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This chapter presents a theoretical framework of the industrial relations (IR) system in China’s coal mining industry, combining the roles of management organizations, workers, and trade unions, as well as government agencies. It is one of the first empirical attempts to investigate the relationship between human resource (HR) practices, labor relations, and occupational safety in China’s coal mining industry over the past 60 years, based on the secondary data on coal mining accidents and case studies of two state-owned coal mines in a northern city in Anhui Province, China. The fluctuating occupational safety has been affected by government regulations over different time spans, marked by key political agendas, and by coal mining firms taking concrete measures to respond to these regulations, while exhibiting differing safety performance in state-owned versus township-and-village-owned mines. The field studies compared a safety-oriented to a cost-control-oriented HR and labor relations system, and their influences on safety performance. Coal mining firms and practitioners are advised to shift the traditional personnel management paradigm to a modern HR management system. In addition, although workers are often blamed directly for accidents, it is suggested that workers’ participation and voice in various processes of decision-making and policy implementation, and trade unions’ active involvement in protecting workers from occupational hazards, be encouraged.

The evolution of capitalism has gone through four major epochs, from the first tangible exchanges of goods and resources, to the generation of wealth by entrepreneurs held personally accountable for their actions, to cost-cutting measures for increasing efficiencies and maximizing wealth for the few, and finally to a socially irresponsible form. The fourth epoch dispatched the last remaining shards of capitalist responsibility to anyone but investors, as the basis of wealth appropriation shifted to manipulating the speculative future worth of intangible or fictitious capital. This evolution through four epochs has sadly been a process of diminishing value creation (Boje et al., 2017).

We are trapped in an era of socially irresponsible capitalism with little respect for humankind. But, it was not always this way. The earliest references to entrepreneurial behavior emerged in the east during the Han Dynasty and in the west in the eighteenth century. Somewhat like the fourth epoch of the twenty-first century, these global beginnings of early capitalism were also directed by opportunistic desires to pursue wealth generation by taking advantage of people’s needs and wants. Although capitalists have consistently been the prime directors of resources and the distributors of wealth, in the early epochs of capitalism they were different. The early epoch entrepreneurs bore personal risks of business failure, consequences that might impact them for a lifetime.

The antenarrative generative mechanisms, or spirals, help us understand the interconnectivities of “real” and “actual” domains of reality (Bhaskar, 1975; Boje, 2016). Socially irresponsible capitalism is pulling global societies into a downward spiral toward an addiction of speculative destruction and dehumanization, transforming “real” into “actual” realities. We need a force to pull us back up toward a revitalized form of socially responsible capitalism. This force is called the socio-economic approach to management (SEAM), and in the responsible entrepreneurial spirit of earlier epochs, the path to recovery can be accomplished by accountably working with one organization or entity at a time.

This chapter first investigates the historical double-spiral-helix footsteps of socially irresponsible capitalism in the making. Then through a SEAM project example, we discuss how the micro-societal perspective of an organization places it at a deeper level of reality, deeper within the double-spiral-helix meta-reality of macro-societal capitalism. Finally, we demonstrate how the socioeconomic approach can help diagnose the deeper realities with an organization, beyond the evident narratives, to reveal the third spiral of deficiencies. This third spiral disenables the organization’s ability to activate the micro forces of socially responsible capitalism.

This paper deals with the organizing of interactive product development. Developing products in interaction between firms may provide benefits in terms of specialization, increased innovation, and possibilities to perform development activities in parallel. However, the differentiation of product development among a number of firms also implies that various dependencies need to be dealt with across firm boundaries. How dependencies may be dealt with across firms is related to how product development is organized. The purpose of the paper is to explore dependencies and how interactive product development may be organized with regard to these dependencies.

The analytical framework is based on the industrial network approach, and deals with the development of products in terms of adaptation and combination of heterogeneous resources. There are dependencies between resources, that is, they are embedded, implying that no resource can be developed in isolation. The characteristics of and dependencies related to four main categories of resources (products, production facilities, business units and business relationships) provide a basis for analyzing the organizing of interactive product development.

Three in-depth case studies are used to explore the organizing of interactive product development with regard to dependencies. The first two cases are based on the development of the electrical system and the seats for Volvo’s large car platform (P2), performed in interaction with Delphi and Lear respectively. The third case is based on the interaction between Scania and Dayco/DFC Tech for the development of various pipes and hoses for a new truck model.

The analysis is focused on what different dependencies the firms considered and dealt with, and how product development was organized with regard to these dependencies. It is concluded that there is a complex and dynamic pattern of dependencies that reaches far beyond the developed product as well as beyond individual business units. To deal with these dependencies, development may be organized in teams where several business units are represented. This enables interaction between different business units’ resource collections, which is important for resource adaptation as well as for innovation. The delimiting and relating functions of the team boundary are elaborated upon and it is argued that also teams may be regarded as actors. It is also concluded that a modular product structure may entail a modular organization with regard to the teams, though, interaction between business units and teams is needed. A strong connection between the technical structure and the organizational structure is identified and it is concluded that policies regarding the technical structure (e.g. concerning “carry-over”) cannot be separated from the management of the organizational structure (e.g. the supplier structure). The organizing of product development is in itself a complex and dynamic task that needs to be subject to interaction between business units.

