Beyond ‘bad apples’ and ‘weak leaders’ Toward a neo-institutional explanation of organizational deviance

Beyond ‘bad apples’ and ‘weak leaders’ Toward a neo-institutional explanation of organizational deviance

Beyond ‘bad apples’ and ‘weak leaders’ Toward a neo-institutional explanation of organizational deviance

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This article examines two starkly different cases—the abuse of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison and the falsification of architectural internship reports—in developing a neo-institutional analysis of deviance within organizations. We argue that the organization’s role extends beyond a failure to act (e.g. monitor, prevent, punish) to include implementing formal structures— decoupling—that make individual deviance both predictable and a predicate of organizational ‘success’. We identify environmental conditions associated with decoupling, strategies to achieve it and organizational responses of deflection. By linking macro-level rule environments, organizational structure and participant behavior, we offer a theoretical framework that elides the long-standing definitional struggles in white-collar crime research through the simultaneous consideration of the organization as environment and the environment of the organization.

Key Words

decoupling • neo-institutionalism • normal deviance • occupational deviance • organizational deviance • torture

Deviance within organizations is often framed as a product of individual choices or behaviors, especially in mainstream discourse and in the popular press. For example, in the case of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, three

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Theoretical Criminology © 2006 SAGE Publications

London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi.

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DOI: 10.1177/1362480606065911

primary explanatory models have competed for ascendancy: (1) rogue individuals from the US Military Police unit engaged in bad behavior (i.e. the ‘bad apple’ explanation); (2) somewhere up the chain of command individual officers gave orders that ultimately led to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners (i.e. the ‘following orders’ explanation); or (3) abuses were the product of failed leadership by specific persons who did not clearly communicate norms or adequately monitor and supervise underlings (i.e. the ‘failed leadership’ explanation).

The first explanation (‘bad apples’) is exemplified in the military’s court martial proceedings for soldiers who directly interacted with Iraqi pris- oners, as well as in the Bush Administration’s claim—from the moment the allegations of abuse first came forward—that the abusive behavior was atypical of the military and simply bad behavior on the part of a few out- of-control soldiers (see Graham, 2004; Higham and Stevens, 2004; White and Higham, 2004). The second explanation (‘following orders’) is exem- plified by the defense in the court martial proceedings who have tried to identify specific persons (e.g. Military Intelligence personnel, civilian con- tractors, Pentagon officials) up the chain of command who ordered the Military Police officers to use abusive techniques to ‘soften up’ Iraqi prisoners in order to elicit information from them (see Cha and McCarthy, 2004; Cha and Merle, 2004; Higham et al., 2004; Vedantam, 2004; White and Allen, 2004). The third explanation (‘failed leadership’) is exemplified by accusations that mid- to high-ranking military officials (e.g. US Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski) failed to adequately train, monitor or supervise troops on the ground, and failed to respond to early warning signs of problems within the prison (see Graham and Ricks, 2004; Smith, 2004; Taguba, 2004; White and Higham, 2004). Each of these explanations focuses on the personal failures of individuals within the military (albeit at ascending hierarchical levels) to act in legal, ethical or moral ways. Each of these explanations also deflects attention from both the organizational environment and the environment of the organization within which abuses occurred.1

In contrast, criminological accounts of corporate and occupational devi- ance have identified a variety of ways in which deviant behavior by individuals is shaped by organizational context and processes. Some re- searchers have focused on power relationships in organizations and how those relationships can generate deviance (see Vandivier, 1972), others on how cognitive processes that emerge in organizational settings may pro- duce deviant behavior (see Kelman and Hamilton, 1989; Gioia, 1992), and yet others have examined how socialization processes in organizations and society can lead to the normalization of deviance (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993; Hochstetler and Copes, 2001; Crelinsten, 2003). In addition, Vaughan (1982) has examined how the sheer structural complexity of organizations may facilitate deviance in organizations, while Jackall (1988) and Pearce (2001) focused on the relationship between formal control systems in organizations and organizational deviance.

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Although criminologists recognize the importance of formal organiza- tions as structures and sites of action, historically based distinctions between occupational deviance and corporate (or, more broadly, organiza- tional) deviance continue to obscure the interconnections between these phenomena. Studies of occupational crime consider the organization as a context for deviant behavior to explain the decision making and actions of those within organizations, frequently lower- and mid-level actors. In so doing, however, they often fail to account for the embedded context of the organization itself (or at least limit the factors considered, e.g. to economic conditions) or the possibility that such ‘crime’ may directly or indirectly enhance organizational effectiveness. Studies of corporate deviance, on the other hand, begin with the legal fiction of the corporation as ‘individual’ and seek to explain the organization’s deviant actions. This line of work, however, runs the risk of anthropomorphizing the organization, treating it as if it had human motivations and capacity to act (Cressey, 1988). Organizational structure is the product of decisions made by those with the authority to establish such structure. When viewed in this way, the creation of structure is as much the product of human agency as is the occupational crime of lower-level participants. In addition, as Glasberg and Skidmore have noted, studies of organizational deviance have tended to imply ‘a focus on the internal structure of the organization itself as if the organiza- tion exists independently of external forces that might create relations, processes, and structures within organizations’ (1998: 426). Thus, calls for definitional clarity in the study of white-collar crime (e.g. Braithwaite, 1985), though well placed, have produced a degree of fragmentation across levels of analysis.

