Again from Marianne M. Jennings’ The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies… Before It’s Too Late:

Some years ago a former dean asked me to look into a new way of teaching students business ethics. He wanted to stop sending our students over to the philosophy department for their ethics training. His reasoning was that “they go over there, find out capitalism is a tool of the devil, and then switch majors.” His theory had one more part to it. Those who did not switch majors and returned to study business came back with a guilt complex. They assumed, based on the views of their philosophy professors, that they had already sold their souls to the devil, so what possible difference could a little cooking of the books mean in their eternal damnation? So, those who remained became comfortable with crossing ethical lines.

Ethics instruction during the era in which the crop of officer felons was trained was not virtue ethics. Rather, these students were given a heavy dose of social responsibility and little or no discussion of the ethical issues in financial reporting. Their ethics instruction focused on these distinct areas:

• Environmentalism
• Diversity
• Human rights
• Philanthropy
• Giving back to the community

The ethics books and curriculum of this generation of business leaders (and regretfully, still today) define doing the right thing in these areas as ethics writ large. Moral relativists are hesitant to establish bright lines between right and wrong, except in areas they deem appropriate. These topics and guidelines for business ethics come directly from the AACSB accrediting body for business schools, which mandates the following content in the business-school curriculum if the school desires AACSB accreditation for its programs:

• Ethical and global issues
• The influence of political, social, legal and regulatory, environmental and technological issues
• The impact of demographic diversity on organizations

Those trained under this pedagogical philosophy will order, “No sweat shops,” but could never bring themselves to say, “Always be honest.” They can condemn lumber companies for destroying the rain forests, but they would never suggest that corporate executives should control their conduct in their personal lives. To students trained in this era of business-ethics instruction, a demented sort of logic and attitude has resulted. As long as the company had a good record on community development and contribution, a little fraud was fine. They were not trained to ask the question “Does social conscience in some areas atone for the lack of moral conscience in finances and financial reporting?” Fannie Mae was named number one by Business Ethics magazine in its annual list of the most ethical companies in America in the same month that Fannie Mae’s multibillion-dollar accounting deception was unfolding. The CEO was forced out by his board because of questions about the firm’s financial reports even as the same group that created the parameters of ethical behavior in such a facile and arbitrary manner was honoring the company. True, few organizations have done more to help individuals get affordable housing than Fannie Mae. But recognition for a job well done does not justify misrepresentation in the marketplace.

From Marianne M. Jennings’ The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies… Before It’s Too Late:

Sign #7: Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

…Beware the socially responsible company. Watch out for the big donors. There is a certain con component in the Yeehaw Culture. The con men and women of the Yeehaw Culture have figured out a formula for drawing attention away from company performance and, in many cases, its financials. Even without the Yeehaw Culture, this dedication to causes and charity seems to be a distraction from running the business. The result is not just a lack of focus, but also a diversion of funds that were needed for simple things, including, for example, the employees’ pensions. That distraction comes in the form of virtuous efforts in the community, charities, and all those social goals one can now find on pretty much every company’s website. Stunningly, that information will be located on the investor-information home page. As cynical as it seems, skepticism about social responsibility and philanthropy may be one of the most certain determinants of a Yeehaw Culture. If you find these present in a company, check for the other factors of ethical collapse because the generosity and service may be a cover in a troubled soul and even more troubled books.

The term “yeehaw culture” comes from the Wyoming Law Reviews’ “Restoring Ethical Gumption in the Corporation: A Federalist Paper on Corporate Governance—Restoration of Active Virtue in the Corporate Structure to Curb the ‘Yeehaw Culture’ in Organizations”. It’s also the cry of Billy Crystal in City Slickers.

The book also encourages researching the community connections between management and charities.

Via Earl Stewart on Cars.

Last week I completed a 2 day Technology of Participation Facilitator training. Developed by the Institute of Cultural Affairs, the Technology of Participation is a series of practices and principles for leading groups through inclusive and participatory dialogues and planning. The training was led by Nancy Jackson and Ruth-Ann Rasbold, who were excellent.

