Abstract
Ackroyd and Thompson (1999) captured it well when they declared that misconduct is a reality of the organizational life: organizations do not only produce organizational behaviour but also organizational misbehaviour. The importance of the issue of misbehaviour in organizations and organizational misconduct is the subject of two recent books, by Palmer and Karlsson. Though both deal with misbehaviour and misconduct, the authors offer quite different perspectives on the matter.
In Normal Organizational Wrongdoing: A Critical Analysis of Theories of Misconduct In and By Organizations, which provides a very comprehensive coverage of the subject of misconduct, Palmer, calling misconduct ‘wrongdoing’, defines it as ‘any behaviour that organizational participants perpetrate in the course of fulfilling their organizational roles […] that the state judges to be wrongful’ (p. 35). In the early chapters of the book, the author identifies two major perspectives on organizational wrongdoing, which he calls the dominant and the alternative approach. Consistent with these approaches he elaborates eight different explanations of the causes of wrongdoing, allocating a separate book chapter to each. The book is a ‘multi-case study’, in which the author provides different narratives of wrongdoing related to each explanation. The narratives are largely focused on the cases of fraud, fraudulent and unethical business behaviour, embezzlement, and the like, which are all considered by the state to be wrongful. Palmer draws on fraud in many cases such as Enron, MCI Carrier Finance unit, Ford pinto, etc. However, when reading about organizational wrongdoing, perhaps the reader expects also to read about cases of petty pilfering, organizational sabotage and other kinds of “smaller” but more frequent forms of organizational misconduct. Even though such forms of misconduct are all wrongdoing, even according to Palmer’s narrow definition of it, his text does not address any of these cases.
According to Palmer, the more dominant view in the literature explains wrongdoing as abnormal, and views wrongdoers as abhorrent individuals who consciously intend to engage in wrongdoing. According to this approach, wrongdoing, whose core protagonist is the individual and whose inherent causes are intrinsic to the individual, is either a rational choice or a result of cultural accounts. The rational choice explanation assumes that people’s actions are based on cost-benefit calculations, and thus individuals engage in wrongful behaviour only when they see a benefit in it. Cultural accounts explanation adopts the idea that individuals become involved in wrongful activities when they find wrongdoing consistent with the norms, values and beliefs that organizational culture promotes.
Palmer also discusses the less dominant and more recent approach in the literature, which he labels the ‘alternative approach’. This approach considers wrongdoing as normal and wrongdoers as ordinary individuals, not different from the righteous. The alternative approach, highly focused on the individuals’ bounded rationality and the effect of their immediate social environment, admits the administrative system, the situational social influence, the power structure, accidental behaviours and the social control systems, as the reasons which make people engage in wrongdoing.
Prior to the discussion of these accounts, the author presents ethical decisions as an explanation bridging the causes related to the dominant approach to those linked to the alternative approach, as it shares views of both approaches. The early ethical decision theories, Palmer argues, saw the cause of wrongdoing in individuals who failed to successfully go through the process of ethical decision-making. However, the more recent theories admit that as a matter of their limited rationality, individuals fail to negotiate the process of ethical decision-making, and consequently engage in wrongdoing without intending to do so.
The second half of the book focuses mainly on explaining wrongdoing from the standpoint of the alternative approach. Within this perspective, administrative system as well as situational social influence explanation of wrongdoing recognizes employees as boundedly rational, whose relations are embedded in their immediate environment, and whose ability in gathering and processing all the required information to make a complicated decision is limited. As a result in many cases they are involved in wrongdoing only as ‘mindless actors’ (p. 145).
