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This study emerged from professional practice into a critique of the notion of empowerment: a generative inquiry into the lived embodied experience of individuals, the ‘nitty-gritty’ of people in time, in particular locations, across different employment sectors. It focuses on the conjunctions and disjunctions of these employees, the voices of front-line practitioners, in making choices, as well as the dilemmas that they face in doing this, both from inside and outside of work. Competing discourses are identified shaping, and being shaped by, the managers of the three companies at the heart of this research inquiry. Moreover, this research uncovered systemic issues arising from where such empowerment rhetorics derived and what they are acting upon in terms of people’s lives within these complex systems. This has resulted in distinctive action at an individual and organisational level through the utilisation of critically reflexive action research. This study is not purely a linear progression. A cyclical, critically reflexive methodology, my own ‘story’ of being empowered and disempowered whilst participating with others in this inquiry, has both deepened and enriched the perspectives offered. Therefore, this research offers an alternative perspective of empowerment as well as in relation to writing about empowerment, a complexity of perspectives explored through the use of literary, artistic and analytical forms that display the depth and richness of participant experience. My research therefore moves beyond the ethnographic studies of management to embrace the shifting sense of lives beyond the workplace, and the complexity of choice making through individual narratives across different sectors. At the same time it is centred in the embodied sense of lived experience that is missing from the critique of management offered by Alvesson and Wilmott [1992,1998], and others [Knights, 1992. Leetz and Mumby, 1990] of the critical management tradition

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the voluntary integration of social and environmental concerns into business practice. It is of increasing importance to utilities, with commercial pressure to be socially responsible coming from, inter alia, consumers, investors and employees. One way in which utilities can integrate CSR into their business is in their procurement. However, the potential scope for the inclusion of CSR considerations in procurement regulated by the EU is uncertain, with some policies clearly restricted but the legality of others being less clear. This thesis examines the practical impact of the EU procurement regulation on the use of CSR policies in utilities procurement, focusing specifically on the inclusion of labour concerns. The project aims to discover practitioners’ opinions of the EU law in this area and their experience in applying it, looking at positive and negative aspects of the law. In order to do so, a qualitative study was completed, with semi-structured interviews conducted with a sample of procurement practitioners based in UK utilities. The study covers the level of use of labour policies in procurement, the types of labour policy commonly included and the means by which those policies are integrated into procurement, with emphasis on the impact of the EU regulation on each issue. The thesis concludes that the impact of the EU regulation was relatively low, with most practitioners feeling that the procurement rules did not generally restrict their inclusion of labour policies. Instead, practical concerns governed the choice of labour policy and the means by which those policies were integrated into procurement. The major exception to this was in the area of policies which favoured local labour or firms, where practitioners felt that the EU regulation was very restrictive and prevented them from achieving their commercial aims.

As human beings, we cannot avoid the implications of non-sustainable programmes, activities or lifestyles by just ignoring them. Thus, sustainable development (SD) becomes everyone’s business. However, there is a belief – especially in developing economies – that SD is the responsibility of the government and/or large businesses. Nevertheless, things are shifting to emphasise the growing responsibility of everyone, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs), who broadly contribute towards the SD agenda by engaging with corporate social responsibility (CSR). Wider stakeholders in developing regions such as sub-Saharan Africa are also beginning to actively engage with the sustainability notion. As a result, businesses especially SMEs, are faced with the need to respond to stakeholder demands for inclusive SME models that go beyond traditional CSR practices to alternatives that form synergies between themselves and SD goals. Worse still, the CSR research is fragmentary, and SMEs’ CSR engagement and contributions towards SD goals tend to go unnoticed, as more focus is put on large corporations (Smith and Thompson, 1991), despite SMEs’ undisputed economic importance. Using a form of analytic induction to evaluate qualitative case-study data from the SME perspective, this research project addresses this gap in the literature with the question: ‘What is the SME/CSR role and opportunity in addressing sustainability challenges in sub-Saharan African economies?’ In such a weak and ambiguously regulated environment, the research endeavours to bridge the gap between SME/CSR research and stakeholders by exploring SMEs’ CSR understanding, drivers and nature, and how their engagement in CSR might contribute to SD. The research findings show that SME owner-managers’ CSR understandings are skewed towards solving societal development challenges. The study offers evidence that the firm’s size does not necessarily determine the context, nature and extent to which it engages with CSR, and thus contribute towards SD. The research contributes to knowledge by suggesting an alternative Stakeholder Engagement Framework (SHEF) and Co-productive Stakeholder Engagement Model (CPSEM) through which SMEs can co-produce solutions to global development challenges by achieving more, for more, with less.

