Translating socially responsible workforce reduction—A longitudinal study of workforce reduction in a Swedish company

This article seeks to add to our understanding of the significance and impact of processes of translation in the context of socially responsible workforce reduction. Abandoning the tendency among researchers and policy-makers to regard socially responsible workforce reduction as a stable feature or model that can be passed on and implemented in any organisation regardless of the local context, it will be claimed here that any attempt to understand what socially responsible workforce reduction means in practice must take account of the context in which it occurs and the processes whereby new ideas are imitated and translated by local actors. This claim will be supported by field data from a large Swedish company that has been undergoing extensive restructuring since the beginning of the 1990s. The implications of the article highlight the need for researchers to take account of the way workforce reduction practices are connected over time and to consider the space for translation available to local actors when it comes to defining the meaning of socially responsible workforce reduction in their own local context. The paper also contributes to our understanding of the interrelationship between the translation of such ideas and the processes of institutionalisation.