The number of fighter pilots in Sweden retiring from service, many prematurely, currently exceeds the number of those being trained to replace them. This article examines the factors and circumstances related to the work motivation of pilots and what the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) can do to retain them. It examines the perspectives of fighter pilots serving today and those who have chosen to leave the SAF since 2013, providing descriptions of different ideal professional types and what might provoke them to leave the profession, or motivate them to stay longer. Four ideal types of pilots are identified. These ideal types are (a) the extrinsically motivated; (b) the high-performing; (c) the family-oriented; and (d) the specialist. This article supports the idea that there is no single inducement for fighter pilots to leave the SAF. Our recommendations for retaining pilots differ depending on type and experience level. While increased salaries and better retirement agreements are essential, local career opportunities, less time away from family, more administrative support to squadrons, long-term career planning, rewarding challenges, and opportunities to study are also important. Some uniquely positive aspects, such as serving a higher purpose, flying experiences, and squadron community, motivate fighter pilots to remain.

This article challenges a common position in research on company towns that corporate paternalism is relevant in the formative years, but then fades away due to urbanization, democratization and improved communications. But, paternalism, just as the phenomenon of company towns, lives on. Relating paternalistic practices to the company’s relation to the state, the worker collective, the built environment, community services, and to the affective and moral dimension, we trace corporate paternalism in the mining town of Kiruna, located in the Swedish Arctic, from the late 19th century when the mine and the town were established, through the critical phases when it is under most pressure. The article highlights how paternalism finds new ways and to some extent remains in effect, thus characterizing power relations between management and labor over time. 

En gång i tiden satt gruvnäringen och Kiruna ihop. Ett ömsesidigt beroende som ändrats med tiden. Men vad händer när gruvbolaget inte behöver Kirunaborna i samma utsträckning? När bolaget mer och mer förlitar sig på arbetskraft i form av fly-in fly-out? När fast anställda kan ersättas av entreprenörer? När allt färre händer behövs för att få upp malmen? 

The article presents a case analysis of the work regime at a uranium mine, located on indigenous land in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. All the miners are flown in and out (FIFO), and with nearly half the workforce coming from different indigenous communities. We ask how the miners participate in and experience life as FIFO workers, and enrol the community concept in the analysis. Defining community as not merely a group of people or a place but also, in the wake of Tönnies’ classic work, as a matter of attitude, the case analysis reveals a community at work but fragmentation of indigenous communities off work.

We compare the iron ore sectors and mining regions of Malmfälten in Sweden and the Pilbara in Australia. Both are physically isolated and the product is economically vital, but we find differences in industrial relations which accord with what would be expected in coordinated and liberal market economies. A closer examination, attentive to history and geography and in which changes in institutional form and function are highlighted, reveals, however, that these differences are more apparent than real, and that there is a common neoliberal trajectory. This analysis also suggests that changes in these sites at times drive transformations in national industrial relations.

In an ethnography of the organizing of an underground mine, this article critically engages with actor–network theory’s theorizing of space, particularly the risk of drifting into spatial pluralism. Inspired by Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple, a space multiple approach is enrolled in which seemingly disparate enactments of the mining operations are understood in terms of coexistence and difference, inclusion and exclusion. Such an account attempts to cast aside a kind of neatness that jeopardizes the empirical openness that makes actor–network theory so fruitful to work with in organization studies dealing with spatial complexity. 

Här presenterar vi ramverket för RIKARE affärsmodeller. Ramverket som tagits fram inom ramen Gender Smart Arena vid Luleå tekniska universitet syftar till att bidra till företags och organisationer förändringsarbete mot inkluderande affärs- och verksamhetsmodeller. Ramverket utgör ett delmoment, ett komplement till det digitala verktyget ”Richer business models” (richerbusiness.eu). En affärsmodell är den plan enligt vilken ett företag sköter sin affärsverksamhet. Medvetenhet och reflekterande förståelse kring vad som skapar värde i företag möjliggör förändring. I detta ramverk bidrar vi med övningar och utmaningar som tar ert företag eller organisation till nästa steg i ert förändringsarbete. Företag och organisationer drivs av människor och det är också människor som skapar värde och åstadkommer förändring. I ramverket rikare affärsmodeller fångas affärsmodellens förändringsarbete utifrån flera dimensioner; från olika ”platser” (fysiskt, digital, socialt), situationer, roller och agerande, dvs det som sker och inte sker i företaget eller organisationen.

