Multinational corporations’ politics and resistance to plant shutdowns: A comparative case study in the south of France

Abstract

MNCs' politics has been considered a 'contested terrain' and further research is needed into the dynamics between the Head Office's drastic restructuring decisions and local responses to understand how collective resistance is performed, and on what conditions. A neo-Gramscian approach is developed to analyse two plants in France facing drastic restructuring, including shutdown. We trace the dynamics of forces significant in aligning resisting subjects. We identify two structural processes -chains of equivalence and chains of difference -which were significant to the constitution of resistance. This article contributes to the development and refinement of a neo-Gramscian approach to management and organization studies in general and to multinational corporations' politics in particular. It refines the study of multinational corporations' politics by explaining how collective resistance is constituted and organized, what favours and limits the possibility of creating a collective antagonistic front and the role of local managerial resistance.

A Transnational Agri-Food System for Whom? The Struggle for Hegemony at Rio+20

“…Neo-Gramscian theory, which has recently gained ground within MOS (Böhm et al, 2008;Contu et al, 2013;Levy, 2008) Hegemony then results from the actors' articulation of a chain that connects discourses, material capabilities and institutions, which are channels of order stabilization where the two previous elements become intertwined. In this article, the transnational agri-food system is characterized by such a contested process of hegemony formation, which characterizes it as being a field of struggle (Patel, 2007).…”

“…Although some researchers have sought to understand how new organizational fields are created (Davis, McAdam, Scott, & Zald, 2005;DiMaggio, 1991;Hardy & Maguire, 2010;Peci, Vieira, & Clegg, 2009), these studies have, however, neglected to show how social movements achieve their goals through their engagement in hegemonic struggles (Böhm, Spicer, & Fleming, 2008;Bommel & Spicer, 2011;Contu, Palpacuer, & Balas, 2013).…”

“…Transnational corporations have no place in trade agreements or our food systems!" Recent studies using the neo-Gramscian framework have sought to examine the relationship and the boundaries between the private sector, the state, and civil society, exploring the role each of these may play in different hegemonic and counterhegemonic processes that are socially constructed through political maneuvering (Böhm et al, 2008;Bommel & Spicer, 2011;Contu et al, 2013;Levy, 2008). However, these studies offer little insight into the different ways in which civil society actors operate at local and international level to resist or sustain hegemonic formations.…”

Organizing resistance movements: contribution of the political discourse theory

“…These studies have focused their debates on: resistance in the workplace (Contu, 2008;Contu, Palpacuer, & Balas, 2013;Mumby, 2005;Willmott, 2005); PDT's implications for organization theory (Böhm, 2006); organizational identity (Brown and Coupland, 2005), organizational change (Spicer & Sewell, 2010), learning in organizations and communities of practice (Contu & Willmott, 2003;Contu, Palpacuer & Balas, 2013); entrepreneurship (Jones & Spicer, 2005); and the use of PDT for an understanding of organizational discourse and narrative analysis (Mumby, 1997;Boje, 1995;Cederström & Spicer, 2013). There is also a set of debates that focus on the relationship between Laclau and the psychoanalytic readings of Lacan (Müller, 2013;Fontenelle, 2010;Böhm and Batta, 2010;Contu, 2008;Contu, Driver & Jones, 2010).…”

“…Specifically, we have engaged with a number of PDT publications by the 'Essex-school' -a range of studies produced by University of Essex-based scholars who have used and reframed the original works by Ernesto Laclau (Howarth, 1994(Howarth, , 1997Griggs and Howarth, 2000, 2004 -as well as works produced by OS scholars (Böhm, Dinerstein & Spicer, 2010, Otto & Böhm, 2006, Levy, 2008, Levy & Scully, 2007, Fontenelle, 2010, van Bommel & Spicer, 2011Contu, Palpacuer & Balas, 2013). We have read and analyzed these studies closely by identifying: (1) the main theoretical categories used; (2) the way these categories were applied to the empirical studies; (3) the main analytical outcomes that were put forward; and (4) the gaps or non-answered questions that we see in connection to the way resistance is organized in these empirical settings.…”