Contracting Out to Manage: Evidence from Security Service Suppliers and Clients in India
Author: Saikat Chakraborty; Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
Author: Ernesto Noronha; Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
Author: Premilla D'Cruz; Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
Author: Parvinder Gupta; Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
The increasing practice of "contracting out" for managing noncore services by organizations trying to meet contradictory interests of cost reduction and service quality in the competition age requires critically analyzing the management side of contractual work arrangements. This study focuses on exploring the managerial interests that govern the decisions and practices of contracting out security services in the context of Indian formal sector organizations. Drawing on qualitative data, we find that cost-reducing interests dominate over service and legal compliance requirements for most clients, shaping these clients' contract management practices towards progressive cost reduction. However, some clients consciously moderate their cost-reducing interests to ensure quality service and reputation linked to legal compliance. We argue that although clients intensify price-based market competition for low-skill service contracts and acerbate the conditions produced by the lack of government regulation, they also retain the choice to pursue dissimilar managerial interests within these dominant structures. Suppliers constrained by client-designed service specifications and exogenously guided by the nature of competition and regulation further enable clients to orchestrate their contractual work arrangements according to their managerial interests.
“Nobody looks at these workers”: The Precarious Work of the Agents of Death Market and the Pandemic
Author: Rosana Silva; Unigranrio - U. do Grande Rio
Author: Robson André; FIOCRUZ - Fundação Instituto Oswaldo Cruz
Author: Rejane Nascimento; Unigranrio - U. do Grande Rio
Author: Denise Franca Barros; Unigranrio - U. do Grande Rio
This research aims to identify the characteristics of precarious work in workers who work in the sale of products and in the provision of various services related to death management, here understood as the death market, and to raise possible precariousness caused by the pandemic of the new coronavirus. After analyzing these two scenarios, we will present the final considerations, including the government's challenges. This research is qualitative in nature and focused on understanding the dying market's work from its participants in various businesses. The articles published in a widely circulated newspaper contributed to understanding the current scenario. As a result, several characteristics of precarious work were identified, in addition to the stigma of society. During the pandemic period, it is possible to notice the accentuation of existing precariousness and new precariousness, such as high health risk and suffering at work. It is concluded that workers can be seen in three pillars of precariousness: objective, subjective, and given existing working conditions. Because of this, the challenges facing public authorities are enormous, especially after the pandemic, given that these workers are among the most exposed to the risks of coronavirus contamination.
Conflicts that cannot be domesticated: analyzing urban conflicts from a demiurgic theorization view
Author: Morgana Krieger; Fundação Getulio Vargas - EAESP
Author: Marlei Pozzebon; HEC Montreal & FGV/EAESP
The understanding of conflicts represents an important topic in organization studies. One might argue that, although different perspectives have been assumed, most of them end by attempting to ‘domesticate’ conflicts. In this paper, our objective is to discuss how conflicts can be the investigated in a different manner, not pursuing domestication or elimination, therefore extending Contu’s (2019) proposition of a demiurgic theorization. We present a hybrid analytical lens that combines the right to the city and the sociology of public problems theoretical paradigms. We apply this lens to comprehend and analyse conflicts that arise from the urban production process in São Paulo and in Medellín, arguing that this lens is an avenue for operationalizing the demiurgic theorization. The paper makes two main contributions: the development of a hybrid analytical lens for interpreting urban conflicts and the advancement of a demiurgic theorization that leads organization scholars to a new understanding of conflicts by learning how not to ‘domesticate’ them.
Shepherding with carrots and sticks to unlearn traditional farming practices
Best Critical Paper on International Business is sponsored by the journal Critical Perspectives on International Business
Author: Nanna Schmidt; Copenhagen Business School
Author: Rajiv Maher; EGADE Business School, Tecnologico de Monterrey
This study examined the methods used by a market-based conservation non-government organisation (NGO) to co-opt the livelihood plans of an indigenous Bolivian community and encourage them to adopt modern organic coffee growing methods without confrontation. Many previous studies have highlighted the use of violence, intimidation and manipulation by outside organisations when seeking to co-opt indigenous communities. To develop a pastoral-power relational-practices framework to analyse the case, first, the current literature on management, NGOs and community development was reviewed, after which the underused Foucauldian concept of ‘pastoral-power’ was applied, which is seen as a kinder, more benevolent governance that encourages self-nurturing in return for a new rewards value system. After the analysis of archival data, fieldwork was conducted in Bolivian communities and NGO officials interviewed. It was found that in communities where most members lacked formal schooling, the pastors recruited locals to act like sheepdogs to corral the flock and ensure they desisted and ‘unlearned’ their past traditional practices and implemented the more modern methods. We present a research agenda for future research on pastoral-power.