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Purpose – This chapter presents a close examination of how manufacturing managers respond to environmental pressures by formulating and implementing operational strategy.

Methodology – The analysis is based on interviews and observations in 31 manufacturing firms in the US Midwest.

Findings – The study reveals that competitive market pressure is only so effective at penetrating the institutional layers of inter- and intra-firm relations. Even in the highly competitive manufacturing sector, operational strategy is consistently implemented in suboptimal ways. Relatively inefficient routines are commonly institutionalized and inefficient arrangements appear to be able to persist for an indefinite period of time. To the extent that firms with variable capabilities and internal socio-technical systems must process, interpret, and react to complex external pressures and often-ambiguous signals, the sociology of work provides essential insights for the sociology of markets.

Originality – While the findings are subject to the standard caveats regarding nonrandom qualitative samples, the rich data produced and the in-depth analysis of real-world organizational pressures and managerial decision-making provide distinctive insights into how managers must balance external market pressures with internal labor process problems. Individual motivation appears to be at least as important in true organizational innovation as market discipline. While adaptation and learning certainly occur in organizations (and selection also operates through the death of extreme laggards) there exists sufficient institutional space within markets for a range of variation in organizational performance. The findings suggest that the analysis of internal organizational dynamics provides an essential part of a realistic theory of markets.

The aim of this chapter is to propose a critical analysis of socially responsible investing (SRI) through debate and reconstruction. Our goal is therefore to try to understand how the definition of ethics in finance has steered SRI towards a financial approach where ethics is guided by finance.

This chapter proposes a two-point approach consisting of a meta-debate and development perspectives. Each approach is divided into three debates (ideological and philosophical, scientific and practical), which are interconnected.

The chapter concludes that the debate on mainstream SRI is necessary but should be re-discussed, as it is preventing in its current form the concept from developing and being grounded in real ethical values, sacrificing the individual ethics that should be driving investing decisions.

The chapter proposes to rethink the paradigm around SRI through a conceptual framework that re-inserts finance within ethics, where non-financial performance and impact investment should be at the centre of the scientific debates, leading to an SRI based on exclusion, the consideration of controversies and social impact measurement.

The central thesis developed during this study is the idea that human dignity must be understood as the right to be recognised as a participant in the institutional practice of human and fundamental rights. This form of association between human dignity and human rights is a response to the various barbarities of the twentieth century, whether by fascist, Nazi, and socialist regimes in Europe, either by South African apartheid or by military dictatorships in Latin America. Human dignity after Auschwitz is the foundation for the construction of a post-metaphysical institutional morality, independent of an idealised concept of rational subjective personality and closer to the historical and material conditions to guarantee the political personality of every human being. In order to defend this thesis, the study is conducted in two steps. First, two conceptions of dignity will be discussed, namely dignity of man and human dignity. Second, it is intended to discuss how the modern conception was incorporated into the practice of human rights after Auschwitz as a way of responding to a crisis in the modern model of the practice of rights.