Work

Negotiating as Institutional Work: The Case of Labour Standards and International Framework Agreements

Year: 2013

Type: article

Abstract: Although institutional work has recently attracted considerable attention from organization research, there is a surprising neglect of inter-organizational negotiations as a form of institutional work. This neglect is astonishing, since negotiations provide a unique opportunity both to study institutional change in settings characterized by diverging institutional logics and to illustrate how institutional constraints and strategic agency are linked in interaction processes. Based on a combination of the literature on institutional work and the theory of strategic negotiations, we examine in detail three illuminating negotiation processes taking place around International Framework Agreements on global labour standards. This examination reveals three types of (proto-)institutional outcomes produced by these processes: institutional creation, modification and stagnation. Whereas institutional creation and modification, albeit differing in quality, show how integrative negotiation practices of global unions might engage management in a joint endeavor for institutional change, institutional stagnation illuminates some of the pitfalls of negotiation work.

Source: Organization Studies

DOI: 10.1177/0170840613492072

Authors: Markus Helfen, Jörg Sydow

Institution: Freie Universität Berlin

Language: English

Topic: Management and Organizational Studies

Subfield: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Field: Business, Management and Accounting

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Decent work and economic growth, Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: green

Funders: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hans Böckler Stiftung