Journal of Organizational Change ManagementEmerald Article: Performativity in place of responsibility?Barbara Czarniawska

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To cite this document: Barbara Czarniawska, (2011),"Performativity in place of responsibility?", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 24 Iss: 6 pp. 823 - 829

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Barbara Czarniawska, (2011),"Performativity in place of responsibility?", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 24 Iss: 6 pp. 823 - 829http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09534811111175779

Barbara Czarniawska, (2011),"Performativity in place of responsibility?", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 24 Iss: 6 pp. 823 - 829http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09534811111175779

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Performativity in placeof responsibility?

Barbara CzarniawskaUniversity of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to question the common conviction that responsibility is themajor factor influencing performance.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper takes the form of a comparison of two recent cases ofecological catastrophes.

Findings – In emergency situations, locating parties able to perform gives better results thanestablishing responsibility for the accident.

Research limitations/implications – More similar cases should be examined systematically.

Practical implications – If the conclusions are accepted, the conventional mode of acting inemergencies may change.

Social implications – Hopefully, the paper may redirect attention from responsibility toperformativity.

Originality/value – The paper opposes a commonly accepted belief and the corresponding mode ofacting.

Keywords Organizational performance, Disaster management, Emergency measures, Responsibilities,Performativity

Paper type Research paper

Organizing in action netsFollowing in the steps of others, beginning with Weick (1969/1979), I have tried for thepast ten years or more to convince organization scholars that they should focus on theprocess of organizing, and not on but one of its results – formal organizations(Czarniawska, 1997, 2008). I argue that it is not that organizations produce organizing, butthat organizing produces organizations. Reification of the concept of “organization” into astable and separate entity – most likely accomplished under the auspices of systemstheory – led many organization scholars to neglect instances of organizing that occurredbeyond and among organizations. My remedy was to study the construction, stabilization,maintenance, destruction, and reconstruction of action nets. Instead of studying thebuilding-like structures called organizations, or even the connections among previouslydefined actors called networks, organization scholars should be studying constructionand maintenance of connections among collective actions. These collective actions neednot be performed within the bounds of a formal organization; an action net can involveactions performed by several formal organizations or simply by assemblies of human andnon-human actants (Latour, 2005)). The actions can be connected loosely or temporarily.

The genealogy of this idea leads straight to actor-network theory, although I havealso added a pinch of new institutionalism: in a given institutional order, certaincollective actions seem obvious or even necessary candidates to be connected to others(producing to selling, for example), whereas other connections (producing to hoarding,for example) may seem strange or innovative, depending on the situation.

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Vol. 24 No. 6, 2011pp. 823-829

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited0953-4814

DOI 10.1108/09534811111175779

According to this perspective, formal organizations are but fragments of action nets,stabilized and legitimized by their registration as legal entities. From the point of view oforganizing, they can be indeed be treated as tools to achieve certain goals, as suggestedby Perrow (1986) long ago. As tools, they should be kept and maintained because theyare doing their work or they should be dropped and replaced (Weick, 1996).

It can be claimed, however, that the reason for this insistence on responsibility isthat attribution of responsibility is a key societal action, which is always given priority.If so, a focus on formal organizations may be necessary. Focusing on action nets ratherthan organizations will make the attribution of responsibility more difficult or maydelay it. I now take a closer look at this argument.

Whereas the noun “organization” previously denoted either an association or theprocess of organizing (in anthropology, for example), organization scholars using theterm in recent times seem to be referring, explicitly or implicitly, to a corporation – a legalperson. This kind of reasoning becomes even more obvious when public administrationunits are encouraged or forced to assume the shapes of “real organizations”,i.e. corporations.

The history of corporations in the USA – the usual country of reference – is a historyof competition, never concluded, between the school of thought that conceptualizescorporations as natural persons, and the school of thought that sees them as artificialpersons (Lamoreaux, 2004). In corporate law, Lamoreaux has said, the two theories tendto hybridize rather than blend. Thus, organizations becoming legal persons acquirethe right to an identity, a will, and an image – all necessary elements for attributingresponsibility to them.

