NOKIA video

This week's blog is about the documentary on Nokia and its supplying factory in China. The main setting in the movie is two of Nokia's representatives checking the conditions workers have to live and work in.

Legitimacy is defined as the activities of a firm striving to be considered as ‘desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions’ (Suchman 1995).

Nokia is being legitimate by sending investigators to check the conditions the workers have to live and work in and by allowing the film crew to record the interviews, arousing the impression to be a transparent company.
Actively striving to be concerned about the wellbeing of workers and transparency are very important norms and values within the western society, improving the brand's image to a proper, desirable kind.

The supplying factory is striving for legitimacy, recognised by Nokia's representatives, by answering their questions as extensive as possible, showing them around and comparing themselfs to competing factories. This way the factory is giving the impression of being appropriate,  using important values and norms for Nokia and its customers.
 

The statement that Nokia is diffusing the sustainability criteria in an effective way, is giving me mixed feelings. In one way, watching the documentary gives me a very unsustainable idea about how Nokia products are produced. The way women are treated during pregnancies for example, or the rooms where the workers have to sleep in, need a lot of improvement to measure up to my idea an sustainable working environment. In that case, if Nokia is really willing to produce in a sustainable way, the main idea a viewer would have after watching the documentary would be very different because Nokia would not have chosen this supplier.

In the other way, the supplier is not meeting my ideas of sustainability and therefore so isn’t Nokia. But the fact that Nokia is hiring people to actually check what is going on in the factories of suppliers, trying to comply to international standards on working environments. Because consumers demand for the cheapest products, it can be a dilemma for a company to be competitive on one hand and have a sustainable organization and management on the other.

                A coordination mechanism better than the current controls would be, according to me, a system where the supplying factory would be rewarded for certain sustainable policy on the workers or the production. In this way, the supplying factory would not try to decrease its costs at the expense of the workers but maybe even increase its costs a little, when improving the worker’s facilities, to gain a certain bonus from Nokia.

                Of course, this system is not in favor of Nokia, that would only consider to implement this if it could somehow increase their profits. One way possible is creating goodwill from customers that will prefer higher prices from a sustainable company like Nokia, compared to lower prices from less sustainable competitors.