Rather than hold fast to the distinction between corporate and occupa- tional crime, the present article considers simultaneously organizations and the environments of organizations as contexts for human action. Specifi- cally, we explore the relationship between (1) strategically designed and implemented structures and (2) deviant and criminal acts perpetrated at lower levels of the organization. Organizations are more than just in- cidental or neutral locations where deviant behavior occurs. The role of organizations, and their leaders and managers, often extends beyond a failure to do certain things (e.g. monitor, prevent, punish, respond with sufficient vehemence) to include implementing strategies for formal struc- ture that facilitate deviance by participants and make such deviance both predictable and a predicate of organizational ‘success’. Specifically, we identify how organizations, through aspects of their formal structure and strategies for eliding this formal structure, play a significant facili- tating and causal role in the deviance that occurs within them. In this, our approach parallels Vaughan’s (1982, 1997) multilevel analysis of organizational deviance. We extend her analysis by offering a more general theoretical framework that draws on neo-institutional organizational theory (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983, 1991; Scott, 2001).

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Neo-institutionalist theories conceive of formal organizations as deeply permeated by broader cultural forces. As Scott argues: ‘Socially constructed belief and rule systems exercise enormous control over organizations—both how they are structured and how they carry out their work’ (2003: 120). Neo-institutionalists thus challenge traditional ideas about the rationality of organizational structure and call into question whether the primary purpose of formal structure is to monitor, constrain and evaluate behavior within organizations. Instead, the theory’s proponents argue that independ- ent of its technical rationality, organizational structure is institutionalized, that is, ‘taken for granted as legitimate, apart from evaluation of [its] impact on work outcomes’ (Meyer and Rowan, 1977: 344). Institution- alized structures enhance organizational stability by symbolizing, for ex- ternal constituencies, the organization’s conformity with broader cultural rules and expectations.

In this article, we examine what actually happens under the cover of institutionalized structure by focusing on the empirical observation of de- coupling. When operating in complex and competing institutional (or ‘rule’) environments, organizations are often formally organized so as to shear structure (the blueprint for organizational action) from action (what actually happens on the ground). That is, formal statements of how and why things should be done are decoupled from how they are actually done. In so doing, organizations satisfy environmental demands by demonstrat- ing appropriate structure and policies while simultaneously freeing lower- level employees to effectively and efficiently meet the organization’s technical goals. Not surprisingly, in decoupled organizations, flexibility— including the willingness to violate formal rules in the pursuit of organiza- tional goals—is a highly valued quality among workers (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Although organizational sociologists have long known that informal structure is pervasive in formal organizations (e.g. Selznick, 1948; Dalton, 1959; Jackall, 1988; Van Maanen, 1991; Scott, 2003), neo- institutional theory suggests organizational mechanisms by which informal structure may be systematically linked to formal structure. That is, the unofficial relationships and patterns of behavior that exist alongside formal policies and structures may be more than accidental or incidental: they may be the product of decoupling as a formal organizational strategy.

Previous research on deviance in for-profit organizations has identified decoupling as a contributing factor, although researchers have not used the term ‘decoupling’ nor do they connect their arguments to the work of neo- institutional theorists of organizations. For example, in their independent discussions of the effects of the ‘finance mode of control’ in organizations, Jackall (1988) and Pearce (2001) argue that: (1) for-profit organizations may manage conflicts between imperatives for profit and for adherence to external regulations and norms by implementing a finance mode of control where formal responsibility for how work is accomplished is pushed down the hierarchy; (2) financial information alone is conveyed up the chain of

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command; and (3) workers at the bottom of the hierarchy have flexibility in how things get done. Pearce concludes that this control strategy:

Explains why so many safety, health and environmental violations are the effects of the policies of higher management without this necessarily being traceable to any specific decisions that they have made about product quality, health and safety. It maximizes the likelihood of ‘willful blindness’ (Wilson, 1979) since it allows those at the top to be ignorant of the activities of subordinates and to ignore the difficulties that subordinates face.

(Pearce, 2001: 44; see also Braithwaite, 1984; Pearce and Tombs, 1998)

Simply put, when organizational leaders set financial goals for subunits and set their workers loose to pursue those goals, they encourage norm- violating behavior while simultaneously buffering themselves from ac- countability for the actions of lower-level participants. Both Jackall (1988) and Pearce (2001), however, limit their analysis to the context of for-profit organizations and to the goal of profit making.