But what good does it do, such attribution of responsibility? Does it make the person –artificial or natural – redress the inappropriate behavior or engage in appropriatebehavior? This is far from sure. There are several problems related to responsibilityattribution, especially to legal persons: its symbolic nature, the reattribution ofresponsibility, and the location of a culprit.

Thurman Arnold, famous US lawyer and anti-trust regulator, noted as early as 1937that as an attribution of responsibility is a symbolic action, the response it evokes is of asymbolic character as well (Arnold, 1937, p. 230). He wrote about “the ritual of corporatereorganization”: a ritual based “on the doctrine of vicarious atonement through whichthe debts of an industrial organization are forgiven”. He quoted several scandals of theday, showing how a political coalition led by the lawyers in an insolvency casesubmitted the guilty company to public punishment, leaving the political and financialinterests intact.

The second problem is revealed by actor-network theory: in case of organizations,especially large ones, public opinion and the law deal with macro actors: networks thatpretend to be united in an actorhood. It does not take a conspiracy theorist to assume thatthe attribution of responsibility will be re-directed within the network, which may revealthe culprit, or may merely find an appropriate scapegoat.

My choice of words suggests the nature of the third problem. Is the purpose ofresponsibility attribution the location of a culprit? And if so, what good will come of it?

In what follows, I consider two contrasting examples. Both are based on mediareports, which make them even more relevant for my present reasoning, as it is mediapresentations that form imitation models for organizers in contemporary societies.

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Locating responsibility: BPOn 20 April 2010, Deepwater Horizon, an oilrig belonging to British Petroleum,exploded while drilling at Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 peopleand causing a massive oil spill. “The US Government has named BP as the responsibleparty, and officials have committed to hold the company accountable for all cleanupcosts and other damage”, says Wikipedia[1], which, when I accessed it on 4 July 2010,had produced a 15-page article on the subject and many subsidiary ones.

A naive but straightforward question may be asked at this point: could theestablishment of the extent of BP’s guilt clean the waters from the leaking oil? Itcertainly failed to do so for a long time:

The oil from the ruptured well continues to flow as of July 2010. A number of attempts tostaunch the flow were either unsuccessful or have met with only a limited success, and reliefwells to allow termination of the flow are unlikely to be completed for some time[2].

The legal assumption is that location and punishment of the culprit will prevent futurecrimes and misdemeanors. But this assumption is constantly debated within and outsidethe law. In this case, it was assumed that establishing accountability could helpthe victims of the accident, and that the fear of damaged public relations and future costsin general would hasten the day when the leak would be stopped. Unless, that is, BPwould first invest in strengthening their PR personnel to deal with damage limitationand only second in stopping the leak – as has been demonstrated in cases of othercompanies in trouble (Morsing and Beckmann, 2006) [. . .] In any case, the leak had to bedealt with. But how should one know if it was the same “actant” within the macro actorBP who had been guilty of the leak, and who could stop it?

The leak was finally stopped five months later, and only afterwards were thefollowing measures taken:

The “well-kill” operations in the Gulf of Mexico were completed on 19 September 2010.On 29 September, BP announced that “it will create a new safety division with sweepingpowers to oversee and audit the company’s operations around the world. BP also revealsplans to re-structure its Upstream segment from a single business into three divisions –Exploration, Development and Production. Incoming group chief executive Bob Dudley says:“These are the first and most urgent steps in a programme I am putting in place to rebuildtrust in BP. The changes are in areas where I believe we most clearly need to act, withsafety and risk management our most urgent priority” (www.bp.com/iframe.do?categoryId¼ 9035136&contentId ¼ 7065156; accessed 19 March 2011).

Why the formation of three divisions from one should restore the public’s trust inBP remains an open question. Even if it could be established beyond doubt whichorganizational unit, or even which natural person was instrumental in creating the oilleak, this would not have cleared the oil from the Gulf of Mexico. I therefore suggest theintroduction of the concept of performativity – the capacity to act that can beestablished only by investigating action nets.

