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This chapter focuses on an innovative effort in the Italian context in which a complex web of partnerships was created as the foundation of an alternative model of health care. More specifically, the start-up of a health-care organization – Welfare Italia Servizi (WIS) – is analyzed and discussed with respect to its sustainability.

The process of organizing a sustainable health care is analyzed through the theoretical lenses of multi-stakeholders management and partnership perspectives.

The possibility of developing dense knowledge about the WIS’s case has stemmed from our collaboration with the organization board with regard to a research process intended to monitor the organizational start-up and its sustainability challenges.

The case provides new insights into the dynamic nature of building multi-stakeholder partnership in a complex environment; the developmental life-cycle challenge of multi-stakeholder partnership, and the meaning of sustainability. The case suggests a tapestry of issues such as how sustainability may be “paradoxical,” dynamic, led by different and sometimes conflicting logics, and changeable over time like a growing tree in an intricate forest.

The case can stimulate learning and discussions both within the community of practitioners and the community of academics with respect to which promising conditions could help address the challenge of starting-up a sustainable organization in the health-care field.

The employee-organization relationship (EOR) has increasingly become a focal point for researchers in organizational behavior, human resource management, and industrial relations. Literature on the EOR has developed at both the individual – (e.g. psychological contracts) and the group and organizational-levels of analysis (e.g. employment relationships). Both sets of literatures are reviewed, and we argue for the need to integrate these literatures as a means for improving understanding of the EOR. Mechanisms for integrating these literatures are suggested. A subsequent discussion of contextual effects on the EOR follows in which we suggest that researchers develop models that explicitly incorporate context. We then examine a number of theoretical lenses to explain various attributes of the EOR such as the dynamism and fairness of the exchange, and new ways of understanding the exchange including positive functional relationships and integrative negotiations. The article concludes with a discussion of future research needed on the EOR.

Reflecting on professional learning networks (PLN) in rural and equity-seeking spaces, the authors foreground the importance of “relational space” in studying PLNs in this commentary. The authors argue that while the complexity of taking a relational approach is challenging, it offers an important and necessary perspective, one which is often implicit in the studies featured in this book but not explicitly considered. The chapter is organized around three broad concepts from social network theory – boundedness, connectedness, and mutuality – which serve as starting points for shifting our gaze from formal system structures to more deeply interrogating the informal relational spaces within PLNs. The authors conclude with a call to make use of network theory and methods on their own, and in complement to other literatures, to do so.

The issue of employment status lies at the heart of much conflict in the gig economy, with many gig economy workers effectively excluded from statutory employment protection because of it. Establishing employment status continues to be the gateway to accessing most UK statutory employment rights, a fact which makes the exclusion of casual workers from much statutory protection seem arbitrary and unjust. Employment status has been historically determined by common law conceptions of the contract of employment. This creates particular difficulties for casual workers, who have typically had to prove a requirement to perform personal service and to show that the contract was based on mutual obligations in order to be recognised as employees. The advent of the gig economy has seen the concept of employment status evolve as courts and legislators have struggled to adapt to a more flexible labour market. Likewise, gig economy employers have gone to considerable lengths to try to circumvent the legal protections available to their workers. This chapter will examine the evolving role of common law doctrine in defining employment status and the emergence of the category of ‘worker’ as an definition of employment status for those who work in the gig economy. It will analyse prominent cases involving gig economy employers (such as Uber BV v Aslam) and explore how these cases have re-defined contractual doctrine. Finally, the chapter will analyse the Taylor Review (2017) and examine the viability of a conceptual uncoupling of statutory employment protection from contractual doctrine.

Recognizing the need to build global-minded citizens, higher education institutions are increasingly trying to find ways to leverage their international programs to develop students’ intercultural competence. The MA in global leadership at Royal Roads University, Canada, created an international partnership in Ecuador that serves to go beyond the traditional student study abroad or service learning focus and instead focuses on developing competencies of global mindedness and strategic relationships. In this chapter, we present an analysis of how an international student group engaged in building dynamic partnerships within a Global South country to create change for sustainable development initiatives of mutual concern. Through a case example, we describe how these partnerships evolved and adapted in ways that enhanced the learning needs of the students while simultaneously supporting the development of new educational opportunities for Ecuadorians. To illustrate, this chapter delineates the activities that members of the program undertook to connect and develop a mutuality of relationship across diverse stakeholders in Ecuador. The authors analyze this network-building process from the perspective of cultural context, building trust and influence, and responding to social development needs of host communities.