The effects of conflicting norms on individual behavior have also been extensively developed in the criminological literature. Specifically, strain theory suggests that non-conformist behavior may result when the achieve- ment of societal goals is blocked by overly restrictive institutionalized means (Merton, 1938; Cloward, 1959; Dubin, 1959; Agnew, 1992). Vaughan (1982, 1997) has argued for the application of strain/anomie theory to organizational as well as individual behavior. In doing so, she (1) applies the notion of opportunity structures to organizations; and (2) advances a reconceptualization of Merton’s distinction between means and goals—at least in the context of organizational deviance—as ‘scarce re- sources for which both individuals and organizations compete’ (1997: 98). In her analysis of the Challenger disaster, Vaughan attributes faulty deci- sion making at NASA to the larger contradictory environment—what she labels ‘a triumvirate of conflicting cultural imperatives’ (1997: 113)—in which NASA operated. In this analysis, Vaughan connects the decision making of individuals within NASA to the larger cultural environment of the organization via organizational structures and practices. In an environ- ment of scarce resources and competition (for contracts, in the case of NASA contractors, or public funding, in the case of NASA), and conflicting cultures, ‘organization structure facilitates misconduct as a solution to blocked opportunities by creating structural secrecy . . . [and by] providing difficult-to-monitor mechanisms for carrying out illegal acts that conceal rather than reveal’ (1997: 100).

In this article, we argue that decoupling is a more general process that plays out in a variety of organizational types (e.g. for-profit organizations, but also state and professional organizations). In particular, the environ- ments of organizations may be contradictory in ways that extend beyond competition for profit or for scarce resources. Neo-institutional theory offers a general framework in which we may consider organizations as contexts and also the context of organizations, or what we term the

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embedded context of organizations. This approach provides a general framework in which to simultaneously consider (1) the macro-level contra- dictions faced by organizations; (2) how such conflicting norms shape organizational structures (usually via the actions of upper-level organiza- tional actors); and (3) how such structures influence individual behavior.

More specifically, we explore how organizational structure mediates between the larger rule environment and organizational participants, and how particular structural arrangements arrived at by the conscious choices of managers, executives and leaders facilitate flexible, and sometimes deviant, responses by organizational participants to conflicted institutional environments. In such structures, rule-breaking behavior is to be expected. By explicitly linking macro-level rule environments, organizational struc- ture and participant behavior, we challenge explanations for deviance in organizations that presume neutrality on the part of the organizational structure and those who design and implement that structure.

In developing this general framework of organizational deviance we draw on two disparate empirical cases: (1) the abuses by American military personnel at the prison in Abu Ghraib; and (2) the falsification of intern- ship records by architects-in-training. Using these cases—usefully aligned on opposite ends of the spectrum of severity and notoriety—we illustrate how deviance is produced by organizations when the organization de- couples structure from action. In particular, we examine: (1) organizational strategies that simultaneously elaborate and trivialize formal structure as a social control mechanism; (2) behaviors on the part of individual partici- pants (including formal rule violations) that occur in, and contribute to the effectiveness of, organizations facing complex and competing institutional environments; and (3) the complex environment in which organizations exist that influences the extent to which structure is decoupled from action in organizations.

The cases: Abu Ghraib prison and architectural internship

Abu Ghraib

The Abu Ghraib prison abuses came to light in the spring of 2004 when photographs, taken in the autumn of 2003, of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers were nationally televised on 60 Minutes II. By that time, numerous investigations of the prison abuses had been completed or were underway, including investigations by the International Red Cross and US Army General Antonio Taguba (ultimately released as the Taguba Report). Congressional hearings followed during the summer of 2004. Explanations for the deviant behavior varied from ‘bad apple’ prison guards to prison guards claiming to be ‘following orders’ to ‘poor leader- ship’ by superior military officers. The Abu Ghraib prison was but one of numerous prisons set up in Iraq following the American occupation.2

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Formally, the prisons were under the command of Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski who oversaw the Military Police Units that established and maintained the prison system. The prisons, however, had dual functions: they housed Iraqi prisoners who were under the control of US Military Police and were the sites of prisoner interrogations on the part of Military Intelligence and civilian contractors. And, crucial to our argument, the chain of command of the latter did not coincide with that of the former (Cha and McCarthy, 2004; Cha and Merle, 2004; Higham et al., 2004; Smith and White, 2004). We will argue that this convoluted chain of command—a product of organizational decoupling more than bad man- agement or poor planning—along with other structural arrangements provided a facilitating organizational context for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Data on the Abu Ghraib prison abuses were drawn from published news accounts as well as publicly available reports of investigations into the abuses.