The original meaning of “performativity” is usually traced back to Austin’s (1962)notion of “performative utterances” – utterances that are equivalent to what is beingsaid (“The meeting is closed”). Various social scientists later developed the notionand transferred it to different contexts. Callon (1998, p. 2) suggested, for example, that“economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs, shapes and formats the economy,rather than observing how it functions”. Many scholars of science and technology

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adopted this idea, and began writing about performativity, by which they meant that“theories and models bring about the very conditions that they attempt to explain”(MacKenzie, 2008, p. 25). I believe that the notion can be transferred from suchquasi-objects as economic models to collective actions and connections among them –action nets.

To return to the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, one would imagine that the criticaltask was to identify the action or actions that would clean the water, and to follow up orcreate the connections to other actions that are necessary for performing the crucialone. Thus, the central operation should be the situating of performativity withinexisting action nets, and activating those points and connections (or creating new ones,if need be). If that was, indeed, the central operation, the media did not report on it inany detail.

Situating performativitySuccessful organizing, especially in crisis situations, seems to require three operations:apportioning responsibility, situating performativity, and – decoupled from the othertwo – attributing blame (a legal action). The crucial issue is the order in which they areperformed. Here is a short description of a recent event in which the order was, in myview, correct.

On 5 August 2010, a cave-in at the San Jose copper and gold mine trapped 33 menbelow ground[3]. Probably influenced by previous criticism over the Chileangovernment’s handling of an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, President Pineraabandoned his planned participation in the presidential inauguration in Colombia andtraveled to the mine. He issued an appeal to international experts, which was answeredby companies and individuals from around the world. The Swedish company,Bergteamet, for instance, sent its equipment and technicians to San Jose[4]. All in all,three extraction plans were prepared and put into operation. It was Plan B – using aUS-manufactured drill owned by a Chilean-US joint venture company that reached theminers, but cooperation included attendance to the health of the miners (because theirsituation was judged similar to the astronauts’, a team from NASA joined the rescuers)and psychological and material help to their families. To the estimated more than onebillion people watching the rescue on television, it was clear that the question was andremained: “What needs to be done?”.

The miners were extracted on 13 October 2010, after spending 69 daysunderground[5]. President Pinera, accompanied by his wife, waited at the mouth ofthe shaft throughout the night, and hugged the men as they appeared from the shaft.Only after the rescue operation was completed, did the president state publicly thatthose responsible for the collapse of the mine would be punished, and that Chile’s minesafety regulation would be overhauled.

On 25 October 2010 – 28 days before the deadline decided by the President –a preliminary report by the Commission on Work Safety delivered 30 proposals aimedat improving work safety in the mines to Pinera[6]. It was not until 3 March 2011 thatChile’s Mining Minister Laurence Golborne told the media that a congressionalreport had found that it was the owners, the San Esteban Mining Company, who wereresponsible for delivering a safe workplace and who failed in this responsibility[7].Imagine, as so often happens, if establishing responsibility had occurred beforeestablishing performativity. The miners would be still underground.

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Situating performativity, attributing responsibility, and apportioningblameCommon sense would indicate that, especially in situations of emergency, theorder should be the same as it was in the Chilean case: first, find those who can dowhat needs to be done (situating performativity) and from among them select thosewho would be capable and legitimate helpers (Margalit, 2010)[8]. Only later, whenthe critical situation has been resolved, should one attribute responsibility for theoccurrence of emergency; or, in case of natural disasters, that the emergency measureswere not in place (apportioning blame). In March 2011, the Swedish media contrastedthe heroic measures taken by Japan after the earthquake and tsunami with the reactionof the Swedish government after the tsunami in Thailand in 2004, when the issue mostdiscussed was whether or not the Swedish Foreign Minister had the right to go to thetheater when the catastrophe was taking place.

Yet such common sense rarely exists when needed. Our studies of organizing in theface of risk and threat (Czarniawska, 2009) revealed that commonplace action followinga catastrophe consists of assembling a list of actors, divided into two columns: praiseand blame. No wonder, then, that preparation work – planning how to meet possiblerisks and threats – consists almost entirely of the distribution of responsibilities. Evenless wonder that this type of preparation work results in the first place in the creationof alibis, and only in the second place in a list of actions that need to be performed. AsMol (2008) noted in the context of the health sector, another sector prone toemergencies, the first question ought to be “What needs to be done?” and not, as it oftenis, “Who is in charge?”