When it comes to power structures, Palmer focuses on the effect of power both on those who possess it, and those subject to it. Power is of two kinds highly related to each other: formal and informal power. Formal power is that of organizational authority and is imposed on subordinates making them engage in wrongdoing. Informal power, or resource-dependence power, stems from one’s access to the rare or strategic resources. The author admits power as ‘something that operates by overcoming the resistance of others’ and not by ‘changing the views of others’ (p. 177). However, one could question the proposition that changing behaviour/actions is different from changing views. As Nietzsche put it: ‘there is no “being” behind doing, […]; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything’ (1969: 45). Overcoming resistant behaviour is not only about directing people’s actions but people’s selves and hence, their views. Palmer also mentions that informal power will lead only to grudging compliance from those who ‘retain a powerful self-concept’ (p. 187). This explanation clearly points to the struggle of individuals to maintain a distinct sense of self against the practices of power which are imposed over their subjectivity through leading their behaviour.
After power relations, the author indicates accidental behaviour account as another explanation for wrongdoing. This account defines wrongdoing as a matter of reasons such as individuals’ bounded rationality, faulty system design or operations and systems’ inherent complexity, which all cause accidental wrongdoings that individuals become entangled in without intending to do so.
Social control systems, such as the state, are the last explanation for wrongdoing in the alternative perspective. Taking a social constructionist approach, Palmer states that in each particular time and place social dynamics determine what is wrong and what is right. As a result, social control agents constantly draw and move the line separating right and wrong and by this they, indeed, create wrongdoing. Such agents institute new rules, or alter the existing ones in accordance with their own interests and constraints, making individuals fall into wrongdoing in an unplanned fashion.
Though Palmer’s main goal is to review a high volume of literature and theories of wrongdoing, he champions the ‘alternative approach’ which, as implied above, holds that ‘people sometimes slip into wrongdoing over time, in a mindless and boundedly rational fashion, influenced by their social context, without ever developing a positive inclination to do so’ (p. 17), which preserves a relatively passive role for the individual in the curse of wrongdoing.
As far as the engagement with the mainstream view of wrongdoing is concerned, emphasizing that wrongdoing is not necessarily rooted within individuals but rather in organizational culture, power relations, etc. makes Palmer’s book a very good descriptive text, above all by presenting an extended literature review on the subject. However, as a matter of a relative lack of commitment to establish his own theoretical and critical view beyond the literature he reviews, Palmer does not go far enough in persuading the reader about the passive role that his book presents for wrongdoers, and his seeming justification of wrongdoing, albeit from a culturally determined angle.
From passive vessels of cultural reflection in Palmer’s work, wrongdoers become active players in Karlsson’s (2012) Organizational Misbehaviour in the Workplace: Narratives of Dignity and Resistance. Here we are confronted with what he calls ‘organizational misbehaviour’. Presenting a broader concept than the very specific concept of wrongdoing by Palmer, Karlsson defines misbehaviour as ‘anything you consciously are, do and think at work that you are not supposed to be, do and think’ (p.157, emphasis added). Karlsson argues that dignity troubles are the very core reason of employee organizational misbehaviour, and misbehaviour occurs as a result of individual’s conscious attempt to defend their dignity. While Palmer’s notion of wrongdoing is what the state judges as wrong, misbehaviour is what the organizational authority defines as improper.
In the opening part of his book, Karlsson claims that due to the incompleteness of every contract, employers tend to extend control over employees. When autonomy—according to him, the central aspect of human dignity—is constrained, employees tend strongly to resist its perceived retrenchment in the workplace since they need to establish and maintain their dignity. He argues that dignity is related to elements such as autonomy at work, respect, pride and recognition. At the same time, elements such as shame, humiliation and stigma are negatively related to it.
Similarly to Palmer, Karlsson uses storytelling to elucidate his arguments. The second part of the book consists of 68 narratives, mainly gathered from social science articles, telling stories about petty pilfering and fiddling, cynicism and distancing from the organizational values, resistance against change, workers strikes, absenteeism, joking and teasing management decisions, and the like. In comparison to Palmer, Karlsson reviews a broader—and different —variety of organizational misconduct in his narratives, yet judges all kinds of misbehaviour presented there to be the result of defending threatened dignity.