Genom ramverket RIKARE affärsmodeller kan företag och organisationer ta ytterligare steg mot förbättrad konkurrenskraft och ansvarstagande för att skapa nya värden. Ta på dig de inkluderande glasögonen och bege dig ut i världen – var normkritisk och normkreativ – var aldrig rädd att förändr

The literature on dirty work has traditionally zoomed in on workplace studies of occupational groups stigmatized by some parts of society. In this paper the bias is challenged and extended with the aid of Iris Marion Young’s appropriation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of seriality and an empirical study of workers with non-stigmatized occupations in stigmatized work contexts (arms and pornography). The study shows that the workers have to be constantly ready to deal with work-related dirt in their identity work and to do this without any means of support, development of a language or resistance to the transfer of dirt.

Fallstudier är fantastiska. De visar på exemplets makt och får oss att ifrågasätta etablerade idéer och sätt att göra saker. Fallstudieforskningens utbredning är också en framgångssaga. I boken beskrivs den resan ur ett historiskt perspektiv. Genomgången utmynnar i en presentation av den rådande fallstudiepraxisen, och därmed får läsaren en konkret guide till hur en fallstudie kan planeras, genomföras och kommuniceras.

In August 2016, the second album by Organizing rocks was released. Organizing rocks is a music collaboration between Johan Sandström and Tommy Jensen, emerging out of the research project on labour processes and power relations in the mining industry that they run together. All songs are about the mine, work and power. The musical side of the project also includes doctor Michal Zawadzki. 

List of songs: 

1 Production

2 Automation

3 Wolfpack

4 Blast gotta move

5 The worrying song

6 The sound

7 Pumping iron

8 Black-eyed Eve

9 Doggy style

10 Pullman city

11 Outside the gates

Lyrics by Johan Sandström in songs no. 2, 3, 5, 7-10. Music by Sandström in Black-eyed Eve. 

In May 2016, the album Spaceland was released by Organizing rocks, a music collaboration between Johan Sandström and Tommy Jensen, emerging out of the research project on labour processes and power relations in the mining industry that they run together. All songs are about the mine, work and power.

List of songs: 

1 Spaceland 

2 We the North 

3 Kiruna You Maggot 

4 Us Local People

5 Labouring to Learn (The Tony Huzzard Song) 

6 Metal Machine Emotions

7 After Method

8 Free Spirits (No More Lies) 

9 Back to the Mountain

10 Roots 

Lyrics by Johan Sandström in songs no. 1-3, 5, 8 and 10. Music/vocals by Sandström in Roots.

The paper highlights two problematic tendencies in the burgeoning literature on organizational stigma.The first tendency is conceptual, where stigma is treated at the organizational level, thereby neglecting social encounters at the micro-level. As a way of remedying this, we enroll the seminal writings of Erving Goffman to situate organizational stigma in the interaction order.The second tendency is empirical, where the inclusion of actors performing stigma management is limited to managerial and organizational actors, thus neglecting many of those faced with managing orga- nizational stigma.We report from an explorative study of ordinary wage laborers in the Swedish arms and pornography industries situated toward the bottom of their organizations and referred to as ‘normal deviants’.The paper shows how and why the organizational stigma literature could be more sensitive and inclusive toward whom, how, when, and where organizational stigma is managed.

This paper is about how multiple contexts influence employees’ and managers’ enactments of a standardized corporate code of ethics. An earlier local Swedish case study of how a code is enacted is extended to include enactments during business trips to Ottawa (Canada), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and New Delhi (India). The paper shows that although the code is possible to enact as remote and insignificant (‘not relevant to me’) in the local study, when travelling to different contexts it is enacted as intrusive (affecting core operations) and fluid (highlighting seeming contradictions). The paper highlights the consequences of these enact- ments in terms of management control and individual responsibility) and suggests ways for better understanding how a code is expected to perform, meant to work and keep on working.

En alltmer central del av företagens arbete med och kommunikation av socialt ansvar(Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR) har kommit att handla om hållbarhetsredovisning; dess roll, relevans och möjligheter. Detta projekt har därför fokuserat på hur svenska detaljhandelsföretag använder sig av hållbarhetsredovisning och hur det kan relateras till företagens interna organisatoriska hållbarhetsprocesser.

