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Corporate elites are increasingly held responsible for issues of sustainability including working conditions and workers’ rights in global production networks. We still know relatively little about how they respond to concrete stakeholder initiatives aiming to restrict corporate voluntarism through transnational regulation. In this paper we report comparative findings on corporate legitimation strategies in response to requests by labor representatives to sign Global Framework Agreements (GFAs). These agreements are intended to hold multinational corporations (MNCs) accountable for the implementation of core labor standards across their supply chains. We propose to broaden management-focused analyses of corporate legitimation strategies by applying a field-oriented perspective that considers the embeddedness of management in a broader web of strategic activity and variable opportunity structures. Our findings suggest that legitimation strategies are developed dynamically along with the rules, positions, and understandings developing around specific regulatory issues in sequences of interactions between elites and challenging groups.

In this chapter, we underscore the enduring importance of research on work, workers, labour markets, and the places and spaces of work. We then examine the particular and valuable contributions that come from ethnographic research in providing detailed studies of work, particularly when these are situated and interpreted in their wider socio-political contexts. We discuss the key dimensions of ethnography before overviewing the contributions to the volume. The volume presents cutting-edge ethnographic research on contemporary worlds of work and the experiences of workers from a range of contexts including an alternative community, working online, the gig economy, and the hospitality industry. Alongside novel empirical chapters, the collection includes the reflections of ethnographers with regards to, for example, the experience as a young female management researcher working amongst journalists in a media firm, personal feelings of precarity within and beyond the field, and how to navigate the challenges of researching inequalities ethnographically.

This chapter discusses the impact of the sociological imagination and ethnographic research methods on identifying the ‘real’ nature of conceptualized phenomena. The examination is done by comparing the researcher’s experience of work-related precarity in ethnographic methods and in the researcher’s personal circumstances immediately following the fieldwork. Such a juxtaposition shows what had been emphasized by ethnography and the effects of the researcher’s social context on the concepts under study. In the case of fieldwork, many of the practical difficulties of precarious work were encountered. However, the context of being an ethnographer altered how work precarity was felt. In the personal circumstances that followed the fieldwork, precariousness was strongly felt in a more general manner. This occurred in a discrete event that involved multiple factors of employment, housing, institutions relied on, and personal relationships. Such differences between fieldwork and personal circumstances illuminate on the tendency to isolate phenomena in fieldwork, which poses the risk of making ethnographic reality out of ideal types.

Good ethnographic work produces stories. Stories are told to us by our interlocutors. We record them in our fieldnotes and read about them in archival or policy documents. We see and hear them occur around us, we participate in them, and they become a core part of our memories of the field. Given that ‘telling stories is one of the fundamental things we do as human beings’ (Falconi & Graber, 2019, p. 1), stories are perhaps the most crucial resource by which we as ethnographers make sense of a field, allowing us to translate what happened to others so that they might be able to vicariously travel through the fields which we studied.

Yet when we look at the ethnographies published in leading management and organization studies journals, stories are increasingly hidden from view. We argue in this short chapter, for a return to storytelling at the centre of the production of ethnography. We seek an opening of the closed world of academic storytelling to those audiences excluded from such networks, including those whom we ethnographers are writing about. We retell nine short stories from an ethnography of Traffic Officers and the breakdowns they encounter on the strategic road network. These vignettes form a non-linear narrative of some of the most emotive and embodied encounters in our fieldwork in transport and mobility spaces between 2018 and 2019. We leave our readers to draw conclusions, implications, and linkages from these stories and offer an invitation to debate and conversation on the themes encountered therein.

This personal reflection piece relates my experience of vulnerability as a researcher when doing ethnographic fieldwork with journalists. Drawing on my empirical and emotional experience, I show the way the encounters in the field made me feel vulnerable and challenged my identity as a researcher. The chapter also introduces the way my self-disclosure in various ways as a fellow imperfect human being – a.o. regarding motherhood – was an important way to build relationships with the research participants and gain their trust. By doing so, this reflective commentary seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the articulation between researcher identity, fieldwork, and vulnerability.

The extra-low minimum wage for US restaurant workers has remained unchanged for over 30 years. Periodic campaigns have brought this wage, and its connection to the perpetuation of inequality and exploitative work, to public attention, but these campaigns have met resistance from both employers and restaurant workers. This article draws on a workplace ethnography in a restaurant front-of-house, and in-depth interviews with tipped food service workers, to examine the tipped labour process and begin to answer a central question: why would any workers oppose a wage increase? It argues that the constituting of tips as a formal wage created for workers a two-employer problem, wherein customers assume the role of secondary, unregulated, employers in the workplace. Ultimately, the tipped wage poses a longer-term strategic obstacle for workers in their position relative to management and ability to organize to shape the terms and conditions of their work.

A growing body of literature suggests that creating a just sustainable society will require reorganizing economic arrangements and, in particular, rethinking work. Previous studies have recognized alternative organizations, such as cooperatives and intentional communities, as sites for building more democratic, sustainable models of work. This study contributes a description and analysis of work and sustainability at Twin Oaks Intentional Community, an 80-person income- and resource-sharing commune in Louisa, Virginia. Some measures show that Twin Oaks members live more sustainably in terms of energy consumption than the average US resident. In this article, I investigate the relationship between sustainability and work at Twin Oaks. I find that sustainable work is linked to the following key principles: broadening definitions of work, prioritizing community well-being, and democratizing decision making. In doing so, I contribute to previous literature on work, sustainability, and alternative organizations by suggesting that (1) sustainability in intentional communities is deeply intertwined with systems of work; (2) broadening definitions of work to include social reproductive labour contributes to sustainability; and (3) the democratization of work can further goals of sustainability.

In this chapter, we theorize about online freelancers’ approaches to work flexibility. Drawing from an ongoing digital ethnography of US-based online freelancers pursuing work on digital platforms, our data question the common conceptualizations around the flexibility of online freelancing. We posit that the flexibility of where to work, not when to work, is the most important attribute of their work arrangement. Our data show (1) the online freelancers in our study prefer the stability and sustainability of full-time work over freelancing when both are offered as remote options; (2) full-time remote employment increases these workers’ freelancing control / flexibility; (3) these workers keep freelance work options open even as they transition to more permanent full-time work arrangements. We discuss how these findings relate to workplace culture shifts and what this means for contemporary working arrangements. Our insights contribute to the discourses on knowledge-based gig work and for what it means to study individuals online.