14 Dec Chikako Oka–Business and Society Seminar

Posted at 17:26h in Business & Society Seminars by

January 24th, 2019 / 14:00 – 15:30 / Paris Campus (Room 2110)

For the 18th Business & Society Research Seminar, the Deloitte ESCP Europe Chair on the Circular Economy & SustBusy Research Center welcome:

Chikako Oka

of Royal Holloway University, School of Management, Centre for Research into Sustainability

Analysing the Evolving Texture of Transnational Industrial Relations: Opening the Black Box of Interfirm and Firm-Union Relationships in the Global Garment Industry

Using qualitative data comprising 93 interviews, the authors analyze the emergence of the Action Collaboration Transformation (ACT) living wages initiative, asking why firms embrace union-inclusive forms of labor governance. They argue that the private labor governance literature, which has to date not paid attention to unions as a specific kind of actor, needs to be complemented with the industrial relations literature, which does not address community-building as a driver for firm collective action. The central finding is that existing union-inclusive governance initiatives provided a platform facilitating the development of the interfirm and firm-union relations crucial to the formation of ACT, which in turn facilitated the signing of new framework agreements with IndustriALL. The authors’ contribution lies in developing a new mapping of labor governance approaches on the dimensions of union inclusion and interfirm organization and in highlighting potential spillover effects among union-inclusive initiatives.

Coordinating Professors:

Aurélien Acquier (aacquier@escpeurope.eu)

Valentina Carbone (vcarbone@escpeurope.eu)

For questions please contact Marie Brisson de Chassey (mbrissondechassey@escpeurope.eu).

For people outside ESCP Europe, if you wish to attend, please print this announcement and show it at the welcome desk.