Social and Environmental Accountability Journal

ISSN: 0969-160X (Print) 2156-2245 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reaj20

The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’

Work to Create and Perpetuate Inequality
R. Hamann and S. Bertels, Journal of Management Studies, 2018, 55 (3), pp.
394–423

Christine Gilbert

To cite this article: Christine Gilbert (2019) The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’
Work to Create and Perpetuate Inequality, Social and Environmental Accountability Journal, 39:2,
142-143, DOI: 10.1080/0969160X.2019.1635812

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969160X.2019.1635812

Published online: 12 Jul 2019.

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142 ARTICLE REVIEWS

matters quite significantly for organisational responses to climate change. Basically, Australian
policy approach to climate change, shifting over time from enthusiastically supportive to dis-
missive, is reflected quite faithfully in case companies’ attitude to climate change. The con-
structed model, illustrated by the end of the paper, alleviated my confusion but it also
triggered further reflections on the supposedly ill-fated nature of business-driven climate
change action. The third stage of translation, accompanied by a resurgence of the shareholder
value maximisation discourse and actions that contradict initial commitments to grand chal-
lenges, appears inevitable. Perhaps this needs not always be the case. The Australian
context was unfortunate, with case companies facing economic hardship concurrently with
politicians turning their back to climate change (apparently the two being unrelated to each
other). In societal contexts marked by more stable climate change national/regional policy,
perhaps no transition to the third stage would occur. Confining climate change to the business
case in the second stage of the model is already sufficiently depressive.

Oana Apostol
School of Economics, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
© 2019 Oana Apostol
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969160X.2019.1635809

The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’ Work to Create and

Perpetuate Inequality. R. Hamann and S. Bertels, Journal of Management Studies,
2018, 55 (3), pp. 394–423.

Hamann and Bertels (2018) are concerned with social inequalities and how they are created
and perpetuated. In this paper, the case of South Africa, where the transition to democracy
has led unexpectedly to increasing social inequalities, provides the authors with a field
study to examine the specific role of organisations in producing and maintaining social
inequalities. By paying attention to employers’ agency and motivation in this transition to
democracy, the authors expose the relation between labour availability and the way
employers engage in institutional work in the context of political changes. The paper
shows that, in a context in which labour is scarce, employers engage in more coercive insti-
tutional devices such as conscripting and controlling, to ensure the required labour for their
organisation. However, when labour is abundant, and when a political shift occurred,
employers tend to engage in freeing, as well as in liberalising and outsourcing institutional
controls. The study thus shows how organisations are proactive to affect the social
system to provide them with cheap labour and contributes to the literature by examining
the underexplored agency of employers.
With a qualitative historical analysis and 122 interviews conducted, the paper’s findings are
interesting and important as they show that even in an event that was supposed to be an
advancement of human rights for exploited labour, employers can find ways to perpetuate,
and even increase, social inequalities. It provides insights to reflect on situations in which
freedom is given to individuals in order to improve their living conditions, and on the respon-
sibilities that come with this freedom. The paper shows that in cases in which freedom is not
accompanied by the appropriate means to take advantage of this new freedom, individuals
find themselves with a heavy responsibility and can see their conditions deteriorate. In
Hamann and Bertels’s (2018) paper, a new freedom offered to workers by their employer
was to choose their own place of residence, compared to the previous situation in which
 SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNAL 143

they were obliged to live on-site in single-sex housing compounds. These compounds were
‘cut off from society’, ‘very crowded’, ‘designed for surveillance and control’, and ‘an attack
on the dignity of workers and their households’ (406–407). This new freedom came with the
responsibility to find a place to live with a limited budget. Unfortunately, the workers found
themselves in a situation where the availability of housing fitting their needs at an affordable
price was not sufficient, which resulted in a rapid growth of slum settlements. Workers were
thus unable to improve their living conditions, and even experienced a decline. The paper
shows that in a situation in which employers were supposed to provide their employees
with more acceptable living conditions, they found a way to transform the situation into an
opportunity to reduce their corporate social responsibilities and the cost associated with
labour, resulting in a decrease in individual living conditions. In sum, the gift of freedom
must come with appropriate means. Without these means, empowerment is not possible.

Christine Gilbert
Université Laval & York University
© 2019 Christine Gilbert
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969160X.2019.1635812

It’s Time to Think Centrality of Time in Relation to Sustainable

Business

Business Sustainability: It Is About Time. P. Bansal and M. R. DesJardine, Strategic

Organization, 2014, 12 (I), pp. 70–78.

Short on Time: Intertemporal Tensions in Business Sustainability. N. Slawinski and

P. Bansal, Organization Science, 2015, 26 (2), pp. 531–549.

Time and Business Sustainability: Socially Responsible Investing in Swiss Banks and
Insurance Companies. D. Risi, Business and Society, 2018, I-31. doi:10.1177/0007650318777721

Many studies in the field of strategic management have an important omission – they do not
take into account time and consequently directly or indirectly contribute to promoting short-
termism as a business strategy. What follows is an intertwined review of three essays that –
although thematically and methodologically different – problematise the lack of explicit con-
sideration of time in strategic management studies of sustainability. Namely, sustainability
must be differed from corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship and the triple
bottom line (environmental, social and economic) approach, and also we should distinguish
sustainability from the simplistic horizontal opposition between an organisation and society
or society and nature (see Bansal and DesJardine, 2014). Instead, we should introduce and
start re-thinking the vertical axes of time in parallel with the horizontal divisions (organisation
and society and society and nature). Therefore, certain projects could be sustainable but not
responsible and also could be responsible but not sustainable (see Bansal and DesJardine,
2014). Only after taking into account the fact that sustainability must be temporally envisioned
and considering intergenerational equity as its central element, we can re-interrogate all
aspects adequately. As Bansal and DesJardine underline, in a more conventional understanding