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This chapter provides an ethnographic account of conducting organisational research in a deep-level gold mining workplace. The ethnography presented in this book entailed living in the mine hostel, observing and participating in the production tasks of the underground mining teams for a full production shift for a period stretching over six months. The chapter discusses the day-to-day running of the production process at the rock-face down the mine. This section is important for understanding the organisation of the production cycle and the actions of the mining teams, foremen and management to ensuring the smooth daily running of the production process inside the pit. Furthermore, the chapter presents an overview of AfricaGold’s business performance in terms of operational efficiency, productivity and safety.

This paper aims to examine the interaction between formal and informal organisation of work inside the pit, with reference to the informal working or coping strategy of “making a plan” (planisa).

The research for this paper was ethnographic in nature and the participant observation was the main research technique used in the field.

The underground gold miners make a plan or engage in planisa to offset the production bottlenecks which affected their capacity to achieve their production targets and increase their bonus earnings. They “get on and get by” underground in order to cope with organisational constraints and management inefficiencies.

The paper highlights the limits of formal organisation of work and the significance of gold miners’ informal work strategy of making a plan (planisa) as an existing and alternative working practice that shapes their subjective orientation, agency and resilience to work structures and managerial strategies. Any strategy designed to improve the health, safety and productivity of underground miners must recognise, elaborate and systematically articulate the workplace culture of planisa as an existing work practice in the day‐to‐day running of the production process down the mine.

This chapter examines the institutional configuration of internal CSR in MNCs operating in Canada and Brazil, as well as headquarters-subsidiary relations within the institutional settings of their home and host countries.

The institutional logics perspective is used as it provides a systematic approach to understanding the institutional orders at play in the development of soft policies.

Whereas the institutional framework of the host country is a key factor in the regulatory and distributive spheres, the spheres of discretionary spending and soft policies are largely influenced and shaped by the MNCs through self-regulation, and may also be guided by intergovernmental institutions and NGOs.

The empirical data is limited to two case studies. It seeks to understand the multiple facets of CSR reality and produce contextual insights. Generalizations might fit better with other context communities – research subjects and the researchers who investigate them, beyond the mining industry – in a non-positivist, non-probabilistic sense, than with other context settings within the same industry.

The chapter concludes that institutional discourses and practices around internal CSR seek to strengthen a firm’s legitimacy. CSR does not necessarily increase the MNC’s performance when viewed in a market logic, but its operational viability can align with the corporation’s global strategy and identity. It also highlights resistance resulting from professional and community institutional logics.

This chapter contributes to the literature on internal CSR and is original in including an MNC from the South with subsidiaries in the North.

A participant‐observation study of consulting in a large office supply firm of how consultants and organisational stakeholders perform stories to make sense of events and to enact change during their conversations is presented. A theory of organisation as a collective storytelling system in which precedent and future‐directed stories are shared, revised and interpreted to account for and to affect unfolding organisational changes is extended. It is illustrated how very terse stories, told in everyday conversations, require the listener silently to fill in major portions of the story line and story implications. Storytelling and story interpretation is a critical part of the consulting work done in complex organisations.

This chapter examines the interaction between formal and informal organisation of work in a deep-level mining workplace. In response to organisational constraints, underground mining teams make a plan (planisa) to offset production bottlenecks which affected the daily running of the production process at the rock-face down the mine. They ‘get on and get by’ inside the pit to cope with organisational dysfunctions and management inefficiencies. The chapter highlights the limits of formalised work methods and the significance of the frontline miners’ informal work practice of making a plan (planisa) as an existing and alternative working practice that shapes their subjective orientation, agency and resilience to deep-level mining work processes and managerial initiatives. While the informal work practice of planisa has pros and cons, any managerial strategy designed to improve organisational productivity, safety and teamwork must recognise and systematically articulate the frontline miners’ work culture of planisa. This is especially important if we are to fully understand the limits of contemporary organisational strategies and workers’ orientations towards modernised work processes and managerial practices.

This chapter examines and discusses the unintended outcomes of the production bonus scheme the mine had instituted to motivate and increase the productivity of the frontline mining teams. This is crucial given that the maladministration of the bonus system could lead to a range of undesired outcomes such as deteriorating levels of trust between management and frontline workers, prioritisation of production at the expense of safety, poor work relations and ultimately low levels of organisational, employee and team performance. There are a number of organisational, management and labour factors that can render a production bonus scheme effective or ineffective. These factors influence the nature and extent of worker reactions to the bonus scheme.

This chapter examines and discusses the factors that influenced the reaction of the mining teams to the team-based production bonus scheme and the extent to which mine management fulfilled its side of the bargain in the implementation of the production bonus. The chapter highlights the manner in which the team-based bonus system influenced teams of stope workers to engage in their informal organisational practice of making plan (planisa) in order to offset the snags that jeopardised their prospects of earning the production bonus. The chapter reveals that, to a large extent, the productivity bonus generated conflict rather than cooperation at the point of production down the mine. As a result, the incentive scheme failed to live up to expectations by not eliciting the desired levels of organisational, worker and team performance at the rock-face.