The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’ Work to Create and Perpetuate Inequality

Published date01 May 2018
Date01 May 2018
AuthorRalph Hamann,Stephanie Bertels
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12325
The Institutional Work of Exploitation: Employers’
Work to Create and Perpetuate Inequality
Ralph Hamann and Stephanie Bertels
University of Cape Town; Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT Social inequality is underpinned by exploitative labour institutions, yet the agency
of employers in establishing and maintaining such institutions remains underexplored. We
thus adopt the lens of institutional work in analysing South African mining employers’
purposive efforts to ensure reliable access to cheap labour from the 1860s through until the
infamous Marikana Massacre in 2012. We find that while labour is scarce, employers engage
in forcing: creating exploitative institutional devices through conscripting and controlling. But as
labour becomes abundant (and political winds shift), employers engage in freeing:liberalizing
institutional controls to give workers ‘choice’, while simultaneously outsourcing responsibilities
and costs associated with the unjust employment relationship to others, including workers
themselves. We thus explain how employers purposefully create and perpetuate their
advantage in interaction with labour market dynamics, contributing to our understanding of
inequality and the role of actors’ intentions in impacting social systems.
Keywords: employers, exploitation, inequality, institutional work, mining, South Africa
INTRODUCTION
What is the role of employers in the unsettling and growing gap between the life chances
and living conditions of the poor and those of the rich, and its intractability in the face
of diverse efforts to address it? Take South Africa, where, for more than a century, colo-
nial and Apartheid policies entrenched racial oppression and inequality through formal
institutional means to the benefit of mining employers. With the transition to democracy
in 1994, expectations were high that inequality would decline; however, instead, it has
continued to rise (Bundy, 2016; Leibbrandt et al., 2012; Piketty, 2014). Indeed, the fail-
ure to reverse the trend of inequality became painfully evident in the infamous
Address for reprints: Ralph Hamann, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, Portswood
Road, Green Point 8001, Cape Town, South Africa (ralph.hamann@gsb.uct.ac.za).
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
V
C2017 The Authors
Journal of Management Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and
Society for the Advancement of Management Studies
Journal of Management Studies 55:3 May 2018
doi: 10.1111/joms.12325
Marikana Massacre in 2012, when police killed 34 platinum mine workers who were
striking for higher wages and better living conditions (Alexander et al., 2013).
Building on Marx and Weber, sociologists point to the appropriation of labour effort as
underlying persistent inequality, whereby employers rely on ‘active institutional devices’
(Wright, 2000, p. 1565) and ‘effort-inducing mechanisms’ in the workplace (Burawoy and
Wright, 1990). Yet the agency of employers has remained underexplored in the processes
of establishing and maintaining such institutional devices, especially in the context of a
political transition premised on undoing exploitation (Adler and Webster, 1995). Thus,
anchored in the lens of institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006), we focus on the
agency and motivations of employers, asking: How do employers leverage and even create
institutional structures that foster inequality, and how do they perpetuate inequality
despite the appearance of reform in the context of political change?
We address these questions through an historical analysis of archival and interview
data examining the institutional work of South African mining employers during the
150 years from the growth of the diamond and gold mining industries to the Marikana
Massacre. We find that employers engage in institutional work to create and maintain
access to cheap labour that shifts based on labour availability. When labour is relatively
scarce, employers engage in forcing, undertaking conscripting work to secure a supply of
low-cost workers and controlling work to keep them in their employ. In turn, when labour
is abundant, employers shift to freeing:liberalizing institutional controls to give workers
‘choice’ and to distance themselves from the most visible features of oppression, while
simultaneously outsourcing responsibilities and costs associated with the unjust employ-
ment relationship to others, including workers themselves.
We contribute to conversations about how organizations affect inequality (Beal and
Astakhova, 2017; Cobb, 2016; Mair et al., 2016) by demonstrating how inequality is
created and perpetuated by employers’ purposive efforts, and how these efforts interact
with social systems (Stern and Barley, 1996), especially labour market dynamics (North
and Thomas, 1973). We build on prior studies of exploitative labour relations by chal-
lenging the assumption that for employers, ‘manipulation is primary and coercion is
held in reserve’ (Braverman, 1974, p. 150), especially when labour is scarce. We extend
prior research on how inequality is maintained across political transitions (Acemoglu
and Robinson, 2008, 2012) by identifying shifts in employers’ institutional work that
mitigate the most visible expressions of exploitation, but nevertheless perpetuate
inequality because of their links to changing labour market dynamics. Reconnecting
organizational studies to an earlier interest in how organizations affect social systems
(Parsons, 1956; Selznick, 1949; Stern and Barley, 1996; Walsh et al., 2003), we highlight
how employers’ intentions give rise to these effects through concealment (Mair et al.,
2016) and the ‘imperious immediacy of interest’ (Merton, 1936, p. 901).
INEQUALITY AND EXPLOITATION
Rousseau (2010 [1754]) was among the first to prominently dispute the ancien regime
belief that inequality among people was part of the natural order of things (Berger,
2004; Dahrendorf, 1974). He argued that the privileges of the elite were attained by ‘the
first person to fence in a piece of land and to say, “this is mine”, and to find people
395The Institutional Work of Exploitation
V
C2017 The Authors
Journal of Management Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and
Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

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