This article seeks to defend and develop a stakeholder pragmatism advanced in some of the work by Edward Freeman and colleagues. By positioning stakeholder pragmatism more in line with the democratic and ethical base in American pragmatism (as developed by William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty), the article sets forth a fallibilistic stakeholder pragmatism that seeks to be more useful to companies by expanding the ways in which value is and can be created in a contingent world. A dialogue between a defence company and peace and arbitration society is used to illustrate the main plot of this article

This paper contributes to the literature on the political role and responsibilities of corporations. Following Deetz's (1995) critical reading of stakeholder management and a critical methodology, the paper analyses how a large Swedish corporation manages conflicting stakeholder interests and rationales in a multi-stakeholder context. Throughout the case analysis, it is suggested that the corporation reinforces what Deetz (1995) refers to as an information mode, thus effectively hindering it from reaching a communication mode in which more genuine stakeholder dialogues are performed.

This report is based on a pre‐study aiming to provide an overview of what andhow the largest mining companies, internationally and in Sweden, communicate in terms of sustainability on their websites. The report presents a broad understanding of what large mining companies ‘say’ when it comes to sustainability. Conceptually, the study draws on writings in the areas of organizational communication, institutional theory and sustainability accounting. Methodologically, the study is based on qualitative textual analyses, to some extent aided by the text analytic tool Leximancer. The main findings of the study are that while most companies communicate all relevant sustainability issues and all the global leaders publish sustainability reports with the Global Reporting Initiative level A+, all companies distinctively communicate sustainability in unique ways. In this report, these similarities and differences in sustainability communication are retold in four main tensions and four main stories.

Anställda med yrken som i sig inte är stigmatiserade men som arbetar för stigmatiserade organisationer är en negligerad grupp människor i arbetslivsforskningen. Dessa personer tvingas ofta att hantera det stigma som organisationen spiller över på dem, framför allt i relationer med ytligt bekanta. En respondent på ett krigsmaterielföretag säger: ”Jag har varit med om att folk har vänt ryggen mot mig, när jag berättar var jag jobbar”. I dessa möten blir jobbet, som ofta är en viktig del av en persons sociala identitet, något som måste hanteras med försiktighet. Artikeln handlar om hur dessa personer resonerar kring och i praktiken hanterar denna stigmatransfer. Den bygger på Erving Goffmans arbeten om stigma, på tidigare forskning om stigmatiserade yrken och på intervjuer med anställda vid ett krigsmaterielföretag och två företag i den pornografiska branschen.

Den här boken ger en introduktion till hållbarhetsredovisning. Boken hjälper dig att förstå bakgrunden till hållbarhetsredovisning, hur man upprättar en hållbarhetsredovisning och vilken funktion den fyller.

Boken är starkt kritisk till en organisationsforskning och en samhällsdebatt som hellre diskuterar organisationers legitimitet och förtroende än ansvar. När allt kommer omkring behöver varken legitimitet eller förtroende ha någonting med ansvar att göra. Det kan snarare vara så att legitima och etablerade organisatoriska processer hindrar - eller till och med motverkar - ansvarstagande. I boken lyfts dessa processer fram, tillsammans med förslag på hur man kan hantera dem och upptäcka vägar framåt.

This paper focuses on the significance of codes of conduct (CoCs) in the internal work context of two retail companies. A stepwise approach is used. First, the paper identifies in what way employees use and refer to CoCs internally. Second, the function and relevance of CoCs inside the two companies are identified. Third, the paper explains why CoCs tend to function in the identified ways. In both cases, the CoCs are clearly decoupled in the sense that they do not concern the immediate work context of the employees. Counter-intuitively, this facilitates the process of establishing the CoCs. Even though the CoCs are not directly relevant for the employees, they are accepted and embraced with regard to contents, focus and function. Above all, the CoCs seem to confirm and even strengthen employee identity. On the basis of these observations, it is suggested that CoCs should not only be valued in light of their direct organisational consequences or lack of such consequences. The issue is not just whether CoCs are decoupled or not. Rather, it is argued that researchers should consider more closely a two-level analysis that takes into account not only the concrete application of CoCs but also their function and meaning. An implication of this is that what might appear as a decoupled code cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the ‘core’ business processes of the organisation.

