Dr Helen Delaney
Abstract
The seminar discusses a project of deliberate institutional change in employment relations in a large, multi-site enterprise in New Zealand. It focusses on developments arising from the company's undertaking of a "strategic partnership" with trade unions and "high performance" practices with the workforce, three years since its inception. These interventions aimed to achieve more collaborative employment relations and mutual gains for all parties. It addresses the significant efforts to implement partnership, the successes and advantages, and the particular challenges to embedding and sustaining workplace partnership behaviour. It finds that sustaining collaborative relations requires substantive actor and organizational learning, high toleration of ambiguity, uncertainty, and slowness, and maintenance of high salience of the project. The seminar outlines the concerted efforts demonstrated by key actors as they attempt to embed industrial relations reform.
Speaker
Helen Delaney is a senior lecturer in the Department of Management and International Business at the University of Auckland. Prior to Auckland, she worked at Lund University in Sweden. Her research and teaching interests lie in the fields of sociology of work, employment relations, and organization studies. She is currently working on three research projects: 1) the dynamics and outcomes of workplace partnership; 2) the creation and use of leadership psychometric tools in academia and industry; and 3) the impact of a shortened working week on employee's well-being. Her work has been published in Human Relations, Academy of Management Learning and Education, British Journal of Management, Organization, and Leadership. Helen is a member of the editorial collective of ephemera: theory & politics in organization.
RSVP on or before Friday 27 April 2018 , by email wow@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 07 3735 3714