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The purpose of this paper is to advance research on job loss-related stress through a critical realism framework which considers the interplay between organisational context and personal agency and its implications for worker stress in the pre-lay-off stage.

The paper adopts a qualitative case study approach and considers two groups of workers confronted with the prospects of job loss in Australia’s power generation industry – permanent employees working for power stations and workers employed by associated contractors. Field research and semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 35 power industry workers including power station employees and contract workers.

The research shows permanent employees expressing higher levels of stress than contract workers. The different emotional responses expressed by the two groups are accounted for by differences in organisational circumstances and the conditioning of personal agency within these organisational contexts.

One of the implications is that “vulnerable” workers are better prepared for plant closure and less prone to stress. Additional research involving different types of industries, organisational forms, and workforces and involving different stages of the job loss experience, however, is needed to more full advance the understanding of the complexities between organisational structure, worker agency, and the stress implications.

This study assists the authors in better understanding worker emotional experience in the pre-lay-off stage. These findings have important implications for workers, unions and social support agencies and how they can appropriately approach, prepare and assist different categories of workers confronted with job redundancy situations.

This study assists the authors in better understanding worker emotional experience in the pre-lay-off stage. The study has implications for the design and implementation of assistance packages for displaced workers.

Unlike other studies which focus on the lay-off, unemployment or re-employment stage of job loss, this study focuses on the pre-lay-off stage. Conceptually, the study departs from the positivist paradigm which dominates much of the stress literature and adopts a nuanced approach inspired by critical realist understandings of the structure-agency relationship.

We examined the attitudes of millennial-aged business students toward economic, social and environmental corporate responsibility (CR). Currently, these individuals are of an age that they have entered the workforce and are now ascending or have ascended into roles of leadership in which they have decision-making power that influences their company’s CR agenda and implementation. Thus, following the ecological systems perspective, we tested both the macro influence of cultural values (survival/self-expression and traditional/secular-rational values) and structural forces (income inequality, welfare socialism and environmental vulnerability) on these individuals’ attitudes toward CR.

This is a multilevel study of 3,572 millennial-aged students from 28 Asian, American, Australasian and European societies. We analyzed the data collected in 2003–2009 using hierarchical linear modeling.

In our multilevel analyses, we found that survival/self-expression values were negatively related to economic CR and positively related to social CR while traditional/secular-rational values was negatively related to social CR. We also found that welfare socialism was positively related to environmental CR but negatively related to economic CR while environmental vulnerability was not related to any CR. Lastly, income equality was positively related to social CR but not economic or environment responsibilities. In sum, we found that both culture-based and structure-based macro factors, to varying extents, shape the attitudes of millennial-aged students on CR in our sample.

Our study is grounded in the ecological systems theory framework, combined with research on culture, politico-economics and environmental studies. This provides a multidisciplinary perspective for evaluating and investigating the impact that societal (macro-level) factors have on shaping attitudes toward businesses’ engagement in economic, social and environmental responsibility activities. Additionally, our multilevel research design allows for more precise findings compared to a single-level, country-by-country assessment.