Memory as a Moral Decision

The Role of Ethics in Organizational Culture

Steve Feldman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351325066
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The notion of organizational culture has become a matter of central importance with the great increase in the size of organizations in the twentieth century and the need for managers to run them. Like morale in the military, organizational culture is the great invisible force that decides the difference between success and failure and serves as the key to organizational change, productivity, effectiveness, control, innovation, and communication. Memory as a Moral Decision, provides a historical review of the literature on organizational culture. Its goal is to investigate the kind of world conceptualized by those who have described organizations and the kind of moral world they have in fact constructed, through its ideals and images, for the men and women who work in organizations.Feldman builds his analysis around a historically grounded concept of moral tradition. He demonstrates a central insight: when those who have written on organizational culture have addressed issues of ethics, they have ignored the past as a foundation to stabilize and maintain moral commitments. Instead, they have fluctuated between attempts to base ethics on executive rationality and attempts to escape the suffocating logic of rationalism. After an opening chapter defining the concept of moral tradition, Feldman focuses on early works on organizational management by Chester Barnard and Melville Dalton. These define the tension between ethical rationalism and ethical relativism. He then turns to contemporary frameworks, analyzing critical organizational theory and the "new institutionalism." In the final chapters, Feldman considers ethical relativism in contemporary thinking, including postmodern organization theory, the exaggerated drive for diversity, and such concepts as power/knowledge and deconstructionism.Memory as a Moral Decision is unique in its understanding of organizational culture as it relates to past, present, and future systems. Its interdisciplinary approach uses the insights of sociology, psychology, and culture studies to create an invaluable framework for the study of ethics in organizations.

Part 1

Introduction

1

The Chain of Memory: On the Relations Between Moral Culture, the Individual, and the Past

Studies of organizational culture are a central part of management and organization research. Yet the ethical aspects of organizational culture have received only minimal attention, and even less relative to moral psychology. In this chapter, I develop a theory of culture that will be used throughout the book to analyze the literature on organizational culture in terms of its ethical assumptions and implications. My goal is to increase interest in and understanding of the importance of ethics in organization life. The theory of culture I develop will focus on the relationship between individual moral development and cultural context. This will include a discussion of the role of the past in the present; that is, the role moral tradition plays in maintaining the integrity of both moral culture and character. Examples from telecommunications, electronic, medical, and educational organizations will be used to ground and develop the theoretical framework.

In the twentieth century, modern culture evolved to the point where the individual’s private sense of well-being has split off from his/her sense of social responsibility (Rieff 1987). The essential fact in what amounts to a moral revolution is the breakdown in the tension between the inner feelings and outer values of man/woman. The revolution was stimulated by not only the central cultural change of our time, the growing importance of the idea of the individual (Dumont 1986), but also by the exciting social, economic, and political opportunities, and the fascinating technologies available in the external world. As in primitive culture, our focus has once again passed into things, our symbols have grown increasingly concrete (Rieff 1990). Science now stands where once stood religion. Our spiritual selves are a shrunken version of their former piety.

By breaking the tension between inner commitment and external action, men/women left behind what they shared most, their systems of belief. It was here, in their shared beliefs, that moral ideals and images were maintained, developed, and cherished. With the decline in systems of shared belief, the inner life has taken its revenge: On one hand, the search for “community” is mouthed by politicians and the need for organizational “culture” is pursued by managers; on the other hand, a selfish individualism destructive of community, culture, and the natural environment is proclaimed as the hallmark of freedom and maintains a broad following. Politicians, managers, and professionals of every stripe now control huge organizations where the concentration of power is greater than ever before. The ethical foundation of these organizations, however, like the society of which they are a part, remains confused and disoriented.

My purpose in this essay is to develop a theory of culture that can be used to investigate the breakdown of the tension between inner commitment and outer life, both individual and collective. I will give special attention to the role of memory in maintaining moral culture because it was the destruction of the memory of the past by rationalist forces in modern culture that struck the near deathblow to the moral traditions that had kept man/woman’s sense of social responsibility alive and vigorous. The theory of culture developed in this chapter will be applied in the following chapters to analyze and critique both theoretical formulations of and empirical studies in organizational culture in regard to their moral assumptions and implications. In this way, it is hoped, a contribution can be made toward reforming the way in which we think about our moral responsibilities in organizations.