However, Ackroyd and Thompson’s now seminal Organizational Misbehaviour, written more than a decade ago, argued that seeking individual autonomy is the very core reason for employees’ organizational misbehaviour (1999: 56). While they presented different dimensions of misbehaviour and categorized different forms of it under such dimensions, they admitted that some of these forms can also occur due to other reasons than seeking self-autonomy: e.g. appropriation of company’s products, or joking rituals can simply happen in order to relieve boredom, regular absenteeism possibly due to pursuing an affair outside of the organization regularly, and the like. But Karlsson goes further, arguing that autonomy itself is at the centre of dignity, and it is, indeed, seeking dignity which causes all and every kind of organizational misbehaviour. Due to this highly emphasized role of dignity in this volume, the reader expects from Karlsson a more precise conceptualization of dignity to see how exactly the different forms of misbehaviour, such as pilfering, etc. are connected to the concept of dignity.
In the third and last part of this volume, Karlsson suggests a new way of conceptualizing misbehaviour. In doing so, he deliberately highlights the role of corporate culture in the concept of misbehaviour. Management attempts to establish a strong culture and making employees buy into organizational values is a way to prevent misbehaviour and make sure that employees will comply with management rules. Consequently, those employees who do not embrace organizational culture are misbehaving. Similar to Ackroyd and Thompson who viewed the process of identity formation to be associated with all misbehaviour (1999: 27), Karlsson’s clear cut definition of misbehaviour reflects not only what employees are not supposed to do, but also what they are not supposed to be, which shows the focus on identity.
As mentioned before, Palmer also highlights the role of organizational culture in the creation of wrongdoing. He points to management’s endeavours in making employees internalize organizational values, so that they exhibit behaviours consistent with the cultural norms of the organization. However, while according to Karlsson, misbehaviour occurs when employees do not act according to the culture, for Palmer acting according to culture can result in wrongdoing since cultural norms and values sometimes facilitate wrongdoing.
Even though such norms can encourage wrongdoing, it is still the state that codifies wrongdoing by moving the line between right and wrong. Palmer notes: ‘organizational participants can be on the right side of the line separating right from wrong one day and on the wrong side the next, even when they have not changed their behaviour’ (p. 22). This view is in line with that of Karlsson’s toward superiors’ role in defining what is misbehaviour and what is not. For Karlsson breaking management rules is not necessarily always viewed as misbehaviour. Rather, sometimes ‘organizational behaviour (following all the rules) is organizational misbehaviour (breaking them)’ (p. 155), since employees are supposed to use their own creativity, knowledge and judgements to recognize which rules, and to which extent to follow if the work is to be done.
To avoid the paradoxes that might arise due to such comprehensive definition of organizational misbehaviour, Karlsson presents the findings of a case study from four healthcare companies in Norway to advance our understanding of the core aspects of misbehaviour. However, here he leaves the reader slightly confused, failing to provide a justification as to why the study was conducted in Norway, even though, as he notes in the preface, this book is an outcome of a research that studied the very existence of resistance at Swedish workplaces. Also he fails to justify choosing health care as his study site and to explain why this service domain demonstrates resistance at the workplace better than other sections of the economy or society.
Discussing the findings of the aforementioned study, the author states that misbehaviour consists of four elements which should be conceptually constructed as social relations rather than as activities per se. These elements are: resistance, abusive supervision, collective disciplines and private business. Resistance, as a form of misbehaviour, is employees’ response to employer’s control in order to establish and maintain autonomy and dignity. Abusive supervision refers to superiors’ bullying and harassing behaviour. Collective discipline is, by Karlsson’s definition, those internal disciplines in self-organized groups which are formed to produce sets of rules for the employees to draw on, when breaking management rules. And finally, private business is about appropriation of company’s products and facilities for private usage.
As a final point, Karlsson concludes these results by presenting a model to illustrate the organizational misbehaviour and its subsets, however only in relation to organizational power hierarchy. As he admits, more studies remain to be carried out on the relationship between subsets of misbehaviour with each other.
In all, both volumes focusing on the notions of misbehaviour and wrongdoing, though proceeding from very different conceptual starting points and entailing distinct problems, present illuminating perspectives on these concepts and open up doors for further discussion on dignity, misbehaviour and theorizing wrongdoing.