In practice, however, and especially in situations of disaster, the first question isusually “Who was in charge?” One explanation of this procedure, which reachesbeyond legal and economic reasoning summarized earlier, can be found in narratology.Attribution of responsibility to corporations follows a strong plot (Czarniawska andRhodes, 2006), according to which “the villains must be punished for their crimes”.Strong plots are established and repeated patterns of employment, often recognizableas variation of myths, folk tales, and classic literature. They are “strong” because theybelong to a common collective memory (as institutionalized patterns of interpretation),and are retrieved and shared during times when they seem relevant (Margalit, 2003).The power of such strong plots were observable during the financial crisis of2007-2010, when the main question, like the subtitle of Davies’s (2010) book, was “Whois to blame?” Even intellectuals like Paul Krugman could not resist the strong plot of“Reagan did it” (Ayan Rand and Allan Greenspan were also often evoked in thiscontext; see Czarniawska, n.d.).

In one of the classic texts in social psychology on attribution of responsibility,Fishbein and Ajzen (1973), leaned heavily on the theories of Fritz Heider, who spoke oflevels of causality in the context of responsibility attribution. Although many of thoselevels (for example, intentionality) are relevant only for natural persons, the core ofcausality lies in commission, or instrumentality – who or what actually committed thedeed – the main point in attributing responsibility to formal organizations.

The two explanations – narratological and psychological – may be subsumed underan anthropological tendency for locating a scapegoat for cathartic purposes. In 1983,Giuseppe Bonazzi had already made a connection between disasters and organizationalscapegoating. He also pointed out two earlier explanations for this phenomenon:

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the account of Girard (1982/1986), who saw the ritual sacrifice of the scapegoat as aninstitutionalized practice of symbolic control of violence, and the account of Smelser(1963), who saw scapegoating as a result of emotional and logical oversimplificationscaused by a negative situation.

It seems, therefore, that there is no way of avoiding or diminishing the role ofresponsibility attribution in the traditional sense of finding the culprit: the law needs it,economy demands it, narratology calls for it, psychology justifies it, sociology explainsit, and anthropology corroborates it. The only problem is that, as in Gulf of the Mexicocase, the leak remains where it was. Although all these explanations are convincing,therefore, they do not justify (in the sense of presenting as just) the presence of thephenomenon in the supposedly rational organizing processes. On the contrary: studiesof high-reliability organizations (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001; Ely and Meyerson, 2010)showed that such organizations are characterized by actions running against thestandard scripts, just as happened in Chile. It must be added that Ely and Meyerson’sfieldwork was conducted on BP’s oil platforms (long before the incident). Their studydemonstrated that on the operational level, performativity goes before responsibility,and construction and maintenance of action nets goes before the formal division oftasks and roles. This wisdom does not transfer to higher levels of the organization,however, and is rarely, if ever, propagated by the media.

Notes

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BP (accessed 4 July 2010).

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon (accessed 4 July 2010).

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Copiapo_mining_accident (accessed 19 March 2011).

4. http://dn.se/nyheter/varlden/svenskar-deltar-i-gruvraddningen (accessed 19 March 2011).

5. http://reuters.com/article/2010/10/13/us-chile-miners-idUSN0925972620101013 (accessed19 March 2011).

6. The commission held 204 hearings and reviewed 119 online suggestions, available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Copiapo_mining_accident (accessed 19 March 2011).

7. http://vancouversun.com/news/Report þ blames þ owners þ collapse þ Chile þ mine/4374612/story.html#ixzz1H8fELMIF (accessed 19 March 2011).

8. If the only expertise were to have been found in Iran, the Chilean government would havefound itself in the moral dilemma so well described by Margalit – which could be called“attributing responsibility”, but in a sense different from the usual meaning.

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Czarniawska, B. (n.d.), “New plots are badly needed in finance”, Accounting, Auditing andAccountability Journal, forthcoming.

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Corresponding authorBarbara Czarniawska can be contacted at: Barbara.czarniawska@gri.gu.se

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