Ethical principles for assessing new technologies

Technologies and technology systems have deep and pervasive effects on the human beings who live within their reach. How do normative principles and principles of social and political justice apply to technology? Is there such a thing as "the ethics of technology"?

There is a reasonably active literature on questions that sound a lot like these. (See, for example, the contributions included in Winston and Edelbach, eds., Society, Ethics, and Technology.) But all too often the focus narrows too quickly to ethical issues raised by a particular example of contemporary technology -- genetic engineering, human cloning, encryption, surveillance, and privacy, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and so forth. These are important questions; but it is also possible to ask more general questions as well, about the normative space within which technology, private activity, government action, and the public live together. What principles allow us to judge the overall justice, fairness, and legitimacy of a given technology or technology system?

There is an overriding fact about technology that needs to be considered in every discussion of the ethics of technology. It is a basic principle of liberal democracy that individual freedom and liberty should be respected. Individuals should have the right to act and create as they choose, subject to something like Mill's harm principle. The harm principle holds that liberty should be restricted only when the activity in question imposes harm on other individuals. Applied to the topic of technology innovation, we can derive a strong principle of "liberty of innovation and creation" -- individuals (and their organizations, such as business firms) should have a presumptive right to create new technologies constrained only by something like the harm principle.

Often we want to go beyond this basic principle of liberty to ask what the good and bad of technology might be. Why is technological innovation a good thing, all things considered? And what considerations should we keep in mind as we consider legitimate regulations or limitations on technology?

Here we can consider three large principles that have emerged in other areas of social and political ethics as a basis for judging the legitimacy and fairness of a given set of social arrangements:

 A. Technologies should contribute to some form of human good, some activity or outcome that is desired by human beings -- health, education, enjoyment, pleasure, sociality, friendship, fitness, spirituality, ...
B. Technologies ought to be consistent with the fullest development of the human capabilities and freedoms of the individuals whom they affect. [Or stronger: “promote the fullest development …”]
C. Technologies ought to have population effects that are fair, equal, and just.

The first principle attempts to address the question, "What is technology good for? What is the substantive moral good that is served by technology development?" The basic idea is that human beings have wants and needs, and contributing to their ability to fulfill these wants is itself a good thing (if in so doing other greater harms are not created as well). This principle captures what is right about utilitarianism and hedonism -- the inherent value of human happiness and satisfaction. This means that entertainment and enjoyment are legitimate goals of technology development.

The second principle links technology to the "highest good" of human wellbeing -- the full development of human capabilities and freedoms. As is evident, the principle offered here derives from Amartya Sen's theory of capabilities and functionings, expressed in Development as Freedom. This principle recalls Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures:

Mill always insisted that the ultimate test of his own doctrine was utility, but for him the idea of the greatest happiness of the greatest number included qualitative judgements about different levels or kinds of human happiness. Pushpin was not as good as poetry; only Pushkin was.... Cultivation of one's own individuality should be the goal of human existence. (J.S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought : 454)

The third principle addresses the question of fairness and equity. Thinking about justice has evolved a great deal in the past fifty years, and one thing that emerges clearly is the intimate connection between injustice and invidious discrimination -- even if unintended. Social institutions that arbitrarily assign significantly different opportunities and life outcomes to individuals based on characteristics such as race, gender, income, neighborhood, or religion are unfair and unjust, and need to be reformed. This approach derives as much from current discussions of racial health disparities as it does from philosophical theories along the lines of Rawls and Sen.

On these principles a given technology can be criticized, first, if it has no positive contribution to make for the things that make people happy or satisfied; second, if it has the effect of stunting the development of human capabilities and freedoms; and third, if it has discriminatory effects on quality of life across the population it effects.

One important puzzle facing the ethics of technology is a question about the intended audience of such a discussion. We are compelled to ask, to whom is a philosophical discussion of the normative principles that ought to govern our thinking about technology aimed? Whose choices, actions, and norms are we attempting to influence? There appear to be several possible answers to this question.