One of my first questions in the training was the ethical/political dimension to leading participatory methods (after an early morning drive to New Hampshire, I was feeling punchy). Here are the circumstances when participation doesn’t work (from the facilitator handbook):

• there is no intention of using the information gathered, the plans made, or the excitement generated when people become involved.
• people are attached to a particular outcome.
• truth telling is not an accepted norm in an organization.
• people are so busy, they are unwilling to set aside the time needed to engage in participatory processes or follow through on their collective decisions.
• there is no apparent need to do things differently
• the leader does not champion participation
• people want a quick fix to a deep problem
• participation is performed around a non-issue or merely a surface issue—that is, when the focus is to “straighten something out.”

from Participation Works: Business Cases from Around the World, James P. Troxel (ed.) with the Institute of Cultural Affairs, Alexandria,Virginia, Miles River Press, 1993, p. 28.

I participated in the facilitator training both because of my enjoyment in facilitating small groups—and my desire to improve my methods and confidence for facilitating larger groups—and that my boss is also trained in the Technology of Participation and I’ve quite enjoyed being a participant in the use of these methods.

From the Organizational Development Network:

Definition of OD

Organization Development is a dynamic values-based approach to systems change in organizations and communities; it strives to build the capacity to achieve and sustain a new desired state that benefits the organization or community and the world around them.

Principles of Practice

The practice of OD is grounded in a distinctive set of core values and principles that guide behavior and actions.

Values-Based

The practice of OD is grounded in a distinctive set of core values and principles that guide behavior and actions. Values-Based Key Values include:

• Respect and Inclusion – equitably values the perspective and opinions of everyone.
• Collaboration – builds collaborative relationships between the practitioner and the client while encouraging collaboration throughout the client system.
• Authenticity – strives for authenticity and congruence and encourages these qualities in their clients
• Self-awareness – commits to developing self-awareness and interpersonal skills. OD practitioners engage in personal and professional development through lifelong learning.
• Empowerment – focuses efforts on helping everyone in the client organization or community increase their autonomy and empowerment to levels that make the workplace and/or community satisfying and productive.

Supported by Theory

Draws from multiple disciplines that inform an understanding of human systems, including applied behavioral and physical sciences

Systems Focused

Approaches communities and organizations as open systems; that is, acts with the knowledge that change in one area of a system always results in changes in other areas; and change in one area cannot be sustained without supporting changes in other areas of the system.

Action Research

Continuously reexamines, reflects and integrates discoveries throughout the process of change in order to achieve desired outcomes. In this way, the client members are involved both in doing their work, and in dialogue about their reflection and learning in order to apply them to achieve shared results.

Process Focused

Intervenes in organizational or community processes to help bring about positive change and help the client work toward desired outcomes

Informed by Data

Involves proactive inquiry and assessment of the internal environment in order to discover and create a compelling need for change and the achievement of a desired future state of the organization or community. Some methods include survey feedback, assessment tools, interviewing, focus groups, story telling, process consultation and observation.

Client Centered

Focuses on the needs of the client in order to continually promote client ownership of all phases of the work and support the client’s ability to sustain change after the consultant engagement ends.

Focused on Effectiveness and Health

Helps to create and sustain a healthy effective human system as an interdependent part of its larger environment.

William Bloom:

“…people do not work and create the economy because they want to support the economy. They create and relate—and this in turn, creates the economy.”

From David Boyle’s The Little Money Book. His commentary on the quote above: “So don’t be taken in by economists. We created the economy around us, and if we want to change it, we can do just that.”

Let’s get polemic.

So Forrester Research’s Groundswell has released an update to their Ladder of Participation. Needless to say I’m annoyed. I have already heard from a few close nonprofit friends excited (I’m not picking on Beth, she gets it) by Forrester Research’s Social Technographics Report. Needless to say, I’m disappointed by their excitement. From the original blog entry:

The report also lays out how companies can create strategies using Social Technographics. For example, I’ve used the “participation ladder” to help figure out which social strategies to deploy first – and also how to encourage users to “climb up”, so to speak, from being Spectators to becoming more engaged. It’s my belief that not everyone is cut out from the start to be a Creator; nor is everyone inclined to jump with both feet into social networking. Companies seeking to engage customers with these new tools need to understand where their audiences are with this categorization.

From a social change perspective, in brief, that’s pretty fucked. And to be clear, it’s that mixing of engagement, audience, and customers. This is the chugger model taken off of the street and put online: engagement being the weasel word for brand identification. This is not about building power; it’s about having someone say something nice about your organization in a public place.

This is Forrester’s ladder:

Compare that to another ladder I really like: Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation (it came out in 1969 so be considerate of its lack of shinyness):

There is no practice in the Social Technographics report that I would put above the level of Placation (and that’s being generous).

