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The question of health and safety at work is a central issue for trade unions. In Britain it is an area of concern where there were important legislative initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s, although surprisingly this has received relatively little attention in the debates about trade unionism. This neglect results in an aspect of union activity about which little is known. Explores through a detailed longitudinal study of a middle‐range engineering firm, from the late 1970s into the 1990s, the ways in which trade unions organize and act on health and safety questions. Argues that it is almost “routine” that workers face dangers and hazards at work, a central feature of the work and employment experience of most workers. However, this is often difficult to deal with as individual issues, or as matters which are subject to collective consideration. On the one hand, workers often appear to accept the dangers and hazards they face. On the other hand, managements are preoccupied with questions relating to production and finance, rather than the day‐to‐day problems faced by workers. This tension suggests that the future wellbeing of workers in unionized workplaces lies not so much with legislative provisions and rights at work, but in education and the organizing ability of workplace unions, raising and addressing what often seem like individualistic problems in collective ways.

To improve unsafe workplace of Chinese SMEs, this paper aims to use the multi-agent simulation experiment to reveal the relationship between employees’ safety voice and safety level of enterprises.

Through simulation of employees’ safety voice activities, enterprises’ production activities, enterprises’ safety activities, an experiment platform is built. The experiment introduces external variable of labor resource and sets four experimental situations considering whether labor resource is sufficient and whether employees’ value is significant.

The result shows that not all the employees’ safety voice can change small- and medium-sized enterprises’ safety level. When there is sufficient labor supply, employee safety voice cannot improve the safety level of enterprises; when there is short of labor and employee safety voice is strong, safety level can be effectively improved. When employees have the strikingly different value variance, safety voice of common employees cannot improve safety level of enterprises, but employee safety voice with high value can improve safety level.

This fully provides that under the circumstances of disappearing demographic dividend in China, improving employees’ safety awareness and reasonably using their safety voice can boost SMEs to enhance safety level.

One of the common law duties owed by the employer is his duty to take reasonable care for the safety of his employee. This common law duty is an implied term in the contract of employment and is therefore contractual in nature. Because of the difficulties which may arise in bringing an action in contract for breach of the employer's duty of care, the employee who has sustained injuries during the course of his employment (although he may sue either in contract of tort will normally bring a tort action.

Introducing social sustainability initiatives in the apparel industry is a complex and challenging process. This study aims to investigate the challenges facing Bangladesh apparel supplier organisations in implementing factory safety initiatives.

This study identifies challenges of implementing social sustainability initiatives of the apparel industry based on a literature review and case-study interviews with senior-level management of apparel supplier organisations.

The analysis shows significant challenges facing apparel supplier organisations in implementing social sustainability initiatives relate to resource and institutional issues. These challenges are resource management and strategy, cost and financial concerns, as well as cultural, regulation and monitoring issues.

The identified challenges may be useful for policymakers and managers of apparel buyer and supplier organisations to recognise critical issues involved in social initiative implementation and to help improve social sustainability practices of the apparel industry.

By addressing the identified issues, stakeholders in the apparel industry can work to ensure improved social sustainability practices in apparel manufacturing factories.

The study contributes to the research on social sustainability practices of the apparel industry by identifying and addressing challenges faced by apparel supplier organisations in implementing social sustainability initiatives in apparel manufacturing factories.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of fitness in production as something different from leanness and show that building fitness puts a factory on a course of developing cumulative capabilities and improving its ability to respond to changing market and business conditions.

The paper examines the process of design, launch, and management of a fitness program in 42 factories of the Hydro Aluminum Extrusion Group on five continents between 1986 and 2001. The design was based on the “sandcone model” proposed by Ferdows and DeMeyer but the sequence of capabilities was modified to improve safety, reduce process variability, codify and share tacit production know‐how, improve responsiveness, and improve labor and machine efficiency.

Most factories showed improvements higher than industry average in these capabilities during the 15 years. Moreover, they improved the capabilities listed earlier in the above sequence faster than those listed later, indicating that they were becoming more fit.

Observations were in only one company and industry, which limits general applicability of the model. However, measurements were taken over a relatively long period, factories were spread on five continents, and the authors had access to the actual data during the 15 years, which together provided a unique opportunity to gain deep insights from this case. Future research should test the applicability of the model in other industries and companies.

A fitness regimen provides a roadmap for improving core capabilities in a factory. It is different from building leanness. Fitness helps the factory become leaner, but the opposite is not always true. A factory can become too lean but never too fit.

This paper is the first, to the authors' knowledge, to introduce the notion of fitness in production in the literature. Results observed in this case suggest that a better understanding of how factories become fitter provides insights into some of the deeply ingrained practices of superior manufacturers, especially those that stay competitive over long periods.

The factory legislation in this country has been concerned with safety training in one way or another for a very long time; but it is only relatively recently that it seems to have squared up to the needs of those who have to organise and give the training, by being more explicit. The statutory requirements are contained in a wide range of legislation: in the Factories Act, 1961 itself, numerous codes of Special Regulations, ordinary regulations, so‐called Welfare Orders and other Orders. Some of the subsidiary legislation is very old: the Electricity Regulations, applying to nearly every factory in the land are dated 1908.

