shrink)

This study analyzes the gendered nature of recent production and labor force restructuring in the Dominican Republic. Using a longitudinal case study of work relations on a large transnational corporate pineapple plantation, the author explores the production politics involved in the initial corporate attempt to create a wage labor force and the subsequent replacement of employees with contracted labor crews. She demonstrates how female, and then male, labor forces were negotiated in this process and how labor relations (...) became embedded in local gendered institutions. The study reveals how workforces and spheres of work are constituted through struggles over gender, as well as ethnicity and class, in intersecting arenas linking the local community to the global economy. In this case, gender proves critical in shaping both worker identity and the shifting scope and form of resistance to plantation practices. (shrink)

In 1973, Jim Hightower and his associates at the Agribusiness Accountability Project dropped a bombshell – Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times – on the land-grant college and agricultural science establishments. From the early 1970s until roughly 1990, Hightower-style criticism of and activism toward the public agricultural research system focused on a set of closely interrelated themes: the tendencies for the publicly supported research enterprise to be an unwarranted taxpayer subsidy of agribusiness, for agricultural research and extension to favor large farmers and (...) be disadvantageous for family farmers, for public research to stress mechanization while ignoring the concerns and interests of farm workers, and for the research and extension establishment to ignore rural poverty and other rural social problems. By 1990, however, there had been a quite fundamental restructuring of the agricultural technology opposition movement – one that is not often well recognized. Two overarching changes had occurred. First, agricultural-technology activism had shifted from contesting land-grant/public research priorities and practices to contesting private agribusiness technological priorities and practices. Second, the relatively integrated, overarching Hightower-type opposition had undergone bifurcation into two quite distinct social movements: the agricultural sustainability/local food systems movement on one hand, and the anti-GM food/crop and anti-food-system-globalization movement on the other. In this paper I explore the causes and consequences of these restructurings of the agricultural research and technology opposition movement. Chief among the major factors involved was the fact that “Hightowerism'' involved an ineffectual representational politics. Hightowerist claims – especially the claim that land-grant research was detrimental to family farmers – generated little support among the groups it claimed to represent (particularly “small'' or “family'' farmers). The two successor movements, by contrast, have relatively clear and dependable constituents. Further, the progressive molecularization of agricultural research, which proved to be both an antecedent and consequence of corporate involvement in agricultural research in the US, has decisively changed the issues that are contested by technology activists. Since the age of Hightower, the agricultural technology activist movement has shifted its 1970s and early 1980s emphasis from contesting public sector/land-grant research priorities to contesting private sector activities, particularly genetic engineering, GM crops, and globalization of agricultural technologies and regulatory practices. Even the sustainability/localism wing of the new agricultural technology movement configuration has progressively backed away from contesting public research priorities. The efforts of the sustainable agricultural and localism movement have increasingly focused on quasi-private efforts such as community supported agriculture, green/“value-added'' labeling and marketing strategies, and community food security. Some implications of this increasingly bifurcated, agricultural technology, activist movement configuration in which there is decreased interest in land-grant/public research priorities are discussed. (shrink)

A plethora of books and articles have appeared recently that announce the global triumph of corporate capitalism and its attendant ideologies. Nowhere are these articles more scathing in their critique of corporatization than in the field of education. However, few have taken a historical perspective in examining the institutional policies and practices that paved the way for private‐sector influence and the adoption of business and administrative sensibilities in higher education. This article examines the University of Michigan between 1945 and (...) the early 1960s as a case study of the kinds of physical and philosophical changes that occurred to usher in the process of corporatization at a major research university. I focus predominantly on one major research effort‐‐the Phoenix Memorial Project‐‐that set in motion many of the forces that would effectively reshape the school's philosophy and practices. The article begins with a discussion of the ideological and political tensions that characterized the course of U‐M scientific research after World War II, particularly the complex intermingling of university, government and corporate interests. Next, I document the Phoenix Project itself and the emphasis on institutional restructuring for capital investment that it inspired. Despite conflicting and contradictory ideas about links between education and both military and corporate research interests, U‐M's top administrators restructured the university to attract venture capital by constructing innovative mechanisms for integrating investors’ needs into the work of academic inquiry. Finally, I want to look at some of the cultural narratives that enabled this triumph of corporate interests to infuse itself into the U‐M's institutional and social mission. (shrink)

Global competition has made thetraditional sugarcane and pineapple industriesincreasingly non-viable in Hawaii. One initiative torevive the agricultural sector calls for diversifyinginto non-traditional export crops that gains highervalue by attaching the paradise identity such as freshpineapples, macadamia nuts, or tropical flowers.Drawing from cases of pineapples and macadamia nuts,this paper examines how Hawaii's foodstuffs were ableto capture a premium value of place-association due tothe social construction of Hawaii as a place. Anexpansion of the niche markets, however, has allowedthe symbolic meaning of these (...) products to beappropriated and reconstituted by global interests.Without confronting the fundamental problemsassociated with land and labor relations in Hawaii,Hawaii producers are caught in a niche-markettreadmill. They continuously seek new potentials forhigh-value crops, but are unable to maintain controlbeyond their inventive stage. (shrink)

