ILPC 2026

 A typical consequence of organisations implementing employment restructuring and redundancy is the profound negative effects related to employees’ social, economic, psychological and physiological well-being. The experiences of employees affected by such processes have been generally categorised in the HRM and organisational psychology literature as ‘victims’, who are directly affected by redundancy, or ‘survivors,’ who are not directly affected and remain at the organisation post-restructuring (Ket de Vries and Balazs, 1997; Sahdev, 2003; Devine et al, 2003, Armstrong-Stassen, 2002).

This paper is framed by the critique that this dichotomous categorisation acts to limit understanding of the variety of human experiences associated with restructuring and redundancy. The central contribution herein, is the presentation of a new, analytically discrete, category of employee affected by restructuring and redundancy, termed inbetweener. Inbetweeners are defined as employees whose experiences fall within the interstices of victim and survivor, with a specific focus on employees’ experience of displacement following internal redeployment. The findings point to the need for a greater acknowledgement of the different types of employee experiences of restructuring and redundancy, expanding debates outside the victim-survivor bifurcation prevalent in extant research. The research proceeded through a qualitative case study of a restructuring process at a UK subsidiary of a multi-national steel company, SteelCo, that cut 1700 jobs between 2011-2015.

This article makes three additional contributions to theory and practice. Firstly, this article complements research in the organisational psychology literature that has tentatively acknowledged the experience of employees that lose their jobs but are subsequently redeployed internally and thus remain at the organisation (Armstrong-Stassen, 2002). The article highlights issues related to the adequacy of redeployment processes, employees’ career disruption and specific organisational constraints that help explain why inbetweeners may experience different outcomes to victims and survivors. Secondly, the SteelCo research relocates the experience of redeployment within the HRM literature, noting the implications of inbetweeners for the way organisations, and the HR function, strategise restructuring and redundancy processes. This advances the debates related to how restructuring strategies might be devised and implemented to account for the experience of survivors, proposing that the HR function must necessarily take into account the experience of inbetweeners, where they exist, in order to more effectively manage the workforce post-restructuring (Sahdev, 2003; Teague and Roche, 2014). Finally, in comparing the experience of inbetweeners with those of victims, the specific structural and cultural constraints facing affected employees are identified. A distinctive characteristic of inbetweeners is thus the manner in which such constraints continue to shape ongoing experiences of restructuring and redundancy internally, and within the organisation; as opposed to victims that typically exit the organisation and deal with such effects in the external environment. This means more attention is subsequently afforded to the internal capacity of the HR function to deal with the effects on employees post-restructuring, and for the HR function to recognise how the conditions that shape particular experiences of restructuring and redundancy, such as redeployment, can impact employees’ subsequent relationship with the organisation