I define culture in terms of two main moral functions: First, culture organizes the moral demands men/women make upon themselves into a system of symbols that make men/women intelligible and trustworthy to each other, thus also rendering the world intelligible and trustworthy; second, culture organizes the expressive remissions by which men/women release themselves—to some degree—from the strain of conforming to the controlling symbolic, internalized variant readings of culture that constitute individual character (Rieff 1987). The system of symbols men/women use to organize and regulate their relations is not only shared among them, it is also shared with ancestors and other predecessors (Shils 1981). Hence, moral culture, as well as being internalized in the individual, has depth in time. It is this depth, the reenactment of the past in the present, cultivated over generations in traditions through a chain of memory, that gives culture its wisdom and moral weight.

In the following section I develop a theory of moral culture, indebted to the work of the sociologist Philip Rieff (1979; 1985; 1987). Rieff‘s work concerns the democratization of culture and its effect on moral restraint. An essential part of Rieff’s work is his reformulation of Freud’s theory of repression. Within this reformulated theory of repression, I focus on how moral values are established and maintained in the individual. In the third section, I develop a theory of moral tradition, building an understanding of collective memory as the basis of moral culture. The works of Hannah Arendt (1968), Michael Polanyi (1958), and Edward Shils (1981) are used extensively in this section. Throughout the two theoretical sections I will introduce examples from my own research and experience in organizations to demonstrate my argument. I will utilize data I collected during fieldwork in a telephone company (Feldman 1985; 1986a; 1986b; 1986c; 1988b), an electronics company (1988a; 1989a; 1989b; 1990), and a children’s hospital (unpublished). I will also include examples from classroom experience and university administration. Finally, concluding remarks relate moral tradition to moral culture and the cultivation of individual responsibility.

A Theory of Moral Culture

The choice of duty over self-interest or impulse, of the normatively desirable over the actually desired, was defined by Kant as the essence of moral conduct (Wrong 1994). Morality is basically a discipline (Durkheim 1925). It promotes a certain regularity in peoples’ conduct, answering to whatever is recurrent and enduring in men/women’s relationships with one another. As such, morality is inseparable from culture. What is moral becomes and remains self-evident only within a powerful and profoundly compelling system of culture (Rieff 1987). Morality is the generative principle of culture; it integrates the symbolic world within which the individual socially functions, thus committing the individual to the group. In so doing, moral culture deprives the individual of an almost endless array of possible actions, narrowing his/her behavior in line with ideals that represent the meaning of core commitments in that culture. Only through the idealization of values and ideas does moral culture remain vital for us.

An example of a moral ideal from my fieldwork in Telephone Company is represented by the integrating symbol “the little old lady in tennis shoes.” Telephone Company employees prided themselves on their ability to deliver telephone service to the public no matter what technical or natural catastrophe struck their system. The symbol “the little old lady in tennis shoes” imagined the customer as a poor grandmotherly figure who was dependent on Telephone Company for her lifeline. During floods, storms, and other disasters, Telephone Company employees went to extreme lengths and personal sacrifices to reestablish telephone service. The “little old lady” symbolized moral duty at the center of Telephone Company culture.

In my view of culture, human nature is enormously complex, containing social, asocial, and anti-social aspects (Wrong 1994). In Durkheim’s (1925, 42) words, the individual is filled with a “multitude of human passions,” giving man/woman the capacity to do anything and everything (Rieff 1985). Indeed, in a company as big as Telephone Company a vast variety of behaviors occurred. For example, just referring to the category “company vehicles,” the following incidents were recorded: a high-level, married executive wrecked his car late one night under the influence of alcohol and with another woman in the car; another high-level executive damaged the underneath of his company car by driving it through the fields on his farm; and a telephone repairman, in an attempt to use the ladder from his truck to save a drowning boy in a flooding river, drowned himself.

In the Freudian view, the passions or emotions cannot be known directly, but can only be grasped once they enter into a cultural form, that is, once they are clothed in a representation (Rieff 1979). Furthermore, the emotions are prevented from being expressed directly by a self-canceling relation among the emotions themselves, expressed as ambivalence. Ambivalence is the primary psychological modality inside culture (Rieff 1985). Since human passions are eternally in conflict, any commitment, any belief is always under pressure for reversal. This irremovable openness to changing one’s feelings points to the fragility of all human commitment. It is both a problem and a source of hope.

