To Örebro University

Abstract: The underlying assumption in this paper is that an organization consists of versions of ethics; what is considered to be right or wrong, is constructed and re-constructed in various ways. One of the very important ways in which ethics is reconstructed is through the stories told about and in relation to the company’s corporate code of ethics. Organizations abide with stories, myths, fantasies, and dreams (Gabriel, 1995), however, the stories captured in literature are often about human subjects. In this paper, we shall explore closely the corporate code of ethics as the protagonist in a story.

Research Question: What versions of corporate morality are found in what is said and not said about corporate ethics, about corporate good and bad, in stories about a Corporate Code of Ethics?

Theoretical Framework: The theoretical framework used in this paper is based literature stemming from the field of critical management studies. The main philosophical foundation of critical management studies is critical theory, but inspiration has also been drawn from labor process theory, poststructuralism, and critical realism (Alvesson, Bridgman and Wilmott, 2009; pg 29). The assumption of multiple versions of reality, which in this paper refers to versions of ethics, or what is seen as right or wrong, is based on Law’s (2004) and Mol’s (2002) ontological perspectives, arguing for fluidity, where realities, concepts, and practices  are shown to be plural, having many different faces (See also Law and Mol, 2004 and 2008).

Method: The choice to deconstruct a story narrated by the vice president of corporate responsibility at a Swedish Multinational Corporation (whom I from here onwards will be calling Anna) was made due to Anna’s position of power. Much of her daily work entails training managers and employees in business ethics, and the values stipulated in the corporation’s business code.  The deconstruction is inspired by Joanne Martin’s paper (1990) which is a deconstruction aiming at shedding light on the suppression of gender conflict in organizations. There are however, two significant differences. The first is that an inanimate object is here given life and a personality in order to highlight some of the effects that this object, a business code of ethics, can have. Some of these effects have been pinpointed by other authors (Jensen, Bauman etc). The second major difference is that whilst Joanne (1990) uses a feminist perspective in her deconstruction, the theoretical lens used in this paper is that of a general de-naturalization (Alvesson, Bridgman and Wilmott, 2009; pg 9) which entails questioning the existing order, the taken for granted.

Findings: The paper argues that in the deconstruction and reconstruction of the stories, when the code is seen as an agent, it clearly reinforces the idea of code as good, as a moral preacher and indirectly, resistance towards the code, as bad. The idea of the code is in stories about it often decoupled from the code as a material artifact, allowing separate versions of corporate morality to be enacted in stories about the code. indirectly, the content of the code becomes a part of the idea of the code, and when resistance towards the idea of the code is seen as bad, also resistance to towards the contents of the material artifact are seen as bad.  These findings suggest serious implications for the progression of ethics in corporations, as dialogue and disagreement with certain versions of corporate morality are discouraged. 

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present how my positionality as a researcher aligned with the works of Latour in terms of methodological inspirations and allowed me to develop a critical vantage point and simultaneously adopt a heterogeneously rather than hierarchically informed approach to ordering the world, which I argue serves as a basis for a more inclusive study of management systems.

Design/methodology/approach: I reflect on my own positionality as a researcher and share how my interpretation of Latour's ontology through some of his ideas and concepts, particularly symmetry, power, translation and agency, allowed me to incorporate and organize heterogeneous actors depicted in different empirical materials into space-time contexts and subsequently theorize organizing and management practices as agential, multiple and becoming.

Findings: A base in Latour's ontology has equipped me with openness towards empirical settings, which I argue retains a democratic approach to theorization, i.e. theorization, which remains mindful of inadvertent assumptions about power, hierarchy or the taken for granted. This approach has also given me a form of personal resilience as a researcher.

Originality/value: The originality of this paper lies in presenting and developing the concept of method as democratizing. I argue that Latour's approach to the empirical allows for at least two forms of active democratizing, one relating to the researcher as self and the other in how it incorporates the empirical actors into research, making possible the inclusivity of heterogeneity in analyses of organizations and organizing.

This paper addresses certain methodological aspects of a research project, in which an epistemological symmetry is assumed between humans and nonhumans, and this paper is about what implications and challenges such a premise may entail for the data collection and analysis of the study. Although I adhere strongly to the notion of epistemological symmetry in theory, there are certain aspects with such a study that pose methodological challenges and this paper sheds light upon these challenges and discusses ways to deal with them. The major concern is retaining the epistemological symmetry throughout the data collection and analysis of the study. This paper investigates the methodological aspects of a study on transformations of and by corporate codes of ethics to analyze how corporate responsibility is influenced. The paper, hence explores how we can, theoretically and practically, study a non-human actor (in this case, a code), with similar epistemological capabilities as a human actor, in a human-centered world.

