Although brief, this article is helpful in outlining some of the important ways that a corporate culture is formed and maintained thus giving ‘character’ to a corporisation.

Every workplace has its ways of conditioning its employees with certain norms of acceptability. They quickly become second nature, and everyone adept at reading the signs. Enforcement might be through the passive aggressive use of emails, or the subtle ways in which hierarchy and compliance are enforced through meeting dynamics and inclusion in working groups.To keep an outsider perspective on these things is hard when we ourselves become assimilated. We can learn from those who are new, or those who struggle to ever become “trained” in this way. … Often it seems that these cultural cues in relatively hierarchical, dynastic organisations are conditioned by the habits, signals and behaviours of those at the top. My old boss, the don of polling – Sir Bob Worcester – was and is a phenomenal collector of data, paper, files and articles. I wonder how much of that rubbed off in the rest of our offices, and in our image of ourselves as researchers, as our shelves were usually jammed were sets of data tables, articles and reports going back over many years.

It helps to identify where the tools of cultural analysis can help us in terms of connotation and mimetic forces and the place of power relations.

via Can corporate culture make phone hacking “plausibly deniable”? : RSA Projects.

While I think it unlikely that the claim that both mothers “are going through the same thing”, what I think is interesting about this quote is that there is an appeal to common humanity, a degree of commonality of experience and thus to empathy. At other points in looking at the human dimensions of forgiving, we see that empathy and recognition of common humanity is important.

“My heart goes out to another mother, please tell her I want to hold her,” said the Australian-born English teacher. “No one can judge pain and no one feels it like the mother of a child,” she told the Observer after placing a candle beside the spot in the party resort of Laganas where Sebbage, a Reading FC fan, was fatally stabbed.

“We are both going through the same thing. We are both victims. She has lost her son and I have lost mine. For the rest of his life he will suffer for what he has done,” Morfis sighed, struggling to hold back tears.

However, the difficulty here is that in making a bid for ‘empathic resonance’ there is a risk of drawing the anger that the hurt mother will be feeling about the wrongness of the death onto the mother of the perpetrator. This is especially so since the actual differences which render the claim of ‘the same thing’ suspect mean that the ‘bid’ for empathy can be rejected and that rejection can carry a transference of anger and blame.

via I share grief for stabbed Briton, says suspect’s mother | World news | The Observer.

A further mechanism of emergence of corporisations from human agglomerations is the way that we co-operate in information recall and processing.

Humans are social creatures, and our brains are designed to use other people as a source of information. That means each of us can specialize, and focus on the stuff that’s immediately important to us, safe in the knowledge that other people have the rest covered. It’s because of that distribution of knowledge, skills and labour that we can build civilizations in the first place – if we all had to learn everything we’d have been lucky to get out of the stone age.

Certainly I have had cause to note this in a workplace where reliance on the skills and knowledge of one employee can be a danger to various processes when that person is off ill -unless redundancy is deliberately or unwittingly built in. Often it will need to be deliberately because the tendency above means that others will generally not learn what someone else knows unless it is critical to them personally or sufficient exposure engraves it on their individual memory.

The process of ‘deferral’ of responsibility is what can allow people to ignore wrongs being done, presumably.

via Google, stupidity, and Rupert Murdoch | by Martin Robbins @mjrobbins | Science | guardian.co.uk.

Given that I am thinking about how the division of responsibility between corporisations and individual humans might be conceieved, the phone hacking scandal recently in GB gives pause for thought.

In most cases, many managers, shareholders and staff didn’t necessarily set out to do bad things. They simply got swept along on a culture of hitting targets – and not asking too many questions.

I guess that this helps show the way that the individuals might be swept into an immoral way of doing things and that ‘culture’ by pressuring its constituent human agents into  target-meeting and keeping quiet was able to hold sway and give rise to actions that were blind to human suffering and propriety.

via Phone hacking: a classic case of corporate failure? | Aditya Chakrabortty | Comment is free | The Guardian.

This relates to culture-jamming liturgy; it’s about someone who realises their memory has been moulded by a commercial.

as if Coke had paid for product placement in my brain. What makes it even more puzzling is that I know it didn’t happen, that there is no way we could have been drinking soda from glass bottles. Why not? Because the school banned glass containers. Unless I was willing to brazenly break the rules — and I was way too nerdy for that — I would have almost certainly been guzzling Coke from a big white styrofoam container, purchased for a dollar from the concession stand. It’s a less romantic image, for sure.

