From Societal Norms to Organizational Practice: The Power of Misaligning Fairness in Dismissals through Foucault’s Lens

Using Foucault's insight, this paper investigates passive alignment, a process of normalising external values without strategy or agency, and compares it to traditional forms of decoupling. The empirical focus is on Italian SMEs' social commitment to fair dismissal, as stated as an expression of social responsibility under Agenda 2030 and evidenced by SMEs' official documents and public communications. By examining 230 Italian Supreme Court decisions, the analysis identifies practices used by the same firms that result in unjust dismissals and groups them together to distinguish between decoupling and passive alignment. The findings show that policy-process decoupling is common among non-local, non-family, and technological SMEs, due to the need for flexibility and limited local social networks. Family businesses are distinguished by means-ends decoupling, which emphasises practices that promote family stability while avoiding radical changes. Local and family-owned SMEs frequently engage in passive alignment, responding solely to external pressures to maintain community relationships and legitimacy. The paper makes three major contributions: it proposes a new, embedded typology of misalignment that broadens the concept of decoupling; it empirically categorises SMEs based on decoupling practices; and it discusses how territorial and familial dynamics influence alignment behaviours, with evidence of how social and cultural constraints shape organisational power.