Purpose – The connections between religious factors and stratification outcomes were long ignored in the sociological literature, yet a growing number of studies show that religion remains important for determining the life chances of individuals. I add to this literature by examining how religious affiliation is associated with the structure of occupational attainment in the United States.

Methodology – I analyze data from the 1972–2008 General Social Surveys to show how religious affiliation is related to occupational attainment and occupational mobility by gender and race.

Findings – I find that sectarian Protestants occupy the lower rungs of the occupational structure, even relative to their low rates of educational attainment. In contrast, Jews and nonidentifying respondents show considerable occupational advantage. Catholics also have specific patterns of occupational attainment that hint at their growing wealth parity with mainline Protestants. I also show that religious influences hold across racial and gender groupings, and across cohorts.

Social implications – Religion continues to significantly influence the occupational structure in the United States, and sectarian religion serves as an important anchor hindering occupational attainment.

Learning theory explains how organizations change as a result of experience, and can be used to predict the competitive strength of individual organizations and competitive pressures in organizational populations. We review extant learning theoretical propositions on how competitive strength is affected by experienced competition, founding conditions, and observed failures of other organizations. In addition, we propose that niche changes are an important source of learning. We test these propositions on data from the Norwegian general insurance industry. We find that historical density increases failure rates, contrary to some earlier findings, and also that the effect of founding density supports the density delay rather than trial-by-fire hypothesis. We find that failures of others before and during the lifetime of the organization reduce failure rates, and niche changes reduce failure rates for joint-stock companies but not for mutual firms. Overall the findings suggest that organizations learn more cheaply from the failures of others than from their own experiences, and that the stresses of competition can overwhelm the learning effects of competition.

European air transport policy, emerged through the confluence of case law and legislation, in four broad areas: liberalization, safety and security, greening, and the external policy. Following the implementation of the single market for air transport, policy shifted to liberalizing and regulating associated services and in recent years to greening, the external aviation policy, and safety and security. Inclusion of air transport in the Environmental Trading Scheme of the European Union exemplifies the European Commission’s proactive stand on bringing the industry in line with emission reduction trajectories of other industries. However, the bid to include flights to third countries in the trading scheme pushed the EU into a controversial position, causing the Commission to halt implementation and to give ICAO time to seek a global multilateral agreement. The chapter also discusses how the nationality clauses in air services agreements breached the Treaty of Rome, and a court ruling to that effect enabled the EC to extend EU liberalization policies beyond the European Union, resulting in the Common Aviation Area with EU fringe countries and the Open Aviation Area with the USA. Another important area of progress was aviation safety, where the EU region is unsurpassed in the world, yet the Commission has pushed the boundary even further, by establishing the European Safety Agency to oversee the European Aviation Safety Management System. Another important area of regulatory development was aviation security, a major focus after the woeful events in 2001, but increasingly under industry scrutiny on costs and effectiveness. The chapter concludes by arguing that in the coming decade, the EU will strive to strengthen its position as a global countervailing power, symbolized in air transport by a leadership position in environmental policy and international market liberalization, exemplified in the EU’s external aviation policy.

Purpose – To explore the ethical challenges, the financial crisis afflicting Greece and most of the European South creates for MNCs. Emphasis is placed on using human resource management (HRM) as the principle prism to identify the role of employees as organizational members and individuals within the transforming environment.Design/methodology – The chapter follows an exploratory inquisitive path, attempting to elicit information and evidence from theoretical and practical sources, bringing together three primary areas: CSR and business ethics, HRM, and contextual factors, moderated by the financial crisis. The key driver is to shed light in a related narrowly searched field, paving the way for future investigations.Findings – The results from the critical analysis indicate substantial overlap between the examined themes, indicating considerably scope for academics and practitioners to pursue more specific work on field.Research implications/limitations – The chapter is predominantly exploratory in nature, endeavouring to seam together into a meaningful platform several subtle issues and introduce a novel context as the focal point. The innate limitation is the lack of empirical substantiation which could be picked up in ensuing researches, based on the premises stemming from this discourse.Originality/value of chapter – The chapter offers a novel contextualization for academics and practitioners within the field of CSR, business ethics and HRM, which is particularly relevant given the permeating fluidity in the extant economic and business environment. Decision and policy-making on organizational and institutional level can also gain from the insights proposed, and through continued research to effectively form policies in the near future.

This essay, invited by the editors, provides a retrospective overview of Robert Gephart's career using qualitative research methods to study disasters, and disseminating findings from the research in important management and organizational journals. Dr Gephart's work is associated with many methodological innovations. These include early use of grounded theory; early application of text analysis software to support analysis of extensive documentary data sets including legal proceedings and transcripts; development of ethnostatistics to explore risk assessment; explicating and elaborating abductive processes during the research experience; and using an autoethnographic approach to embed data from his own life in his research (before the term autoethnography was in common use). His contributions to the area of disasters and research methods innovations are wide ranging and provide tools for improving our understanding of risks and crises, and for managing them.