This chapter focuses on the Street Work Homeless Project that was the site of one of the ethnographic case studies conducted in Manchester and also one of the participatory action research projects. The participants – men with lived experience of homelessness – were in many ways the antithesis of those usually considered for inclusion in a study on youth participation. However, the chapter shows how there is much to learn from this project, particularly in terms of how marginalised groups can actively participate in and for society. In preparation for the chapter, Rowley and Charles revisited their reflections and learning from the project. From this process, they wrote conversations exploring tensions that ran throughout the project. These tensions, and an antidote, are explored in the chapter. The chapter emphasises the importance of relationality in building mutuality and trust, the limitations of empowerment due to internalising pathologising dominant narratives, and the need to witness rather than spectate the more discomforting aspects of learning participation. By working through these tensions, it was possible to shift relations and roles between those designated as facilitator and participant leading to the question ‘who was lost and who was found?’. The chapter concludes that such processes are necessarily agonistic and creative to enable more inclusive and democratic participation to occur for marginalised groups.

Talent management and its associated issues are a perennial concern for human resource management (HRM) practitioners and HR professional bodies. The disruption of the gig economy has exacerbated these concerns in multiple ways. This chapter seeks to interrogate this arena, its drivers and in particular the onward impacts on HRM practice and direction at the wider organisational level. The conceptual lens of Critical HRM has been selected for this analysis to examine how a variant of neoliberalism, that of human capital theory, has exuberated and legitimised a shift from an inclusive human relations approach to talent management to an exclusive individualised one with onward impacts on the talent development opportunities for individuals inside and outside of the organisation. This chapter also considers the reemphasis on the role of ‘strategic planning’ and the rise of supply chain management discourses in the context of managing atomised talent. It is argued that in the absence of mutuality in the gig economy espoused talent management strategies can create a conflict between the agendas of giggers, platforms and agencies and wider stakeholders in organisations. These issues are examined through an in-depth case study of gig-based contracts in the higher education and their impact on talent management and associated goals of innovation and creativity.

I aim to understand how informal relationships at work provide a supportive context for individuals and contribute to their engagement in an environment of disruptive change when they are likely to be stressed.

The research was conducted in three UK public service organizations during pre-Brexit disruption. An app was used to capture 400+ transient emotions, reactions, and diary entries of employees about their interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues. This was followed by 25 interviews to reflect more deeply on those relationships documented in the app.

Interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues are shown to contribute in different ways to emotions felt and different aspects of engagement. Closer relationships, less transactional and more emotional in nature, contribute to feelings of trust, significance, and mutual reliance. A typology of four close colleague relationship types also emerged variously driven by the depth of the relationship and sense of shared mutuality.

This research documents employees' lived experience during disruption to show that relationships provide support for the meaningfulness, psychological safety, and availability aspects of personal engagement. It maps the process of developing supportive workplace relationships that form the relational context with four sub-contexts, distinguishing work, and personal engagement by their different foci. Practical and social implications are discussed.

We introduce the concept of social-economic innovation (SEI) and point to cultural challenges involved in instituting SEI. In the second part of the paper, we delve into the alternative exchange system of “Housing for help” (HFH) to explore the challenging negotiation of roles and relations by participants and organizers of HFH.

The study primarily relies on interviews conducted with HFH participants and organizers.

We outline the challenges of categorization and slippage in social-economic exchange systems that combine multiple logics of exchange. While primarily focused on the micro context of relational dynamics occurring between participants, the respective cultural challenges are also discussed in light of institutional problems.

The introduction of the concept of SEI prepares ground for a more coordinated study of the cultural processes and challenges involved in instituting unconventional social-economic systems. The paucity of existent research and the preliminary nature of our study call for further investigation.

The study informs individual and institutional efforts to negotiate unconventional systems of exchange, in particularly in contexts of prolonged, intergenerational co-habitation.

We provide an umbrella concept that ties together existent research and opens new avenues for systematic cultural study. Further, we uncover a fertile context for exploration and take preliminary steps toward unraveling the challenging relational dynamics in SEI.

This chapter offers new insights into the understanding of internal (employee) perceptions of organizational corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and strategies.

This study explores the significance of employees’ involvement and scepticism upon CSR initiatives and focuses on the effects it may have upon word of mouth (WOM) and the development of employee–organisation relationships. Desk research introduces the research questions. Data for the research questions were gathered through a self-completion questionnaire distributed in a hardcopy form to the sample.

An individual’s level of scepticism and involvement appears to affect the development of a positive effect on employees’ WOM. Involvement with the domain of the investment may be a central factor affecting relationship building within the organization, and upon generation of positive WOM.

The chapter offers a conceptual framework to public relations (PR) and corporate communications practitioners, which may enrich their views and understanding of the use and value of CSR for communication strategies and practices.

For-profit organisations are major institutions in today’s society. CSR is proffered as presenting advantages for (at macro level) society and (micro level) the organization and its employees.

Concepts, such as involvement and scepticism, which have not been rigorously examined in PR and corporate communication literature, are addressed. By examining employee perceptions, managers and academic researchers gain insights into the acceptance, appreciation and effectiveness of CSR policies and activities upon the employee stakeholder group. This will affect current and future CSR communication strategies. The knowledge acquired from this chapter may be transferable outside the for-profit sector.