Corporate ethics. Entrepreneurs and corporate boards and executives have an ethical responsibility to consider the impact of the technologies that they introduce into the market. If we believe that codes of corporate ethics have any real effect on corporate decision-making, then we need to have a basis in normative philosophy for a relevant set of principles that should guide business decision-making about the creation and implementation of new technologies by businesses. A current example is the use of facial recognition for the purpose of marketing or store security; does a company have a moral obligation to consider the negative social effects it may be promoting by adopting such a technology?

Governments and regulators. Government has an overriding responsibility of preserving and enhancing the public good and minimizing harmful effects of private activities. This is the fundamental justification for government regulation of industry. Since various technologies have the potential of creating harms for some segments of the public, it is legitimate for government to enact regulatory systems to prevent reckless or unreasonable levels of risk. Government also has a responsibility for ensuring a fair and just environment for all citizens, and enacting policies that serve to eliminate inequalities based on discriminatory social institutions. So here too governments have a role in regulating technologies, and a careful study of the normative principles that should govern our thinking about the fairness and justice of technologies is relevant to this process of government decision-making as well.

Public interest advocacy groups. One way in which important social issues can be debated and sometimes resolved is through the advocacy of well-organized advocacy groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Sierra Club, or Greenpeace. Organizations like these are in a position to argue in favor of or against a variety of social changes, and raising concerns about specific kinds of technologies certainly falls within this scope. There are only a small number of grounds for this kind of advocacy: the innovation will harm the public, the innovation will create unacceptable hidden costs, or the innovation raises unacceptable risks of unjust treatment of various groups. In order to make the latter kind of argument, the advocacy group needs to be able to articulate a clear and justified argument for its position about "unjust treatment".

The public. Citizens themselves have an interest in being able to make normative judgments about new technologies as they arise. "This technology looks as though it will improve life for everyone and should be favored; that technology looks as though it will create invidious and discriminatory sets of winners and losers and should be carefully regulated." But for citizens to have a basis for making judgments like these, they need to have a normative framework within which to think and reason about the social role of technology. Public discussion of the ethical principles underlying the legitimacy and justice of technology innovations will deepen and refine these normative frameworks.

Considered as proposed here, the topic of "ethics of technology" is part of a broad theory of social and political philosophy more generally. It invokes some of our best reasoning about what constitutes the human good (fulfillment of capabilities and freedoms) and about what constitutes a fair social system (elimination of invidious discrimination in the effects of social institutions on segments of population). Only when we have settled these foundational questions are we able to turn to the more specific issues often discussed under the rubric of the ethics of technology.

Regulatory delegation at the FAA

Earlier posts have focused on the role of inadequate regulatory oversight as part of the tragedy of the Boeing 737 MAX (link, link). (Also of interest is an earlier discussion of the "quiet power" through which business achieves its goals in legislation and agency rules (link).) Reporting in the New York Times this week by Natalie Kitroeff and David Gelles provides a smoking gun for the idea of regulatory capture by industry over the regulatory agency established to ensure its safe operations (link). The article quotes a former attorney in the FAA office of chief counsel:

“The reauthorization act mandated regulatory capture,” said Doug Anderson, a former attorney in the agency’s office of chief counsel who reviewed the legislation. “It set the F.A.A. up for being totally deferential to the industry.”

Based on exhaustive investigative journalism, Kitroeff and Gelles provide a detailed account of the lobbying strategy and efforts by Boeing and the aircraft manufacturing industry group that led to the incorporation of industry-favored language into the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, and it is a profoundly discouraging account for anyone interested in the idea that the public good should drive legislation. The new paragraphs introduced into the final legislation stipulate full implementation of the philosophy of regulatory delegation and establish an industry-centered group empowered to oversee the agency's performance and to make recommendations about FAA employees' compensation. "Now, the agency, at the outset of the development process, has to hand over responsibility for certifying almost every aspect of new planes." Under the new legislation the FAA is forbidden from taking back control of the certification process for a new aircraft without a full investigation or inspection justifying such an action.