Most extant studies of corporate social and environmental reporting (CSER) tend to examine the volume of CSER by companies. In contrast, the significance of this thesis lies in its focus on key stakeholders who are users of CSER and their needs. The perspectives of multiple key stakeholders, including investing, procuring and campaigning stakeholders, are investigated with respect to what they perceive to be valuable social and environmental reporting in supporting decision making. This thesis also goes beyond CSER and examines social and environmental reporting from other sources, including but not limited to reporting arising from private meetings between companies and stakeholders and information about companies’ social and environmental impact or performance from information intermediaries. Stakeholder perceptions on the value and the qualitative characteristics of social and environmental reporting have been sought through semi-structured questionnaire with individuals drawn from the key stakeholder groups. Consistent with stakeholder theory, it is expected that stakeholder needs may vary. The findings in this thesis support a hypothesised relationship between the value of social and environmental reporting and information qualitative characteristics. Other key findings show that the availability of social and environmental reporting affects stakeholders’ extent of use of social and environmental reporting and that the drivers for the value of information and the extent of use of information are different. The findings present important implications for both company managers and policy-makers. Company managers are better informed concerning stakeholder information needs. Thus they are better equipped to make decisions about the extent, scope and form of CSER. Furthermore, this thesis enables policy-makers to assess whether CSER requirements under current regulatory mechanisms reflect stakeholder needs. Finally this thesis has contributed towards enriching literature in the CSER area.

Corporate Responsibility (CR) defines the process of self-regulation, whereby an organisation seeks to measure and improve its performance related to the social, environmental and economic expectations placed upon it by society. In the past two decades the prominence, and therefore uptake of CR activities and reporting has increased across many sectors. The pace of this change has varied significantly, with many industries quickly becoming aware of its importance and integrating it into their business operations while others have seen CR as lower priority and have been much slower to embrace it. In the UK, while some of the individual components of CR are governed by legislation (e.g. environmental activities and health & safety), others such as social interactions and CR reporting have little or no legislation associated with them. This lack of any clear legislative requirements effectively allows organisations to report on any topics they wish and results in a very varied approach to implementing and reporting upon the subject. While some aspects of CR, such as reporting (Jones, Comfort et al. 2006), performance benchmarking (BITC, Graafland et al (2003)) and attitudes to CR (Herridge, (2003), Petrovic- Lazarevic, (2008)) have been investigated in isolation, there has been no attempt to provide a holistic view of the industry. This research seeks to do just that by combining a range of data in an effort to build a broad evidence base of the industry's reporting practices, performance and perceptions of the industry with regards to CR. This thesis presents the findings from a mixed-method review of CR reporting, activities and performance amongst UK construction companies. Mixed methodologies (qualitative and quantitative) were employed in order to interrogate a range of data sources. The methods employed in the empirical chapters of this work include a review of construction CR reports, a benchmarking exercise and a case study of consultancy companies operating in the construction industry. With regards to reporting, while some longitudinal changes were seen with respect to report size and levels of detail, a number of core or priority topics were identified which were commonly covered by construction companies regardless of which sub-sector they operated in. The benchmarking exercise attempted to compare the CR performance of companies within three construction sub-sectors (materials suppliers, contractors and consultants) and while some patterns were evident, such as topics where performance was consistently high, no clear trends were seen between the performances of the three sub-sectors reviewed. The case study highlighted a number of difficulties that are faced by consultancy companies and based upon the study, a range of recommendations which could potentially help to address some of them are proposed.

