Entrepreneur and employee negotiated labour market flexibility in small firms

ABSTRACT

We investigated negotiated Labour Market Flexibility (LMF) in small hazardous firms in the context of increased immigrant labourers and the non-availability of the local labour force. Extant literature discussed negotiation between the employer and employees, only if the firm satisfies the following conditions: firm-specificity, employee categorisation into core-periphery, and shared ethnic identities between the employees and employer. However, in this study, we broke away from these conditional boundaries, and used the Grounded theory to capture both entrepreneurs’ and employees’ views. Interestingly, we found a socially constructed interdependence between them, stemming from mutual reciprocity. The findings offer significant implications for substantive theory and practice in the realm of LMF in general, and negotiated flexible work arrangements in particular.

KEYWORDS:

• Embeddedness
• labour market flexibility
• small firms
• hazardous industry
• interdependency
• reciprocity
• negotiated flexibility
• entrepreneur
• labour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. http://leatherindia.org/industry-at-a-glance/ Accessed on 10 June 2021.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Chennai as a whole has 167,322 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), which employ about 581,011 labourers (MSMEDI 2016).

6. The expert was part of the editorial in a reputed academic journal to which we submitted our earlier draft for publication. However, the expert who thoroughly reviewed our paper viewed that the research would be enriched with additional insights.

7. As per Factories Act 1948; i) the total number of hours of work in any day shall not exceed ten; and ii) the total number of hours of work in a week, including overtime, shall not exceed sixty (Section 64 [4] in the Factories Act 1948, India). https://labour.gov.in/sites/default/files/TheFactoriesAct1948.pdf Accessed on 10 October 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Venkatesh Murthy

Dr. Venkatesh Murthy, a faculty member in the domain of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the School of Management and Entrepreneurship, IIT Jodhpur, India. He holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He has widely published his research and case studies in the field of entrepreneurship and small businesses in conjunction with social and economic realities. His work appeared in several journals and case houses, including the Journal of Small Business Management, and Ivey Publishing.

Jaganth G

Dr. Jaganth G is a public policy consultant, at Tamil Nadu State Planning Commission. He holds a PhD in Management and Labour Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Studies (TISS) Mumbai. His research appeared in journals including Science-Technology & Society, and Emerald Emerging Case Studies.

Bino Paul

Dr. Bino Paul is a faculty in the School of Management and Labour Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. He holds a PhD in the area of Economics from IIT Bombay. At TISS, his subject areas of teaching include social network analysis, micro econometrics, and organisational economics. His research work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Social Structure, Journal of Workplace Learning, Journal of Small Business Management, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, Science-Technology and Society, The European Journal of Comparative Economics, World Economic Journal and Journal of Management.