Organisations and management - Essay Example

There is a widespread denial of slavery in management studies, which primarily focus on victims thereby ignoring the role of enterprises and managers in the most atrocious human rights abuses in modern management practice. This article proposes that management research should play a role in explaining why slavery persists in modern day business practices even in the presence of rules, norms, and practices that are meant to discourage it. This article develops a model of modern day slavery as a management practice, which highlights the manner in which modern day organizations succeed in exploiting certain competitive as well as institutional conditions that generate slavery.

Similarly, this theory reveals how companies insulate themselves against all forms of institutional pressures that discourage slavery while shaping or sustaining those conditions that promote slavery or prevent it. The evolution of slavery from a formally sanctioned practice to a criminalized practice bound to the informal economy has enhanced the ambiguity and dynamism of slavery in modern business practice, thereby posing challenges for its definition; a precise definition of modern slavery distinguishes it as “the exercise of ‘powers attaching to the right of ownership’” (Crane, 2013).

Modern slaves are compelled to work by threats and they are owned or manipulated by their employer by use of mental, physical as well as threatened abuse; similarly, modern slaves are dehumanized and treated as property besides being physically constrained in their movements and being economically exploited through underpayment. Despite the many forms of slavery and the various business models through which it can be deployed, slavery is essentially an attempt to illegitimately underprice labor, thus, establishing the illegitimate practices through which enterprises achieve underpricing and survival is essential in understanding modern