Research for practice: Financial Times award for Kassel professor

Whether at the Olympic Games in Brazil or the Football World Cup in Qatar - in recent years, increasing attention has been paid worldwide to working conditions in the construction sector. The honored researchers took this as an opportunity to investigate the dynamics of the media and professional discussion on the subject. Between 2014 and 2019, they collected and analyzed data in the form of 15 interviews with stakeholders from the construction industry, observations at meetings and conferences and 106 articles from a variety of English-language media. The study revealed that certain implicit interpretation schemes, so-called "frames", influence how people perceive a problem, who they blame for it and which solutions they consider appropriate.

"When we pay attention to an issue, we automatically make a choice about which aspects we emphasize and which we tend to neglect," says Prof. Dr. Stefan Gold, co-author of the study and head of the Department of Sustainable Leadership at the University of Kassel. "These frames have a decisive influence on our interpretation of social reality. Competing frames are constantly negotiated between different participants and can ultimately lead to solution-oriented new patterns of action or prevent them."

The researchers were able to observe that the public discussion about modern slavery in the construction industry went through three phases - from the first emergence of the topic, through the social and media peak of the debate, to its cooling off. In each of these three phases, certain frames came to the fore, while others were pushed back. The researchers identified four frames and examined their development over time. Most actors in the construction industry saw modern slavery either as a human rights, moral, management-related or social justice issue. Depending on which of these frames prevailed among them, there were also differences in who they saw as primarily responsible and which solutions they considered appropriate. For example, actors who classified modern slavery primarily as a problem of social justice usually considered it to be structurally caused. They advocated stronger state controls, the expansion of trade union rights and more protective laws for workers. By contrast, those who saw modern slavery as a human rights problem and, in a later variation, as a "hidden crime", focused more on individual traffickers and individual victims. They tended to reject the idea of holding companies more comprehensively accountable. They often favored stronger prosecution of human trafficking crimes as a solution.

The Financial Times Responsible Business Education Award recognizes academic work that helps companies and other organizations to act more responsibly on a practical level. Through co-authors Dr. Gabriela Gutierrez-Huerter O (King's College London) and Prof. Alexander Trautrims (University of Nottingham), the study has been incorporated into the new BSI (British Standards Institution) standard BS 25700, which provides guidance to organizations on how to manage the risk of modern slavery in their operations, supply chains and wider business environment. The standard provides companies with a toolkit to actively tackle modern slavery in their operations and supply chains, rather than hiding behind the interpretation of modern slavery as an inevitable phenomenon in our economic system.

To the article in the Financial Times of January 16, 2023: Academic research award: tipping point for action | Financial Times (ft.com)

Gutierrez-Huerter O, G., Gold, S., Trautrims, A. (2023). Change in Rhetoric but not in Action? Framing of the Ethical Issue of Modern Slavery in a UK Sector at High Risk of Labor Exploitation. Journal of Business Ethics, 182, 35-58.

You can find the article here.

Contact:

Prof. Dr. Stefan Gold

Phone: +49 561 804-3082

E-mail: gold[at]uni-kassel[dot]de