As the article notes, the 737 MAX was certified under the old rules. The new rules give the FAA even less oversight powers and responsibilities for the certification of new aircraft and major redesigns of existing aircraft. And the fact that the MCAS system was never fully reviewed by the FAA, based on assurances of its safety from Boeing, reduces even further our confidence in the effectiveness of the FAA process. From the article:

The F.A.A. never fully analyzed the automated system known as MCAS, while Boeing played down its risks. Late in the plane’s development, Boeing made the system more aggressive, changes that were not submitted in a safety assessment to the agency.

Boeing, the Aerospace Industries Association, and the General Aviation Manufacturers Association exercised influence on the 2018 legislation through a variety of mechanisms. Legislators and lobbyists alike were guided by a report on regulation authored by Boeing itself. Executives and lobbyists exercised their ability to influence powerful senators and members of Congress through person-to-person interactions. And elected representatives from both parties favored "less regulation" as a way of supporting the economic interests of businesses in their states. For example:

They also helped persuade Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington State, where Boeing has its manufacturing hub, to introduce language that requires the F.A.A. to relinquish control of many parts of the certification process.

And, of course, it is important not to forget about the "revolving door" from industry to government to lobbying firm. Ali Bahrami was an FAA official who subsequently became a lobbyist for the aerospace industry; Stephen Dixon is a former executive of Delta Airlines who now serves as Administrator of the FAA; and in 2007 former FAA Administrator Marion Blakey became CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, the industry's chief advocacy and lobbying group (link). It is hard to envision neutral, objective judgment in ensuring the safety of the public from such appointments.

Boeing and its allies found a receptive audience in the head of the House transportation committee, Bill Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican staunchly in favor of deregulation, and his aide working on the legislation, Holly Woodruff Lyons.

These kinds of influence on legislation and agency action provide crystal-clear illustrations of the mechanisms cited by Pepper Culpepper in Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan explaining the political influence of business. Here is my description of his views in an earlier post:

Culpepper unpacks the political advantage residing with business elites and managers in terms of acknowledged expertise about the intricacies of corporate organization, an ability to frame the issues for policy makers and journalists, and ready access to rule-writing committees and task forces. These factors give elite business managers positional advantage, from which they can exert a great deal of influence on how an issue is formulated when it comes into the forum of public policy formation.

It seems abundantly clear that the "regulatory delegation" movement and its underlying effort to reduce regulatory burden on industry have gone too far in the case of aviation; and the same seems true in other industries such as the nuclear industry. The much harder question is organizational: what form of regulatory oversight would permit a regulatory industry to genuinely enhance the safety of the regulated industry and protect the public from unnecessary hazards? Even if we could take the anti-regulation ideology that has governed much public discourse since the Reagan years out of the picture, there are the continuing issues of expertise, funding, and industry power of resistance that make effective regulation a huge challenge.

The tempos of capitalism

I've been interested in the economic history of capitalism since the 1970s, and there are a few titles that stand out in my memory. There were the Marxist and neo-Marxist economic historians (Marx's Capital, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Robert Brenner, Charles Sabel); the debate over the nature of the industrial revolution (Deane and Cole, NFR Crafts, RM Hartwell, EL Jones); and volumes of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe. The history of British capitalism poses important questions for social theory: is there such a thing as "capitalism", or are there many capitalisms? What are the features of the capitalist social order that are most fundamental to its functioning and dynamics of development? Is Marx's intellectual construction of the "capitalist mode of production" a useful one? And does capitalism have a logic or tendency of development, as Marx believed, or is its history fundamentally contingent and path-dependent? Putting the point in concrete terms, was there a probable path of development from the "so-called primitive accumulation" to the establishment of factory production and urbanization to the extension of capitalist property relations throughout much of the world?

Part of the interest of detailed research in economic history in different places -- England, Sweden, Japan, the United States, China -- is the light that economic historians have been able to shed on the particulars of modern economic organization and development, and the range of institutions and "life histories" they have identified for these different historically embodied social-economic systems. For this reason I have found it especially interesting to read and learn about the ways in which the early modern Chinese economy developed, and different theories of why China and Europe diverged in this period. Kenneth Pomeranz, Philip Huang, William Skinner, Mark Elvin, Bozhong Li, James Lee, and Joseph Needham all shed light on different aspects of this set of questions, and once again the Cambridge Economic History of China was a deep and valuable resource.

