Download Strong and Weak Culture

There are two ways of thinking about organizational culture and its analysis—weaker and
stronger. Ok, actually it would be better to think of it as falling along a continuum: Some people
are so set in their beliefs and in how they understand the world that becoming a member of an
organization, even a very powerful one, would have little to no impact on their norms or their
behavior. (This is not, by the way, necessarily a good thing. Sometimes being so set in one’s
ways is a form of dogmatism; i.e., one refuses to change one’s beliefs even in the face of good
counter evidence.) On the other extreme, some people seem to have no deeply established
beliefs, such that they end up adopting the norms or whatever group they are with.
Along that continuum, you get the weaker and stronger versions I discussed in class. On
the weaker version, explicit organizational rules (e.g., codes of ethics), implicit organizational
rules (e.g., “get the story”), distinct and overtly established power hierarchies, and role modelling
merge to create an organizational culture. This culture is directly and indirectly taught to new
employees and then reinforced through the meting out of rewards and punishments. Through
this, the individual agent, at some level, comes to recognize that some of the “preferred”
behaviors are unethical, but she adopts them anyway, because that’s just how things are done.
Depending on how fully she adopts them, she becomes a different person, with different values,
and those different values now drive her behavior. Importantly, she may still be “an extremely
moral and socially responsible person” (recall this from Werhane’s article, commenting on
Dennis Gioia) in other areas of her life; she has just changed her values (and her behavior) in her
work life.
On the stronger version, the culture creates an institutional worldview, one that molds the
very meaning of ethical rules, concepts, and perceived options. On this version, agents perceive
the world differently; for example, a consent form truly is a fearful thing or it truly is a legal
obstacle, depending on the agent’s point of view. The meaning is dictated by the script. Such
meaning carries over into one’s moral understanding as well; i.e., one’s understanding of what
counts as ethically appropriate behavior is thus largely determined by that script. It is not that
(even “at some level”) one recognizes that the behavior is ethically problematic and then one
makes excuses or rationalizations, for that behavior. No, it is literally that one no longer sees it as
problematic. Thus one “unconsciously” (again, Gioia) interprets data in a way that fits the script.
The water bottle is a gift from the gods or it is a piece of environment-damaging garbage or it is
a status symbol, and so forth. The piece of foam hitting the wing of Columbia is a minor event of
no consequence or it is a catastrophic, shuttle destroying event, depending on which “hat” one’s
wearing at the time. (Note—Werhane uses the Challenger explosion, and the “hat” metaphor, to
get at this point. Sadly, it turns out that the same problem occurred with Columbia. The script
through which one saw the foam strike determined whether one saw it as significant.) And,
importantly, agents consequently often act without full awareness of their own institutionally
grounded motivations, even sometimes in direct opposition to their immediate cognitive
perceptions. That is, agents may believe they are acting on a rule or principle when in fact they
are at least as motivated by less transparent motives grounded in the institutional ethos.
What’s the answer to such moral enculturation? On Werhane’s analysis, and I think she
has it largely right, it is “moral imagination.” So make sure you know what she means by that
and when doing your projects try to apply it to the cultures and issues you’ll be discussing.