I am disappointed that there are not more people applying existing models of community building to social media. Just because business has discovered the profit potential of relationships—and their apologists are flow-charting it with exuberance—is not a good reason to forget or ignore the large body of practice that has served community organizers and social change organizations for many, many years.

And I’m not always __pissy_ when I’m talking about nonprofits online, I just want people to focus less on the tools and more on the _practice_ (and I don’t mean _“best”_)._

Augustine of Hippo’s taxonomy of lies, deduced from his book On Lying (De Mendacio) (395) in order of descending severity:

• Lies in religious teaching.
• Lies that harm others and help no one.
• Lies that harm others and help someone.
• Lies told for the pleasure of lying.
• Lies told to “please others in smooth discourse.”
• Lies that harm no one and that help someone.
• Lies that harm no one and that save someone’s life.
• Lies that harm no one and that save someone’s “purity.”

Svenn Lindskold and Pamela Walters reduce those by 2—though Augustine’s previous work is uncited— in “Categories for the Acceptability of Lies” (1983). Listed from least permissible to most.

1. Telling a lie that hurts someone else so that you can gain. In social motivational terms these categories can be said to range from
2. Telling a lie that, if successful, could cause others to do something that benefits you while, at the same time, harming themselves or causing themselves a loss.
3. Telling a lie to make yourself appear better than you really are or to protect some gain, acquired some time ago, to which you were not really entitled.
4. Telling a lie that will influence others in an official position in such a way that you will gain by their response to you, but they will not be harmed.
5. Telling a lie to protect yourself or another from punishment or disapproval for a minor failing or blunder which hurts no one.
6. Telling a lie to save others from minor hurt, shame, or embarrassment.

From Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements by Sharon McKenzie Stevens. Chapter 2, “Vernacular Rhetoric and Social Movements: Performances of Resistance in the Rhetoric of the Everyday”, by Gerard A Hauser and Erin Daina McClellan (emphasis mine):

In the communication tradition of rhetoric, studies of social movements mostly have focused on the discourse of leaders, on single events, or on movement strategies. Although leader rhetoric is significant in shaping a movement and explaining its causes and objectives to an observing public, it provides a specific interpretation of what caused the movement, what it means to those involved, and what it aspires to achieve. As Touraine (1983) has shown, when the movement’s rank-and-file is invited to explain it, they often give different accounts once the leader leaves the room. Ignoring rank-and-file voices in the rhetorical criticism of social movements is problematic. It leads to a skewed picture of the public sphere by defining it in terms of privileged voices. Even in social movements, leaders have greater access to the podium, press,and public attention than those whose resistance is expressed in rhetorical exchanges of the everyday. Second, it misses resistance found in seemingly mundane expressions, such as modes of politeness that, to the knowing eye of the oppressed, convey an ironic critique of domination but, to the blind eye of the censor, evade detection. Third, they ignore Bakhtinian-like dialogizing exchanges between the dominant and dominated within and across classes. Fourth, a focus on leader statements interprets bodily displays of opposition through the filter of a movement’s formal rhetoric rather than regarding them as rhetorical performances in their own right. FinallyL ignoring rank-and-file voices deflects attention from the hidden transcripts of resistance developed in hush harbors and the underground that later puncture the patina of the official realm as public expressions of discontent. Here we wish to clarify that our point is not to dismiss leader-focused studies of movements, but rather to indicate the need for greater attention to the vernacular rhetoric that occurs among social actors who are part of a movement.

Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber:

The Query of Queries: Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me, “Why were you not Moses?” They will ask me “Why were you not Zusya?”’

Carl Rogers on the seven stages of change (cribbed from here, who cribbed it from Making Sense of Change Management by Esther Cameron and Mike Green):

One:

• an unwillingness to communicate about self, only externals;
• no desire for change;
• feelings neither recognized nor owned;
• problems neither recognized nor perceived.

Two:

• expressions begin to flow;
• feelings may be shown but not owned;
• problems perceived but seen as external;
• no sense of personal responsibility;
• experience more in terms of the past not the present.

Three:

• a little talk about the self, but only as an object;
• expression of feelings, but in the past;
• non-acceptance of feelings; seen as bad, shameful, abnormal;
• recognition of contradictions;
• personal choice seen as ineffective.

Four:

• more intense past feelings;
• occasional expression of current feelings;
• distrust and fear of direct expression of feelings;
• a little acceptance of feelings;
• possible current experiencing;
• some discovery of personal constructs;
• some feelings of self-responsibility in problems;
• close relationships seen as dangerous;
• some small risk-taking.