Corporate codes of ethics (CCEs) have become increasingly prevalent as overarching ethical guidelines for multinational corporations doing business around the globe. As formal documents, governing corporations’ work, policies, and ways of doing business, CCEs are meant to guide all business activities and apply to all of the corporation’s employees, suppliers, and business partners. In multinational corporations, this means that diverse countries, cultures, and a myriad of heterogeneous actors are expected to abide by the same standards and guidelines, as stipulated in the CCE. Despite this empirical reality, CCEs have previously been approached by academics mainly as passive company documents or as marketing or management tools, in the contexts of their country of origin. Building on Actor-Network Theory this thesis applies an interactionist ontology, and relational epistemology, seeing the code as a sociomaterial object with both material and immaterial characteristics, and moving in a global arena. Furthermore, the CCEs are assumed to be susceptible to change, i.e. translations. With these assumptions, the CCE of a multinational corporation is followed as it travels between its country of origin (Sweden) and another country (China) and goes to work in different contexts. Heterogeneous empirical materials such as interviews, company documents, observations, shadowing, and emails are used to present stories from different contexts where the CCE is at work. The overall purpose of the thesis is to contribute to the theorizing of CCEs, thereby providing further understanding of the possible consequences of CCEs in contextually diverse settings. By following traces of a CCE, this study posits the need for a simultaneous understanding of three dimensions of CCEs for CCEs to be understood in contextually dispersed settings. The three dimensions are a) material translations of the code, b) enactments of these translations, and c) ideas associated with the material and enacted code.  The study contributes to the understanding of CCEs by highlighting a specific country-context (China), by putting together knowledge from codes in various contexts, and the overarching contribution lies in highlighting codes as different kinds of objects and adding to the existing literature – specifically, contextualizing the CCE as a vaporous object.

Denna rapport delger lärdomar och kunskap förvärvad inom ett ettårigt Vinnovaprojekt (diarienummer 2018-04685) som sökt beskriva och analysera möjligheter och hinder för en omställning till en cirkulär ekonomi utifrån ett företagsekonomiskt perspektiv. I detta samverkansprojekt har tre huvudaktörer drivit arbetet; forskare från Handelshögskolan vid Örebro universitet och dess Centrum för hållbart företagande (CSB), den ideella föreningen CradleNet som syftar till att accelerera den cirkulära ekonomin samt det privata företaget Econova  med mångårig erfarenhet inom återvinning och återanvändning av restmaterial och avfall. I projektet har vi arrangerat fyra interaktiva kunskapsmoduler där aktörer med intresse för en övergång till cirkulär ekonomi samlats och tillsammans diskuterat nuvarande praktiker samt vägar framåt. I projektet har vi arbetat med en bred definition av cirkulär ekonomi; definitionen inbegriper hantering av material med målet att minimera avfall, samt en materialhantering som är miljömässigt, socialt och ekonomiskt ansvarstagande. Rapporten summerar de viktigaste lärdomarna från projektet och beskriver olika sätt som företag –tillsammans med andra – kan påbörja resan mot en cirkulär ekonomi.

This paper uses the notion of material affordances to show that a focus on how people engage with materials helps understanding how organizations transit toward sustainability. Material affordances refer to the enablements and constraints afforded by materials to someone engaging with an environment for a particular purpose. Based on a qualitative study of a company's efforts at becoming circular, we show that material affordances are evolutive as organizational members shift focus from the development of products to the establishment of a circular business model. We also show that affordances are distributed across the company's circular ecosystem. Between what they enable and prevent, they invite humans to a dynamic engagement with materials that decenters human agencies to incorporate material agency in such efforts. A key contribution of the notion of material affordances is to put the relationships of humans and materials at the core of a transition toward circularity and sustainability.

This paper presents a review of 100 empirical papers studying corporate codes of ethics (CCEs) in business organizations from the time period mid-2005 until mid-2016, following approximately an 11-year time period after the previous review of the literature. The reviewed papers are broadly categorized as content-oriented, output-oriented, or transformation-oriented. The review sheds light on empirical focus, context, questions addressed, methods, findings and theory. The findings are discussed in terms of the three categories as well as the aggregate, stock of empirical CCE studies in comparison with previous reviews, answering the question “where are we now?” Content and output studies still stand for the majority of the studies, whereas the transformation studies are fewer. Within these areas, two new trends are found to have emerged: discursive analyses and a focus on labor conditions. The review finds that (a) the content of CCEs is still predominantly self-defensive, (b) that CCEs are insufficient in themselves in terms of protecting workers’ rights, (c) that CCEs are likely to encounter tensions when implemented across national and organizational boundaries, and (d) that while perception of CCEs is generally positive, CCEs may lead to both positive and negative outcomes. Based on these findings, potential areas for further exploration in the area of CCE research are suggested.

Background: Moral philosophers and ethical thinkers have long noted the intricate relationship between ethics and business. Business and ethics have often been seen as contradictory and incongruent, not least in the way ethics is incorporated into businesses. Business goals aiming to satisfy ethical- and business-related issues best work with integration. However, oftentimes, the strategies maybe well defined by management, yet the implementation is often left to employees in their daily practices. This paper focuses on contradictions individuals experience as they implement strategies to integrate ethics into their business. Our starting point is the challenge when well intending individuals pass contradictions on rather than dealing with them.