Of course, it seems to bring up the issue of memory and formation and as such the practices of Lectio Divina, offices and the Eucharist.

via Ads Implant False Memories | Wired Science | Wired.com.

I’m not sure that this is fatal, but it does point to a critique that needs to be accommodated.

The idea of nature that underpinned all these visions of self-organisation was a fantasy. A fantasy that was born at a time when those who ran the British empire were desperately trying to cling on to power as the dynamic forces of history whirled around them. So they turned to science to create a vision of a static world where everything is stable and your moral duty is to make sure that nothing ever changes.The other problem with the self-organising system is that it cannot deal with power. Although it sees human beings all linked together in a system, its fundamental rule is that they must remain separate individuals. Alliances and coalitions would compromise the precious autonomy of the individual, and destabilise the system.

The key is the individual being ‘atomistic’.Whether that is true and to what extent (I’m thinking phonemes vs features) and, on another track, the fact that unlike superorganisms, humans can belong to several ‘wholes’; an ant to only the nest/colony.

via How the ‘ecosystem’ myth has been used for sinister means | Environment | The Observer.

Some of the emotional and cognitive infrastructure for the things that seem, humanly speaking, to support forgiving seem to have been corroborated in research.

Whereas young children had a tendency to consider all the perpetrator malicious, irrespective of intention and targets (people and objects), as participants aged, they perceived the perpetrator as clearly less mean when carrying out an accidental action, and even more so when the target was an object

via Changes in brain circuitry play role in moral sensitivity as people grow up.

Useful insight about the ‘glue’ of emergent superorganisms showing why the linguistic -cultural dimension is important.

From a communication perspective, an organisation is a network of conversations. If we take this as axiomatic, anyone wishing to facilitate change will do well to have some understanding of the role of language in the reality/meaning-making process.

via Appreciative Inquiry | gohbyname Go by nature.

This article also makes an interesting point about how organisations are managed:

Traditional management focusses on what is wrong, on the negative. In my view, this only serves to make us more eloquent and articulate about what’s wrong with our organisations, families, churches, etc. It also breeds a culture of blame.

I think it not only breeds a blame culture but in so doing it de-motivates, and focusses people on watching their backs, building a case for the defence and takes time and energy away from truly productive thought and effort.

This is quite a useful overview article which one of my students cited in an essay recently. I was struck by a number of points one of which follows, starting to deal with forgiveness when, eg, the victim has died.

According to this philosophical view forgiveness becomes morally desirable when the offender has apologized and has accepted responsibility for the wrong committed [Benn: 1996]. At this point the victim cannot feel indignation due to the lack of acceptance of the wrong and moral order by the offender since the offender has accepted guilt and as well as endorsed the values of the community. While this does not make it imperative for the victim to forgive it becomes morally desirable since it would mark the rejoinder of the moral community by the offender which is both socially desirable as well as morally appropriate. Nevertheless it is harder to determine whether someone who has wronged a third person can be forgiven when the victim is absent [Benn, 1996: 377]. The problem here is that the main wrong was not committed against the person present and while there may be some indirect harm in terms of losing a friend or grief, the main moral obligation is towards the absent victim. Forgiveness in this respect would be dubious and thus would be an incomplete forgiveness.

One of the reasons the article caught my attention is that it makes mention of the cultural dimension and puts into words why, having had it brought to my attention briefly in a conversation a few months ago, I think that paying attention to the cultural dimension is important.

Since culture shapes the way events are interpreted and that interpretation triggers emotions, culture will exert some influence on the way forgiveness is felt by the victim and by the offender.

I think that this may be seen in the history of the doctrines of the Atonement where recasting an explanation in terms resonant with cultural concerns seems to have been a major part of what happened. One are then, that we should pay attention to now is the way that individualist and collectivist cultures may be wont to process forgiveness and reconciliation.

Studies show that decisional forgiveness is more important in collectivist cultures than in individualist ones, and that reconciliation is viewed as the natural consequence of forgiveness by collectivists while considered optional by individualists

via Journal of History & Social Sciences – View Article.

The article is refers back to a study on the different perspectives on forgiveness between Christianity and Psychology

Here’s a summary of some research into the perceptions of apologies.

apologies serve a useful function as a first step, we easily over-estimate the work they can do in repairing a relationship. That is why it is so irritating when public figures apologize, and then act like the matter is finished.

The point would seem to be that we have to recognise that apologies are really meant o be about rectifying and repairing relationships not simply ‘drawing a line under’ them.

via How Powerful is an Apology? — PsyBlog.