Business Ethics from Below: Rethinking Organisational Values, Strategy and Trust

Abstract

Turbulence is often seen as a threat to strategy processes in organisations. Even if strategy is seen as an emergent process à la Minzberg, turbulence brings with it uncertainty and additional complexity. Severe turbulence is often regarded as making strategic action impossible. In this context, Boisot and others argue that extreme turbulence can be dealt with if the strategies designed and implemented are such that they can absorb complexity, and if these strategies do not try to reduce complexity unduly. If it can be assumed that this is good practice, business organisations and business leaders need to adapt their understanding of actions aimed at shaping organisational and corporate values. If initiatives around values are set up well, they may create better conditions for strategies to succeed in extreme turbulence. However, the very notion of common values may be a mistake, if it is meant to imply that values are understood and driven as a dimension of the reduction of complexity and uncertainty. Actions aimed at shaping organisational values should deliberately focus on values that enable organisations to absorb uncertainty and complexity. This requires a particular understanding of value processes as well as value contents. Subsequent to revisiting the notion of common values in organisations, one has to reconsider the notion of trust in organisations. Trust cannot be seen as an interpersonal matter alone and has to be extended to include structural dimensions. Notions of trust that seem sensible in terms of the aim of handling turbulence and operating from difference break down when institutional processes operate with the principle of distrust. The relationship between system and lifeworld as conceptualised by Habermas is a point of departure for developing an alternative perspective that conceptualises an open values process without romanticising the economic and management constraints in business organisations.