Job quality and human resource management: respective roles of employer strategy and institutions
(2014) New Frontiers for Citizenship at Work, 2014 International CRIMT Conference — Location: Montréal (12.May.2014)
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- Much research focuses on the importance that national level institutions play in determining job quality, and notably for low wages workers and low qualified workers in new service activities (Batt, Nohara, & Kwon, 2010; Gautié & Schmitt, 2010). The research results that they provide show that national institutions organising the labour market play a decisive role in shaping employment integration for low wage workers. However, Batt and Nohara (Batt & Nohara, 2009) also demonstrate that, even though the national context partly explains job quality and wages, these also vary from one firm to another within a given institutional context. The question, then, is the following: what is the respective influence of managerial strategies within the company and of the institutions ‘outside’ the company, on job quality? This paper examines human resource practices within firms and their interactions with the institutional context, in new services – ‘housework services’ – and how firm strategies and institutions respectively contribute to job quality of low qualified workers. With this objective in mind, we draw on a conceptual framework articulating neo-institutionalist contributions (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, 1997; Hall & Soskice, 2001) and social regulation theory (De Terssac, 2003; Reynaud, 1988, 1989, 1997). Neo-institutionalist contributions share the idea that the institutional context is key in determining in-company decisions and practices. In such a perspective, organizations tend to develop homogenous strategies and behaviours when they belong to similar institutional environment. Yet, if employer strategies are not totally free to act, they are not completely bound by the institutional context (Klarsfeld, Ng, & Tatli, 2012). There are, then, trends towards homogeneity but also a degree of diversity within a common institutional context. The notion of ‘institutional work’ (Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2009, p. 215) is useful to go further in understanding the variety of organizational forms (Ben Slimane & Leca, 2010). In order to better apprehend how institutions, on the one hand, and managerial strategies, on the other, shape job quality within the company, we analyse how ‘the rules of the game’ (Reynaud 1989) that are at play within the company are determined. Reynaud’s social regulation theory (De Terssac, 2003; Reynaud, 1988, 1989) allows us to understand the phenomenon deeper by focusing on social actors’ leeway, their interplay and interactions in the organization, also taking the influence of external rules into account.
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Coster, S., & Léonard, E. (2014). Job quality and human resource management: respective roles of employer strategy and institutions. New Frontiers for Citizenship at Work, 2014 International CRIMT Conference, Montréal. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/194657