A  new title that recently caught my eye is Pierre Dockès' Le Capitalisme Et Ses Rythmes, quatre siècles en perspective: Tome I Sous Le Regard Des Géants. Intriguing features of the book include the long sweep of the book (400 years, over 950 pages, with volume II to come), and the question of whether there is something new to say about this topic. After reading large parts of the book, I think the answer to the last question is "yes".

Dockès is interested in both the history of capitalism as an economic system and the history of economic science and political economy during the past four centuries. And he is particularly interested in discovering what we can learn about our current economic challenges from both these stories.

He specifically distances himself from "mainstream" economic theory and couches his own analysis in a less orthodox and more eclectic set of ideas. He defines mainstream economics in terms of five ideas: first, its strong commitment to mathematization and formalization of economic ideas; second, its disciplinary tendency towards hyper-specialization; third, its tendency to take the standpoint of the capitalist and the free market in its analyses; fourth, the propensity to extend these neoliberal biases to the process of selection and hiring of academics; and fifth, its underlying “scientism” and positivism leads its practitioners to devalue the history of the discipline or the historical conditions through which modern institutions came to be (9-12).

 

Dockès holds that the history of the economic facts and the ideas researchers have had about these facts go hand in hand; economic history and the history of economics need to be studied together. Moreover, Dockès believes that mainstream economics has lost sight of insights from the innovators in the history of economics which still have value -- Ricardo, Smith, Keynes, Walras, Sismondi, Hobbes. The solitary focus of the discipline of mainstream economics in the past forty years on formal, mathematical representations of a market economy precludes these economists from "seeing" the economic world through the conceptual lenses of gifted predecessors. They are trapped in a paradigm or an "epistemological framework" from which they cannot escape. (These ideas are explored in the introduction to the volume.)

The substantive foundation of the book is Dockès’ idea that capitalism has long-term rhythms punctuated by crises, and that these fluctuations themselves are amenable to historical-causal and institutional analysis.

En un mot, croissance et crise sont inséparables et inhérents au processus de développement capitaliste laissé à lui-même.

[In a word, growth and crisis are inseparable and inherent in the process of capitalist development left to itself.] (13)

The fluctuations of capitalism over the longterm are linked in a single system of causation — growth, depression, financial crisis, and growth again are linked. Therefore, Dockès believes, it should be possible to discover the systemic causes of the development of various capitalist economies by uncovering the dynamics of crisis. Further, he underlines the serious social and political consequences that have ensued from economic crises in the past, including the rise of the Nazi regime out of the global economic crisis of the 1930s.

Etudier ces rythmes impose une analyse des logiques de fonctionnement du capitalism.

[Studying these rhythms imposes an analysis of the logic of functioning of capitalism.] (12).

Dockès is explicit in saying that economic history does not "repeat" itself, and the crises of capitalism are not replicas of each other over the decades or centuries. Historicity of the time and place is fundamental, and he underlines the path dependency of economic development in some of its aspects as well. But he argues that there are important similarities across various kinds of economic crises, and it is worthwhile discovering these similarities. He takes debt crises as an example: there are great differences among several centuries of experience of debt crisis. But there is something in common as well:

Permanence aussi dans les relations de pouvoir et dans let intérêts des uns (les créanciers partisans de la déflation, des taux élevés) et des autres (les débiteurs inflationnistes), dan les jeux de l'état entre ces deux groupes de pression. On peut tirer deux conséquences des homologies entre le passé et le présent.

[Permanence also in the relations of power and in the interests of some (creditors who favor deflation, high rates) and others (inflationary debtors), in the games of the state between these two pressure groups. We can draw two resulting homologies between the past and the present.] (20)

And failing to consider carefully and critically the economies and crises of the past is a mistake that may lead contemporary economic experts and advisors into ever-deeper economic crises in the future.