Hence, underneath the integrative symbol “the little old lady in tennis shoes,” signifying the culture of service at Telephone Company, was the culture of control. The culture of control did not have such an altruistic face. On the managerial level of the company, it was characterized by intense competition for rewards and promotions not always resulting in what was best for the customer. Managers sometimes withheld cooperation from peers to damage their service evaluation, thus improving their own chances for rewards and promotions.

The psychological centrality of ambivalence is a second reason human action must be restricted so peace and harmony can be brought to social life (Rieff 1954). Culture provides compensatory pleasures for its insistence that the individual must restrain his/her actions. Restriction of choices, for example, offers a more rational design for action with more effective and fruitful results (Santayana 1905). Given that the alternative—complete expression of one’s contradictory impulses—would lead to disaster, the sacrifice of self appears less oppressive.

At Children’s Hospital, for example, a central integrating cultural symbol was the Nike slogan “Just do it.” This symbol points to the physical skill and prowess needed to manage the punishing physical demands required in resident medical training. After countless sleepless hours of work and faced with feelings of ambivalence toward treating yet another patient, the Nike slogan offers the resident a self-understanding dressed as athletic achievement and competitive superiority. This assists the resident in maintaining his/her focus and fighting off distracting feelings of fatigue and resentment, thus contributing to his/her rational effectiveness.

The process of socialization by which the individual develops a specific social self involves the individual’s imaginative participation in social interaction (Mead, in Wrong 1994). Through the use of systems of symbols, including language, the individual learns to take the role of the other because in addressing the other the individual arouses in him/herself the same tendency to respond that he/she is attempting to elicit from the other. In making sense out of the response of the other, he/she is able to grasp the other’s experience and look back on him/herself, the stimulus to the other’s response, as he/she appears to the other. Out of this perception of the perceptions of other, the individual imagines his/her self. Eventually this process is interiorized in the mind by the development of the institutions of the “I” and “Me.” The self becomes split between a perceiving “I” and a perceived “Me.” This allows the self to become an object of experience, enabling it to reflect on itself: upon rational reflection, he/she can change him/herself. This is the basis of selfhood and consciousness of kind which makes both imitation and identification possible, two fundamental forms of social attachment.

Under stress, the dialogue between “I” and “Me,” a mirror of the relation between self and other, can break down. At the end of a shift, the tired first year residents would all be talking at the same time as they dressed to leave the hospital, no one listening to the others. This resulted partly from the intense demands for performance throughout the day under the watchful eyes of their many levels of superiors. By being so focused on their own performance and the observation of this performance by superiors, the normal process of listening to peers (and patients) is exhausted. The doctor-in-training’s self thus develops blocking mechanisms to avoid identifications with competitors or patients who can distract him/her from his/her goals of developing skills and winning the support of powerful superiors. As this process is interiorized in the doctor’s self, the doctor develops a highly selective capacity to ignore the emotional demands of others, thus maintaining the boundaries of his/her skill-based identifications and the ability to concentrate on implementing them.

Given that the individual is faced with an array of representations for defining and directing his/her life amid the diversity of his/her own impulses, the self has no choice but to negate some representations and impulses and embrace others in an effort to establish itself in reality (James 1890). Without this process of selection and rejection, the self would be swamped by confusion and contradiction. Thus, the mind is ever striving to produce some sort of unification or harmony in its experience (Cooley 1922). Feelings, thoughts, and representations are attached a value and allotted a position in a hierarchical structure of the mind. Cooley (1922, 372) refers to this order as the “moral sense” because it is the law of our mental integrity. To lose it would result in insanity, a random or socially unacceptable pattern of thought. The way the socially acceptable individual integrates all the materials of the inner and outer worlds is the basis of his/her individuality. Moral character is a personal accomplishment.

Hence, the doctor-in-training who focuses too much on patient care and does not complete his/her assignments inevitably runs into trouble with the dominant culture. Cultures are systems of hierarchically established values. In the process of socialization, the initiate has choices to make aoout how much to conform to the dominant values. These choices determine both the basis of his/her individuality and his/her “fit” with the dominant culture and its powerful representatives. The doctor-in-training, by insisting on more personalized patient care at the expense of productivity, might be, according to external value systems, exercising a higher level of moral character, but in the training hospital culture he/she is certain to run afoul of the organizational authorities. This tension is typical in modern professional training.

