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Employee Volunteer Self-Regulation and Strengthening Employee Political Representation

This article offers an in-depth study of self-regulation of a bank’s employee volunteers as a modality of organizational control from the late 1970s onwards. It also seeks to discuss the affinity between these methodical and intentional organizational practices and other parallel formative events in the sphere of the bank’s industrial relationships. The paper is based on a case study in a privately-owned Israeli bank, from its establishment in 1935 until the late 1970s. Research data was collected using semi-structured interviews and archive material, including dozens of bank bulletins published from 1964 onwards. The article follows the transformation in the self of the bank’s employee, from a passive object of generous workplace health, education, and financial aid welfare programs – established together with the bank itself – to an autonomous and competitive individual who, from the late 1970s onwards, was required to initiate, plan, and participate in community volunteering, to advance bank sales. The article also demonstrates that organizational control of the employee’s self-intensified parallel to greater political status and importance of employee representation during the 1970s. The study challenges positivistic managerial literature that avoids discussing social repercussions of managerial practices of self-construction for volunteering employees. Furthermore, the study raises questions for further research about the nature of the link between corporate volunteering and issues concerning labor relations, such as acceptance or resistance by employees and their representatives of managerial control of self.