Browsing by Author "Deacon, Louise Joy"

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    Due diligence and psychosocial risk : examining the construction of compliance : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024-07-20) Deacon, Louise Joy
    New Zealand’s Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 introduced two significant changes to the country’s work health and safety regulatory landscape: (1) it placed a duty upon officers to ensure that the business of which they are an officer complies with its duties under the Act; (2) it broadened the definition of health to include mental health. The latter inclusion confirmed the scope of the Act to apply to psychosocial risks at work. Despite the officers’ duties being lauded as a profound change to New Zealand’s regulatory landscape, there has been little research investigating how officers respond to these legal duties. Further, internationally, there are significant gaps in knowledge regarding the role senior company managers play in psychosocial risk management, particularly relating to the intersect of legal responsibilities and psychosocial risks. This research adopted a Foucauldian analytical approach to examine how ideas about compliance and psychosocial risks are constructed and organised. Specifically, the research questions led to an investigation of the ways in which officers conceptualised and carried out their due diligence duties as they applied to the protection of workers’ mental health and the implications thereof. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 24 officers of large companies operating in New Zealand. The findings indicate that officers tended to discursively construct risk in ways which frequently obfuscated causes of harm arising from work while also problematising the possibility of eliminating or minimising risks to workers. Further, through a process of “risk translation,” psychosocial risks were often transformed into risks which were individualised, psychologised and managerialised. This translative effect functioned to displace psychosocial risks with risks which were more recognisable and amenable to management and posed less challenge to management prerogative. In this way, a dominant construction of risk came to represent worker mental health as a cause of risk to the organisation and the object of compliance, rather than a consequence of psychosocial risk exposure. The resultant compliance responses may therefore be considered symbolic in that they represented attention to legal ideals while marginalising the management of risks arising from work. Thus, the potential of work health and safety legislation to regulate psychosocial harm arising from work was largely curtailed, highlighting the limits of self-regulation in a legal context characterised by uncertainty and ambiguity.