In the past more than three years, Wal-Mart has been embroiled in incidents of public scandals. In part, they pertain to Wal-Mart’s global strategy of growth and expansion, where the company’s senior managers have been implicated in using illegal bribery and corruption to secure business and to conceal this information from regulatory authorities. Another issue, albeit longer running, has been the incidents of fire and resulting deaths and injuries of hundreds of people, most notably in Bangladesh, but also in other countries where low-skill, low-wage manufacturing predominates, and where foreign multinationals have been accused of condoning and profiting from sweatshop-like exploitation of workers.

The authors use Wal-Mart as a microcosm of corporate conduct which provides a prism through which to examine the exploitation of negative externalities, i.e. engaging in illegal and unethical behavior by using their bargaining power and market control these companies, pressure host countries to condone environmental degradation, violation of country laws in terms of wages, working conditions and operating in sweatshop-like conditions to maximize their profits at the expense of other factors of production, i.e. labor and resources.

The authors contend that Wal-Mart’s unique business model, which focuses on everyday low price, absolute growth and market share expansion by any means possible and everyday low cost, has led to the company’s enormous success since its founding and has made it one of the world’s largest corporations by revenue. At the same time, this model seriously impedes the company’s ability to improve unit-based profit margins and thus forces it to take short cuts in achieving lateral growth and low-cost production.

The authors also examine in some detail the large gap that exists between Wal-Mart’s pronouncements of the company’s commitment to ethical and socially responsible conduct and its actual business practices. They demonstrate that the company’s communications and claims for ethical conduct are mostly aspirational and fail the test of accuracy, specificity, materiality and verifiability through independent, externally provided integrity assurance.

Finally, the authors outline a number of measures that would need to be taken by Wal-Mart, industry groups that depend heavily on outsourcing from low-skill, low-wage countries for their products and host country governments and the governments of Western industrialized nations whose corporations and consumers are the primary beneficiaries of the exploitative sweatshops that fatten their companies’ bottom lines and enrich their denizens with ample amounts of inexpensive goods.

Off-site manufacturing (OSM) has emerged as a method of modern construction that provides several benefits including achieving lower costs, a quicker schedule and environmentally friendly solutions. Although numerous researches are available that advocate the adoption of OSM, the devotion towards OSM safety is somewhat limited. However, OSM invariably generates safety risks, including dynamics and uncertainty in safety management. There is a unique call to have an investigation on the identification of OSM safety risks.

To provide a full picture on the OSM safety, a systematic literature review was adopted based on interpretivist philosophical stance. The literature search was conducted in key electronic databases to identify OSM safety-focused publications. Bibliometric analysis was adopted to identify co-occurrences of keywords and collaboration among authors in OSM safety-related research publications. Content analysis was conducted to provide a taxonomy of OSM safety risks. The identified studies were critically analysed to determine the focus of OSM safety research and provide future research directions.

The results demonstrated frequently appeared OSM safety aspects while highlighting the limitedness of collaborative research outputs in common authorships. Content analysis subsequently unveiled safety risks in OSM under human, organisational and work environmental factors. A critical analysis of extant literature revealed seven research classifications of OSM safety. Directions were offered to enhance OSM safety by applying principles of targeted safety management concepts, technology-driven safety measures and bespoke training programs.

This study provides a comprehensive review on the identification of safety risks throughout OSM while presenting the avenues useful for the development of OSM safety management strategies.

This study aims to explore how management accounting practices act as drivers of organizational change in situations of institutional complexity.

A case study was carried out in a small company with a strongly rooted social culture, which was acquired by a large conglomerate and underwent a process of strategic change as part of a new control logic. Based on this, the study analyzes the evolution of this change, with a particular focus on the efforts to construct the meaning of the performance through the inscription of objects from the cultural system to which it is attached and the “situated rationality” of the managers who are involved in its production.

The authors show how managers link their own concepts of performance to accounting practices. At the same time, the authors show how accounting practices unfold through representational gaps that their production generates.

This study acknowledges that bias may arise from reliance on retrospective views of past processes and events, gathered primarily through interviews, documentation and observations.

This study highlights that the way in which the performance concept is presented by accounting practices can have a constructive effect on the organization through the aspirations that its representations entail, thus having the potential to stimulate change in organizations.

This study contributes to the organizational literature by clarifying that accounting practices drive change by providing spaces for debates and questions that affect the way organizations understand and report their performance.

The paper explores the emergence of private sector responsibilisation for tackling governance issues in a global supply chain. The infamous case of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh is used to investigate the ways a frameshift, triggered by a manmade disaster, can potentially influence the effectiveness of the certification process in a research site characterised by the presence of a strong state-business nexus.

The empirical work for this paper is based 24 semi-structured interviews with owners, managers, operators, independent inspectors in the ready-made garments (RMG) industry in Bangladesh between 2014 and 2018. We also analyse a range of archival materials. For the purpose of data analysis, we adopted an exploratory flexible pattern matching design with nested template analysis (Sinkovics et al., 2019).

Our analysis suggests that the magnitude of the Rana Plaza collapse triggered several frameshifts in multinational corporations approach towards labour governance in Bangladesh. Subsequently, a responsibility framework for the private sector was created, resulting in significant improvements in working conditions in the sector. However, the sustainability of the labour governance mechanisms was significantly affected by the state's ability to play the role of catalyst in the process, mainly due to the presence of a significant state-business nexus.

We find that broadening the scope of sustainability accounting and assurance process can allow social auditors to play a more meaningful role in triggering collective actions to address labour governance issues in supply chains. However, in a context defined by the presence of a state-business nexus, the sustainability of such a process largely depends on the willingness of the state to play the role of a catalyst.