Five:

• feelings freely expressed in the present;
• surprise and fright at emerging feelings;
• increasing ownership of feelings;
• increasing self-responsibility;
• clear facing up to contradictions and incongruence.

Six:

• previously stuck feelings experienced in the here and now;
• the self seen as less of an object, more of a feeling;
• some physiological loosening;
• some psychological loosening – that is, new ways of seeing the world and the self;
• incongruence between experience and awareness reduced.

Seven:

• new feelings experienced and accepted in the present;
• basic trust in the process;
• self becomes confidently felt in the process;
• personal constructs reformulated but much less rigid;
• strong feelings of choice and self-responsibility.

Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster:

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are. Up one day and down the next; morose and silent in the morning, laughing and cracking jokes at night. Harry had been low when he talked to Tom, but now that his business venture was in the works, he was flying high with me.

An exceprt from “Internment Camp: The Intern Economy and the Culture Trust (Interns Built the Pyramids)” by Jim Federick in The Baffler ( 1997: Vol. 1, No. 9.) - mentioned by Henri Makembe on the Mission Based Massachusetts listserv.

All Internships Lead to MTV

Given the fact that they benefit so handsomely from the intern economy, it is no surprise that the media routinely run stories on the virtues of internships. The stories always seem to follow the same pattern. First comes the bad news about how tough it is out there: “For 17 years straight, A. Todd Iannucelli made a late summer trip to the stationary store to buy loose-leafsheets for classroom note-taking,” goes one cautionary tale that appeared in August 1995 in the Washington Post. “This year, he went to replenish a dwindling supply of resume paper, having joined a growing number of college grads who, as fall approaches, remain jobless and planless.” Then they assure us that internships are the only way a college kid is going to get by in the cutthroat world of the Culture Trust: “Consultants say the route has become a popular one with savvy jobseekers,” the Post continues. “For a new entrant into the job market, volunteering or unpaid internships may be the only ways to amass credentials”

It should hardly surprise us, given the amount they stand to gain from the unfettered operating of the intern economy, that the hippest publications are among the most regular and most sanguine chroniclers of the intern’s happy lot. Rolling Stone, a notorious intern abuser, runs gooey features on the glories of unpaid internships in its annual college issue. One year it profiled the lucky guy who drove the Oscar Meyer weinermobile, the even luckier guy who got to fetch lunch for Howard Stern, and, luckiest of all, the New York Knicks towel guy. But Rolling Stone doesn’t want Chip and Jessica getting swollen heads just because they get to sweat for the stars, and so on occasion it will tincture the standard categories of the intern story with a certain wholesome contempt for the young people who put themselves out for the glamour business. “You would be surprised how many intelligent people cannot take a cohesive phone message or Xerox more than one copy of a document,” it quoted Victoria Rowan, a woman who had risen from internhood to be a powerful and glamorous assistant editor at Mirabella, as saying back in 1993. “It’s not a game of shit on the peon. Coffee has to be ordered.” Indeed it does, gentle Victoria. But if you’re not paying the peon minimum you are, in fact, shitting on her. Even girl-empowering Sassy gets in on the act, following in 1995 the heroic exploits of an intern at - surprise - MTV: “Biggest perk: We got to go to Madonna’a Bedtime Story Pajama Party at Webster Hall (a huge club in New York City). Worst part of the job: We have to go up to the 50th floor a lot, and the elevator makes me nauseous.

But to read the most addle-eyed intern-economy glorification of all you have to turn to the new New Yorker, which in October 1994 ran Rocking in Shangri-La: a story by John Seabrook about interns at - you guessed it - MTV. The story actually attempts to convince readers that “the real power brokers at MTV are not President Shirley McGrath, Chair Tom Freston, or even Viacom Chair Sumner Redstone, but its “employees under the age of twenty-five.” “When you are in your early twenties and you are working for MTV,” Seabrook writes, in one of the most appallingly misguided tributes to the Culture Trust to appear to date, “you carry in your brain, muscles, and gonads a kind of mystical authority that your bosses don’t possess.” After 14 long pages it turns out that the “authority” possessed by the low-paid production assistants and the unpaid interns boils down to this: They are walking, talking demographic surveys who tell executives what ia cool and what sucks. In exchange, they get free MTV stuff! And they’re allowed to listen to music as loud as they want! Often, observes the venerable New Yorker, interns will “rock out together for a moment before continuing along the hall,” because, we are told, “employees who think that a particular song ‘rules’ are encouraged to crank it.”