The fact that the individual makes cultural choices assumes the exclusiveness of his/her personal authority to choose (Rieff 1991). It also implies, therefore, a sense of responsibility: authority means responsibility (Rieff 1985). Authority/responsibility requires distance from the social world for its development (Dumont 1986). One must justify one’s’position ideally because only in an ideal world can the good be reflected on and worshipped, its value brought into contact with the heart, and its aesthetic form used to cultivate the self that grasps it (Santayana 1905).

At Telephone Company, a well-liked young executive was offered a major promotion, but turned it down because it would have required that he spend less time with his family. Turning down a major promotion was extremely unusual for a high-level executive because getting to a high level had already required a great commitment to career and company. His refusal to accept the promotion highlights his personal authority to choose. This authority, his personal authority, was inseparable from his responsibility to himself, his family, and the company. In carefully thinking through the decision, he concluded that his responsibility to his children was most important.

Initially, the individual’s moral decisions are not so reflective. Moral character originates in family life in the process of identification (Freud 1936). The small child identifies with (internalizes) the moral qualities of parents and other figures of authority, making their characteristics and opinions his/her own. Failure to live by these internalized values results in painful self-criticism.

The mechanism by which the family induces the individual to accept its values is love (Freud 1930). Parental love provides the incentive for the child to sacrifice his/her private inclinations, replacing them with identifications with the parents. However, family relations suffer the same ambivalence characteristic of all human feelings. Families are competitive and conflict-laden. Even love, in the best of cases, is touched with ambivalence. Nonetheless, it is here, in the narrow confines of family tension that moral character begins to emerge. In families without love, where the child has little incentive to internalize parental values, moral character does not develop and the individual can direct his/her whole aggressiveness outward.

In addition to living up to one’s own values, receiving the approval of one’s peers also leads to pride and self-respect (Sullivan 1950). The individual who is rejected and criticized by his/her peers, is subject to anxiety. Anxiety is the painful feeling of self-rejection, sometimes referred to as shame, guilt, or self-doubt (Wrong 1994). Hence, since we cannot escape the presence of others, managing how others treat us is unavoidable. We try to ensure others think well of us as a preventive strategy to avoid anxiety. Indeed, our “preventive strategy” can go so far as simply denying or forgetting anything that would lead us to be rejected, including moral demands.

At Children’s Hospital, a group of doctors/supervisors were discussing the performance of a resident. One group was complaining that the performance was poor and recommended that a letter be put in the resident’s file noting it as such. Another group was arguing for a less severe sanction. In the end, the former group won out. However, the latter group was actually in control of the administrative process and after the former group left the meeting, the administrators ripped up the letter. It was the administrators who bore the brunt of resident morale, so by tearing up the letter they avoided having to deal with an angry resident. The fact that they forgot or denied the organization’s consensus policies and their own administrative responsibilities went unremarked by all.

Denial and forgetting can have a positive function too. They are signs of repression in the relationship between culture and the individual (Freud 1930). Repression is a function of the individual’s ego. The individual employs repression to mediate between his/her own emotions and the demands of the social environment. Feelings or impulses that are unacceptable to cultural norms (that is, unacceptable to the super-ego, the representative of culture inside the individual) are repressed. The essence of repression is a turning away from direct and conscious expression of everything that is before praise and blame (Rieff 1979). A culture without repressions could not exist because everything thought or felt would be done instantly. By standing between individual desire and its object, culture represents the moral regulation of the individual. This shows the positive function of the repressive process and its necessity for the preservation of collective life.

The repressive process vital to organizational culture can even extend into employees’ private lives, and, in turn, reinforce the organizational culture. At Telephone Company, the culture of control demanded strict deference to superiors. One group of influential executives on the middle management level had to act within the culture of control, yet simultaneously function within the halls of power. They accomplished this by a slow and careful balancing act. I was quite astonished when I heard that three of these powerful men had taken up the hobby of growing rare flowers in their spare time. The patience, attention to detail, and careful planning required for this hobby is a good analogy for their political behavior. In the culture of control all impulses toward disobedience and efforts to overpower opponents were out of the question. These tendencies were repressed. For many employees these repressions marked the end of their political efforts. But for others, like the gardeners, the repressed impulses, tamed and tempered, found their way back into organizational life. The gard...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Establishing Traditions
• Part 3: Ethical Rationalism
• Part 4: Ethical Relativism
• References
• Index