L'oubli est dommageable, celui des catastrophes, celui des enseignements qu'elles ont rendu possible, celui des corpus théoriques du passé. Ouvrir la perspective par l'économie historique peut aider à une meilleure compréhension du présent, voire à préparer l'avenir. (21)

[Forgetting is harmful, especially forgetting past catastrophes, forgetting the lessons they have made possible, forgetting the theoretical corpus of the past. Embracing the perspective of the concrete economic history can help lead to a better understanding of the present, or even prepare for the future.] (21)

The scope and content of the book are evident in the list of the book's chapters:

1. Crises et rythmes économiques
2. Périodisation, mutations et rythmes longs
3. Le capitalism d'Ancien Régime, ses crises
4. Le "Haut Capitalism", ses crises et leur théorisation (1800-1870)
5. Karl Marx et les crises
6. Capitalisme "Monopoliste" et grande industrie (1870-1914)
7. Interlude
8. Á l'âge de l'acier, les rythmes de l'investissement et de l'innovation
9. Impulsion monétaire et effets réels
10. La monnaie hégémonique
11. "Le chien dans la mangeoire"
12. La grande crise des années trente
13. Keynes et la "Théorie Générale"La "Haute Théorie", la dynamique, le cycle (1926-1946)
14. En guise de conclusion d'étape

As the chapter titles make evident, Dockès delivers on his promise of treating both the episodes, trends, and facts of economic history as well as the history of the theories through which economists have sought to understand those facts and their dynamics.

Experimental sociology of norms and decision-making

The discipline of experimental economics is now a familiar one. It is a field that attempts to probe and test the behavioral assumptions of the theory of economic rationality, microeconomics, and game theory. How do real human reasoners deliberate and act in classic circumstances of economic decision-making? John Kagel and Alvin Roth provide an excellent overview of the discipline in The Handbook of Experimental Economics, where they identify key areas of research in expected utility theory, game theory, free-riding and public goods theory, bargaining theory, and auction markets.

Behavioral economics is a related field but is generally understood as having a broader definition of subject matter. It is the discipline in which researchers use the findings of psychology, cognitive science, cultural studies, and other areas of behavioral sciences to address issues of economics, without making the heroic assumptions of strict economic rationality concerning the behavior and choices of the agents. The iconoclastic writings of Kahneman and Tversky are foundational contributions to the field (Choices, Values, and Frames), and Richard Thaler's work (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health and Wealth, and Happiness and Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics) exemplifies the approach.

Here is a useful description of behavioral and experimental economics offered by Ana Santos:

Behavioural experiments have produced a substantial amount of evidence that shows that human beings are prone to systematic error even in areas of economic relevance where stakes are high (e.g. Thaler, 1992; Camerer, 1995). Rather than grounding individual choice on the calculus of the costs and benefits of alternative options so as to choose the alternative that provides the highest net benefit, individuals have recourse to a variety of decisional rules and are influenced by various contextual factors that jeopardise the pursuit of individuals’ best interests. The increased understanding of how people actually select and apply rules for dealing with particular forms of decision problems and of the influence of contexts on individual choices is the starting point of choice architecture devoted to the study of choice setups that can curb human idiosyncrasies to good result, as judged by individuals themselves, or by society as a whole (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003, 2008).

Researchers in experimental and behavioral economics make use of a variety of empirical and "experimental" methods to probe the nature of real human decision-making. But the experiments in question are generally of a very specialized kind. The goal is often to determine the characteristics of the decision rule that is used by a group of actual human decision-makers. So the subjects are asked to “play” a game in which the payoffs correspond to one of the simple games studied in game theory — e.g. the prisoners’ dilemma — and their behavior is observed from start to finish. This seems to be more a form of controlled observation than experimentation in the classical sense -- isolating an experimental situation and a given variable of interest F, and then running the experiment in the presence and absence of F.

It is intriguing to ask whether a similar empirical approach might be applied to some of the findings and premises of micro-sociology. Sociologists too make assumptions about motivation, choice, and action. Whether we consider the sociology of contention, the sociology of race, or the sociology of the family, we are unavoidably drawn to making provisional assumptions about what makes the actors in these situations tick. What are their motives? How do they evaluate the facts of a situation? How do they measure and weigh risk in the actions they choose? How do ambient social norms influence their action? Whether explicitly or implicitly, sociologists make assumptions about the answers to questions like these. Could some of the theoretical ideas of James Coleman, Erving Goffman, or Mark Granovetter be subjected to experimental investigation? Even more intriguingly, are there supra-individual hypotheses offered by sociologists that might be explored with experimental methods?

