Striving for Sustainable Management: A case study on Managing Blue-Collar Work in Danish Slaughterhouses

“Sustainable management” increasingly demands balancing the corporation’s performance with employee health. This balance is particularly relevant for companies requiring physical production, such as blue-collar work. Some researchers suggest that performance and health entail competing and contradictory considerations. New studies have found these two sustainable management concerns to be potentially complementary if short-term expenses toward improving employees’ health are
perceived to lead to long-term gains in performance.

This thesis studies sustainable management in an extreme case where occupational health and safety are particularly at risk, and the work demands high performance. This extreme case highlights the challenges of different corporate actors in balancing performance and health. The thesis aims to explore how managers, administrative personnel, and employees in dirty blue-collar work strive for high performance while maintaining health. The embedded single-case study iteratively explores blue-collar work in slaughterhouses. The dataset is comprised of 47 semi-structured interviews in six sites with managers, administrative personnel, and blue-collar employees as well as document analysis of 28 issues of an employee magazine.

The purpose of the thesis is threefold: Firstly, using first- and second-order analysis, I inductively explore how top managers of slaughterhouses approach health in the workplace while ensuring financial performance. The analysis reveals that specific contextual factors incentivize top managers to improve employee occupational health and safety to increase financial performance. 

Secondly, using thematic narrative analysis, the thesis abductively studies how blue-collar employees perceive doing dirty work with high performance demands and risks to their health. The findings reveal that blue-collar employees perceive and balance ambivalences in their many incentives for choosing this kind of work, which is less dirty than has previously been considered. 

Thirdly, the thesis focuses on how social actors manage performance and health when employee health becomes compromised. I deductively use thematic analysis to explore how the blue-collar context influences perceptions of performance and health in presenteeism. The research demonstrates that the workplaces’ flexible work resources influence employees’ abilities to job craft and make idiosyncratic deals to negotiate how presenteeism impacts their performance and health.

The thesis concludes that social actors strive to balance performance and health by improving the conditions for blue-collar work while attempting to negotiate the ambivalence of the “dirty” bluecollar work. Social actors on different corporate levels perceive performance as dependent on health. Several contextual factors influence social actors’ abilities and incentives to negotiate changes and handle the embodied ambivalences they perceive in blue-collar work. Social actors attempt to sustainably manage the dynamic and ambiguous but potentially complementary considerations that influence their performance and health. They do this by changing the boundaries of the work and negotiating their performance and health, which they perceive as related to the work performed.