Pour faire face aux défaillances et leurs conséquences, certaines organisations adoptent des modes de fonctionnement leur permettant d’assurer un haut degré de fiabilité et de résilience. Cette thèse s’attache à formaliser ces modes de fonctionnement au travers d’une approche processuelle de la fiabilité et de la résilience organisationnelles d’un service d’urgence médicale. Nous étudions d’une part comment les processus se déploient concrètement dans le contexte opérationnel face aux situations rencontrées et d’autre part quel est l’impact du contexte organisationnel sur le maintien de la fiabilité et de la résilience.Au travers d’une étude d’un service d’accueil des urgences vitales français, un premier niveau de résultats décrit les différents processus aux niveaux organisationnel et situationnel constitutifs du maintien de la fiabilité et de la résilience organisationnelles : culture, intégration des nouveaux membres, confiance, coordination, apprentissage et slack organisationnel.Un second niveau de résultats aborde les situations de prise en charge des patients sous forme de continuum et de points d’inflexion. Saturation de l’unité, gestion de l’imprévu et slack situationnel viennent répondre à la volatilité et à l'urgence vitale des situations qui imposent une action immédiate.Nous étudions également la question de l’articulation entre les niveaux organisationnel et situationnel en proposant une relecture du concept d’espace de discussion (Detchessahar, 2003).Enfin, nos résultats nous invitent à considérer la tension existant dans l’hôpital concernant les ressources nécessaires au maintien de la fiabilité et de la résilience organisationnelles. / In order to prevent faults to happen and their catastrophic consequences, some organizations adopt operational modes allowing them to ensure a high degree of reliability and resilience. This research focuses on formalizing these operational modes through a processual approach to organizational reliability and resilience of a critical-care unit. We aim to study, on the one hand, how the processes unfold in the operational context facing real-life situations and, on the other hand, the impact of the organizational context on reliability and resilience.Studying a French critical-care unit, first-order results describe the different processes – at both organizational and situational levels of analysis – contributing to the organizational reliability and resilience: culture, integration of new members, trust, coordination, learning and organizational slack.Second-order results address patient-care situations as a continuum and we highlight the inflection points of the different patient-care trajectories. Saturation of the unit, management of the unexpected and of the situational slack enable critical-care unit’s members to cope with the volatility and the life-threatening emergency of situations demanding immediate action.We also study the links between the organizational and the situational levels of analysis by proposing a reinterpretation of the concept of discussion space (Detchessahar, 2003).Finally, our findings invite us to consider the tension in hospitals regarding the resources needed to maintain organizational reliability and resilience.

The growing importance of non-market considerations has led multinational corporations to globalize not just production and commercialization but also their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives as nonmarket strategies. Scholars have shown that CSR can create intangible assets that help companies reduce their foreignness and gain competitive advantages over local rivals. To what extent multinational enterprises (MNEs) can transfer CSR initiatives to other locations is an important question. Prior research, focusing on the transfer of operational initiative, is silent on the transfer of practices that extend beyond the boundaries of the firm to influence the welfare of external stakeholders. This study builds a theory about the conditions that influence success and failure in the transfer of CSR initiatives from headquarters to overseas subsidiaries. Through a case study of an Indian multinational, qualitative data is combined with the formal logic of fuzzy set analysis. The findings reveal that it is the combination of practice characteristics and local contexts that influence the success of practice transfer. Specifically, I explore two characteristics of CSR initiatives that facilitate practice transfer: stakeholder multiplicity and ambiguity. The former denotes the degree to which a CSR initiative can serve more than one stakeholder and the latter denotes the degree to which a CSR initiative can be applied to multiple contexts in different ways. The analysis suggests that stakeholder multiplicity is a predictor of transfer success to countries where coordination among diverse social actors is easy to achieve. In contrast, in high-context culture locations where rapid coordination is less easy to achieve, the ambiguity of CSR initiatives is a more important predictor of transfer success.