Purpose: The main question we ask is: how do individuals frame their contradictory work related to the implementation of ethics goals? We focus on enhanced methods of training, which can lead to morally engaged organizational members.

Method: This paper is inspired by observations made during an ethnographic case study of a Swedish multinational’s endeavor to integrate ethics into its procurement activities. This endeavor included a heavy focus on operationalizing and incorporating (by managers) and training (employees and contractors) in social, health and environmental aspects. Empirical observations, field-visits, and semi-structured interviews were conducted in both Sweden and China.

Results: Focusing on the individual actor within the organizational context, we draw on theories from experimental psychology, business ethics as well as paradox and suggest that organizational member to be work with a paradoxical mindset which could enable moral engagement. Within such a context, we attribute great power to the individuals’ own sense of right and wrong and their ability to think and act upon a personal moral compass.

The concept of place, as well as physicality of place, impacts  sustainability practices in different ways. While management and organization studies have seen a rise in discussions on sustainable business models, we argue that place has lost its natural place in sustainability studies related to the business organization. Place offers a rootedness and a link to the natural, that all organizational activities are dependent on. Therefore, place has the capacity to drive and deepen sustainability practices.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the role of place in sustainability research and organizational practice. A topic, which in sustainability research related to the business organization has been rather weakly covered. By applying an abductive research approach, we identify four different settings for the relation between place and sustainability. We then develop a place typology that shows the different roles of place in sustainability research and practice.

Corporate codes of ethics are integrated into supplier-auditing processes in the hope of ensuring sustainability throughout the supply chain. But little is known about what actually happens when one standardized code of ethics is disseminated and applied in audits on suppliers across the globe. This study builds on the literature on the 'translation of management ideas' and examines what happens when a corporate code of ethics travels in a global context. The specific case reports on a Swedish Multinational Corporation (MNC) with a standardized code of ethics applied in the practice of auditing a supplier in Eastern China. The study shows that the code can be translated in different ways in different organizational and geographical contexts. Observations of and interviews about how the code is translated in practice indicate that the code's ethics are negotiable. It is argued that sustainability and ethics are in danger of being negotiated or completely undermined when efficiency and contractual agreements set the agenda for audits, and that the relative buyer–supplier power relation can play a vital role in setting standards and demanding supplier compliance.

Qualitative researchers experience a myriad of emotions during fieldwork. Yet, a reluctance to display and openly discuss emotions in relation to research practice means little insight on how these can inform the research process exists. In this paper, we explore the researcher’s emotions in an organizational ethnography of an emergency department during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify three emotional triggers (uncertain field access, disrupted research practices, and researcher exposure) and discuss the researcher’s embodied experiences and reflexive responses. We present four ways in which the researcher’s emotions can be used as a resource for embodied reflexivity: (i) deepening field engagement through a focus on collective experiences, (ii) using the researcher’s agency to refocus data collection and enhance creativity, (iii) merging inward and outward focus to reframe the research project, and (iv) visualizing emotions throughout the research process to avoid mind-body dualisms. This paper joins recent discussions on qualitative methods and reflexivity and answers calls for making the researcher’s field presence visible in qualitative research. We contribute by delineating ways in which emotions, as a resource for embodied reflexivity, can inform qualitative research.

Qualitative researchers are exposed to a myriad of emotions associated with experiences from the field. Yet, little insight on how these are intertwined with the research process exists. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between researcher and researched by looking closer at the challenges encountered during an organizational ethnography of an emergency department during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors engaged in peer debriefing sessions to construct a reflective account of the research process. Drawing on Barad’s ontology, the paper discusses the need to recognize the entanglement of researcher and researched and how the researcher can actively gauge and redirect emotions into methodological impetus to inform and sustain research focus despite unforeseeable events. The paper answers calls for making researchers’ emotions visible in qualitative research and organizational ethnography and contributes by articulating and visualizing the mutually constitutive relationship between researcher and researched.

Sustainability innovation research suggests that when the managers of small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) perceive sustainability as strategic, they undertake sustainable innovation. Educationalinterventions are, in turn, suggested to foster such views among these managers. But in the interactionbetween educators and managers, power matters for how knowledge is conveyed and educational interventionsare understudied, especially when they are university-led. This article examines how actors’power affects the translation of knowledge between educators and SME managers. A conceptualframework combining translation and power-dependency theory is introduced and applied to the casestudy of a University-led competence development program offered to construction company managersin Sweden. The analysis reveals how imbalanced dependencies and power within interactions accumulatedover time and came to interfere with the program’s learning objectives. The study contributespractically by suggesting how mutual goals, time management, and relationship building can create abetter context for educator-SME interactions and SME sustainability. The scientific contribution lies inintroducing a new perspective on educational interventions for SMEs and providing a conceptualframework for future studies thereof.