Political theorists are increasingly drawn to the recovery of anticolonial thinkers as global figures. Frantz Fanon is largely excluded from these discussions because of his presumed commitment to the nation-state and its territorialist assumptions. This essay claims, by contrast, that Fanon’s writings reveal an alternative way of thinking about worldmaking, less as a question of political and economic institution-building spearheaded by leaders than as a multiscalar project that permeates the production of the built environment and the creation of selves. I (...) show how Fanon challenges the dichotomy between the global and the national by seeking to transform not just the national scale in relation to the international, but also the corporeal, urban, rural, and regional scales of an imperially configured world. In order to read Fanon as a scalar thinker and to highlight aspects of his thought that have been relatively neglected, I draw on concepts from geography, and specifically scalar analysis, which, I demonstrate, allows political theorists to develop a richer understanding of the operations of power in colonial contexts and how they can be restructured to inaugurate more liberated ways of being human. (shrink)

Could international financial capital impose shareholder sovereignty on Japan, the ultimate bastion of stakeholder capitalism? As the Japanese economy descended from boom to bust in the early 1990s, government and industry leaders called for a decisive move toward US-style shareholder capitalism, and increasing foreign share ownership exerted strong pressure to adapt corporate governance practices to Anglo-American norms. In practice, however, the government gave firms more options for restructuring but did not make them more beholden to shareholders. Firms on (...) their part favored superficial adjustments to prop up share prices rather than fundamental changes, because they sought to preserve the strengths of their traditional business models. This article explains how marketplace developments, domestic political dynamics, and corporate strategies combined to produce the distinctive pattern of Japanese corporate governance reforms since the 1990s. It concludes with an assessment of the consequences of these reforms for managers, workers, shareholders, and the general public. (shrink)

This essay from 1999, republished in Notre Dame Magazine online in July 2023, explores how the 1950s were a time of fundamental transformations in American society, a time when the United States went fully megatechnic. The hugely increased power of military, corporate-industrial and “big science” institutions developed during the 1950s signaled the transformation to megatechnic America, with atomic bombs and nuclear testing, automobiles and televisions as key symbols of that transformation. Figures such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller (...) illustrated the battle between national security dictates controlling nuclear bomb testing and responsible science. -/- Since the Second World War the United States has been problematically guided by a power-oriented culture, which, in the names of national security and convenience, has tended to reshape America toward an increasingly hierarchical model of society based on the system requirements of a machine. This same era gave birth to a generalized economic prosperity in the United States, to the civil rights movement, to feminism, literary and artistic innovations, and to other openings of public equality and freedom. Yet the magnification of bureaucratic-corporate structures in that postwar, cold war prosperity has ultimately tended to restructure America against the basic requirements of democratic community. (shrink)

Contemporary universities are characteristic of an evident proliferation of corporate discourse. A sole concentration on the production of new knowledge and the education of students does not ensure the prosperity or even survival of universities any longer, and equally important are the admission of elite students, the outcome-based evaluation of academic performance, the establishment of alumni network and also fundraising. This article examines how and to what extent this trend of marketization has invaded the order of discourse of Chinese (...) universities. The research methodology combines the paradigms of critical discourse analysis and the tenets of critical genre analysis [Bhatia VK Towards critical genre analysis. In: Bhatia VK, Flowerdew J and Jones RH Advances in Discourse Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 166–177], with particular attention paid to the notion of genre, interdiscursivity and conversationalization. The texts examined include ceremonial speeches, regulatory documents, insiders’ accounts and field notes. Analytical results show that the trend of marketization, in spite of a potential threat for academic integrity, does facilitate the institutional restructuring and transformation of universities in the context of Mainland China. (shrink)

This article seeks to identify and address the normative void that resides at the heart of postmodernist-feminist theory, and to propose a philosophical framework – beyond postmodernism, but incorporating its central insights – for thinking through the normative questions with which feminists are inevitably confronted in their engagements with positive law. Two varieties of postmodernist-feminism are identified and critically analysed: the ‘corporeal feminism’ of Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler, which seeks to ground feminist critical practice in the irruptive capacities of (...) the material body considered as an arte fact of social construction; and the deconstructionist feminism of Drucilla Cornell, for whom ‘the feminine’ is an indeterminate but disruptive force beyond its construction in law and in other social sites. The first component of the argument elaborated here is that each of these approaches ultimately reduces to a form of aestheticism which is incapable of generating a worthwhile and workable feminist approach to the restructuring of politics and law. The second component of the argument involves a return to aesthetics, in particular to the philosophical aesthetics of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, it will be suggested, yields a framework of concepts which, duly re-manipulated, could speak to the very concerns that have inspired postmodernist-feminism: how to attend to (bodily) particularity while avoiding the dangers associated with ‘essentialism’; and how to theorise the propensity of the unrepresentable power of the feminine to exceed both embodied human capacities and the confining rein of socially privileged rationalities. Crucially, however it also responds to a set of preoccupations – those of the feminist lawyer – that cannot be accommodated by postmodernism: how to translate embodied experience into (legal) norms; generalise from the particular; seek consensus; and codify an endless potentiality in the form of law. (shrink)

This is a new and revised edition of a book which has had a major impact upon the social sciences and public political debate. Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert's THE NEW INDIVIDUALISM inspired readers with the dramatic suggestion that 'the reinvention craze' - from self-help and therapy culture to management restructurings and corporate downsizings - is central to a 'new individualism' sweeping the globe. Giving particular attention to the narratives of people seeking to define anew their lives in an (...) age of globalization, the authors contend that an endless hunger for instant change and relentless emphasis on self-reinvention is fundamental to grasping the disorientating effects of the new individualism. This edition contains a substantial new Introduction in which Elliott and Lemert reply to some of the standard criticisms made of the theory of the new individualism, and also addresses the escalation of new individualist thinking in the wake of recent global crises. (shrink)