Recognition that corporations are embedded within societies is playing an increasingly significant role in shaping strategic decision making in modern business organisations. Corporate community involvement (CCI) is becoming an increasingly salient aspect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and encompasses a diverse range of activities from philanthropic giving and employee volunteerism to cause related marketing and sponsorship, and supports a range of community needs from education and welfare to cultural and artistic development. As such it provides an ideal focus for exploring the economic, strategic, cultural and institutional influences on CCI. This thesis presents the first systematic analysis of CCI behaviours in Turkey. Turkey, as a secular, developing, largely Moslem country with a growing economy, provides a comparative research context that is culturally, economically and institutionally distinct from other environments within which CCI has been studied. A conceptual model has been developed based on the application of the behavioural theory of the firm. The model engenders the studies which aim to explain the situation of CCI in an institutional, cultural, and national context and through the CCI model, it is expected that the multicultural and complex characteristics of the CCI phenomenon can be understood. The findings suggest that shareholder/investors and community groups positively affect the companies in taking the decision to engage in CCI. The documented relationship between CCI, ownership type, and other firm characteristics also had important implications. This study finds that larger firms are more likely and smaller firms less likely to become involved in CCI activities. Local Turkish companies are keener to contribute large amounts in corporate giving than foreign ones. There is a strong orientation of CCI in Turkey to projects concerned with education, healthcare and the arts. The three common exclusions are politics, religion and animal rights. The majority of CCI expenditures in Turkey took the form of sponsorships. Engaging in CCI under a CSR department is not thepreferred choice in Turkey usually the companies wants to engage in their CCI activities under other business functions. The companies generally separate their philanthropic and sponsorhip activities from each other. Key types of CCI such as employee volunteerism, cash resources or gifts-in-kind, are undertaken under the auspices of these philantrophy and sponsorship and considered to be resources allocated to engage in these types of CCI. This thesis fills the gaps in the existing literature with respect to the lack of conceptual and empirical studies about the necessity of investigating the topic of CCI from a holistic perspective; the necessity of application of other theory(ies) which are able to describe the whole CCI situation instead of describing it piecemeal, and the necessity of discovering different institutional contexts because existing research is geographically narrowly drawn and usually concentrated in the U.S and Western Europe. The thesis is structured to fill these gaps and the contributions are made based on the lacks of the existing studies on CCI.

Many companies use mergers to achieve their growth goals or target technology position. To realise synergies that justify the merger transaction, an integration of the merged companies is often necessary. Such integartion takes place across company business areas (such as finance or sales) and across the layers of management consideration, which are strategy, human resources, organisation, processes, and information technology. In merger integration techniques, there is a significant gap regarding the management of operational level issues. Yet, especially for the finance business area, an integration of processes and information technology is of high importance and often required swiftly after the merger. The author therefore presents an approach designed for managing the operational level merger in the finance business area. To close the gap in considering operational level issues, the author has developed a model for integraring finance processes and information technology of merging companies. For such model development, literature resources have been used along with merger experiences of the author, and interviews with merger experts. Validation of the developed model has been conducted by using in-depth case studies for showing the effects of applying the model. Further validation interviews have been conducted to support the generality of the approach. Accommodating the significant increase of task complexity during mergers compared to normal business operation, the presented approach focuses on managing interdependencies instead of project detail. Features of this approach comprise: An organisational proposal to settinmg up merger programme management; An interdependency model, vertically interconnecting the finance business area with strategic and organisational merger decisions, and horizontally interconnecting the finance business area with other business areas. It could be shown that the presented model improves merger integration quality by reducing complexity of merger management. The model is most applicable for larger companies, and can be used in any merger phase.