Corporate responsibility (CR) communication has risen dramatically in recent years, following increased demands for transparency. One tendency noted in the literature is that CR communication is organised and structured. Corporations tend to professionalise CR communication in the sense that they provide information that corresponds to demands for transparency that are voiced by certain stakeholders. This also means that experts within the firm tend to communicate with professional stakeholders outside the firm. In this article, a particular aspect of the organisation of CR communication is examined, a phenomenon that we refer to as the ‘filtration effect’. By comparing CR communication in parent companies and their subsidiaries, we show empirically that there is considerably less CR communication on the subsidiary level compared to the parent level. We see filtration as a sign of conscious organising of CR communication that implies particular attention to certain stakeholder groups with clearly defined demands and expectations on companies. The strong filtration effect noted in the study suggests that CR communication does not seem to be very much adapted to customers, which may be problematic both from a communicative and ethical perspective. The study covers Sweden’s 206 largest retail firms.

Globalization is a blind spot in stakeholder theory and this undermines its explanatory power and usefulness to managers in global corporations. In this paper we build on Edward Freeman and colleagues’ attempts to construct divergent stories about how to create value for the corporation and its stakeholders when developing a stakeholder theory that is more sensitive to globalization. We achieve this by highlighting two particular challenges that globalization brings to stakeholder theory. The first challenge is to acknowledge new power relations (sub-political movements, new forms of bureaucracy and hierarchy) and the second is to acknowledge new dimensions of responsibility (a political responsibility). In the paper we relate our developments of stakeholder theory to two previously published case studies.

Purpose - Efforts to address the role and responsibilities of large global corporations have predominantly focused on the need for increased and more effective global corporate governance, but this underestimates the need to articulate a global ethics for these corporations. This paper aims to analyse the Woolf Committee Report (WCR; the weapon company BAE Systems plc's attempt to outline what it would take to become a global corporate leader in ethics) and benchmark it against an ethical response to corporate responsibility articulated as a global ethics. Design/methodology/approach - The paper is based on a textual analysis of the WCR. Findings - The WCR contains openings towards a re-articulation of the role and responsibilities of large global corporations, but it is predominantly a text that gives us more clues to how difficult it will be for BAE, or any other corporation, to "live" a global ethics. Research limitations/implications - Critical analyses of the language that corporations use in order to address their role and responsibilities are important. However, how texts influence practice is dependent on how they travel and more studies on such journeys are also needed. Practical implications - Given that textual analyses, such as ours, are re-connected to practitioners, such studies might contribute to making practitioners more discursively aware of the corporate talk that they are embedded in. Originality/value - The paper predominantly speaks to the field of business studies and its originality lies in its focus on a global ethics (without reducing this to governance) in relation to the role and responsibilities of large global corporations.

This study is about how a corporate code of ethics travels into a multinational corporation’s subsidiary, focusing on how members of the subsidiary recontextualize, relabel and explain the code (to themselves and others). What emerges is the story of a code that is disliked by its receivers, but yet signed by them all, avowing that they have ‘read, understood and accepted’ it, thereby reinforcing the parent’s control system. We argue that this seeming contradiction can be explained in terms of the receivers resisting the code by distancing themselves from it through the devaluation of (i) social referents, (ii) the code’s core ethical content and (iii) the expected outcome of implementing the code. These distancing practices enable the receivers to position themselves as outside of power, which, in turn, enable them to sign the code.

In this article, we explore the self-oriented rather than socially-oriented reasons why a doctoral dissertation in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is written. We base our article on Yuri M. Lotman's idea on autocommunication which we use as tool in analysing a group interview conducted with six doctoral students studying in the field of CSR. We suggest that autocommunicational aspects might play a much more important role in rationalized Western culture and science than is often realized, and our main thesis is that one essential reason for writing a doctoral dissertation in the field of CSR might be to communicate with oneself and that this even might contain a therapeutic dimension. Implications for students, supervisors and future research are discussed at the end of the article.

What happens when corporate codes of ethics (CCEs) `go to work', and how do they influence moral practice? Even though previous research has posed these or similar questions, the role and the effect of the CCE are still dubious. In this article, it is argued that this is predominantly because previous research is fixed in a position in which CCEs are passive artefacts with no capability of bending space, and in which agency and morality are limited to the human sphere only. An approach to the study and understanding of CCEs in which the travel of the CCE is made the focus of the research is therefore developed. The code comes alive in a heterogeneous materiality, travelling as a result of a wide range of translations, and granted an epistemological capability of influencing humans' world-views and moral practices. The approach is illustrated with a case study on CCE-implementation and it is concluded that through generating more accounts like this, researchers and practitioners are not only in a better position to understand how CCEs `go to work', but also in a better position to shoulder moral responsibility.

This paper outlines the contours of the global network society and then searches for 'the masters' of this emerging environment. Judging from the management talk on flexible, decentralized and adaptable networked enterprises, these masters are found in the large global corporations, but closing in on practice, evidence rather points in the direction of illegal, or partly illegal, global networks. In the paper, we use global trafficking networks as the benchmark example, arguing that they are the real masters of the global network society and that they show us in which direction large global corporations might be heading. This raises several issues, of which the role and responsibilities of business researchers and business studies are discussed. We present three kinds of arguments to why we should study global trafficking networks -- the ideologist, the scientific and the moral argument. The position advocated in the paper holds that the two first cannot be left to their own destinies; they need to be assessed on moral grounds.

In this article, we focus on the cross- cultural aspects of the implementation of an American company’s code of ethics into its Swedish subsidiary. We identify the cross-cultural stories that the receivers in the subsidiary use when trying to explain the parent’s code and conceptualize these stories as part of an emerging narrative of national belonging and differences. The receivers resisted the code by amplifying the importance of national identity. Rather than stimulating a discussion on ethics that might have strengthened the ties between the parent and the subsidiary, the outcome of the code implementation had the opposite effect. The article concludes by stressing the process of implementing codes across cultures rather than code content.

This paper takes its point of departure in an article by Stevens [Stevens, B.: 1994, Journal of Business Ethics54, 163–171], in which she identified a lack of knowledge regarding how corporate codes of ethics are communicated and affect behavior in organizations. Taking heed of this suggested gap, we review studies on corporate codes of ethics with an empirical content, published since 1994. The conclusion of the review is that we still lack knowledge on how codes work, how they are communicated and how they are transformed inside organizations. Stevens’ plea could even be extended, arguing that the knowledge gap might be of even more significance than in the mid-1990s. Some directions for how this situation can be approached in future studies are outlined in the paper.

This paper is based on the notion that the discourse of corporate sustainability is becoming institutionalised at a time when it is just getting started. It therefore attempts to contribute to research approaches that question and go beyond the dominant normative discourse of corporate sustainability. It poses the question of what would be some of the assumptions needed to open up the discourse and what would be some of the implications of doing that. It assesses a number of earlier reviews of the field, and undertakes a case study of The Natural Step, which, while claiming to open up a new discourse, may be understood as another means of institutionalising the narrative of corporate sustainability. Three areas for future research are outlined in this paper.

How and why do organizations approach greening? How can we conceptualize approaches and how can we encourage reflexive dialogues on them? These are the main questions addressed in this qualitative study on organizational greening. The study sets off by discussing matters of research philosophy, arguing that our trust in science ought to be revised and that a more postmodern and constructionist philosophy might be a way to go. This is then followed by a theoretical review, showing that organizational studies have a history in environmental issues, but that it is basically technocentric in orientation. A more reflexive organizational approach is suggested. The empirical part of the study is based on qualitative research of five case studies, representing a mix of organizations situated in Sweden, all with an explicit ambition to approach greening. The analyses target the organizations' approaches from practice to assumptions, pointing at the commonalities as well as the tensions. Basically, greening was an issue for all studied organizations, but an increasing pressure to market-orient their operations in line with the business rhetoric dominated their identity construction. The environment was included if there were opportunities of win-win situations between environment and economy in sight. Once embarked upon, the organizations tended to focus on technocratic practices, developing or implementing management systems, product development indexes, life-cycle methodologies and other tools. On a more philosophical level, in the study referred to as the worldview level, the approaches were predominandy characterized by a representative epistemology and a dualistic ontology, that is, they were clearly anthropocentric. With a base in these findings, an alternative approach is discussed as a way out, or as a way of constructing a reflexive dialogue on greening. This is partly based on the tensions within and between the cases, which encouraged reflections on how greening was approached. In the alternative, organizations are seen as actors on a symbolic agora where transparency, participation and self-reflexivity are keys to organizational legitimacy. This view frames organizations in the dominating approach as agoraphobic producers of materialistically dependent satisfiers. The alternative also targets the limits of a preference and materialistically oriented view on die satisfaction of human needs. Instead, it is argued that environmental and cultural sensitivity should be acknowledged as natural parts of organizational greening. This, however, demands more room for reflexive dialogues encouraging ontological awareness and a respect for more ecocentric views.