Areas where experimental and empirical investigation might be expected to pay dividends in sociology include the motivations underlying cooperation and competition, Granovetter's sociology of social embeddedness, corruption, the theories of conditional altruism and conditional fairness, the dynamics of contention, and the micro-social psychology of race and gender.

So is there an existing field of research that attempts to investigate questions like these using experiments and human subjects placed in artificial circumstances of action?

To begin, there are some famous examples of experiments in the behavioral sciences that are relevant to these questions. These include the Milgram experiment, the Stanford Prison experiment, and a variety of altruism experiments. These empirical research designs aim at probing the modes of behavior, norm observance, and decision-making that characterize real human beings in real circumstances.

Second, it is evident that the broad discipline of social psychology is highly relevant to this topic. For example, the study of "motivated reasoning" has come to play an important role within the discipline of social psychology (link).

Motivated reasoning has become a central theoretical concept in academic discourse across the fields of psychology, political science, and mass communication. Further, it has also entered the popular lexicon as a label for the seemingly limitless power of partisanship and prior beliefs to color and distort perceptions of the political and social world. Since its emergence in the psychological literature in the mid- to late-20th century, motivated reasoning theory has been continuously elaborated but also challenged by researchers working across academic fields. In broad terms, motivated reasoning theory suggests that reasoning processes (information selection and evaluation, memory encoding, attitude formation, judgment, and decision-making) are influenced by motivations or goals. Motivations are desired end-states that individuals want to achieve. The number of these goals that have been theorized is numerous, but political scientists have focused principally on two broad categories of motivations: accuracy motivations (the desire to be “right” or “correct”) and directional or defensive motivations (the desire to protect or bolster a predetermined attitude or identity). While much research documents the effects of motivations for attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge, a growing literature highlights individual-level variables and contexts that moderate motivated reasoning.

See Epley and Gilovich (link) for an interesting application of the "motivated reasoning" approach.

Finally, some of the results of behavioral and experimental economics are relevant to sociology and political science as well.

These ideas are largely organized around testing the behavioral assumptions of various sociological theories. Another line of research that can be treated experimentally is the investigation of locally relevant structural arrangements that some sociologists have argued to be causally relevant to certain kinds of social outcomes. Public schools with health clinics have been hypothesized to have better educational outcomes than those without such clinics. Factory workers are sometimes thought to be more readily mobilized in labor organizations than office workers. Small towns in rural settings are sometimes thought to be especially conducive to nationalist-populist political mobilization. And so forth. Each of these hypotheses about the causal role of social structures can be investigated empirically and experimentally (though often the experiments take the form of quasi-experiments or field experiments rather than randomly assigned subjects divided into treatment and control populations).

It seems, then, that the methods and perspective of behavioral and experimental economics are indeed relevant to sociological research. Some of the premises of key sociological theories can be investigated experimentally, and doing so has the promise of further assessing and deepening the content of those sociological theories. Experiments can help to probe the forms of knowledge-formation, norm acquisition, and decision-making that real social actors experience. And with a little ingenuity, it seems possible to use experimental methods to evaluate some core hypotheses about the causal roles played by various kinds of "micro-" social structures.

Organizational culture

It is of both intellectual and practical interest to understand how organizations function and how the actors within them choose the actions that they pursue. A common answer to these questions is to refer to the rules and incentives of the organization, and then to attempt to understand the actor's choices through the lens of rational preference theory. However, it is now increasingly clear that organizations embody distinctive "cultures" that significantly affect the actions of the individuals who operate within their scope. Edgar Schein is a leading expert on the topic of organizational culture. Here is how he defines the concept in Organizational Culture and Leadership. Organizational culture, according to Schein, consists of a set of "basic assumptions about the correct way to perceive, think, feel, and behave, driven by (implicit and explicit) values, norms, and ideals" (Schein, 1990).

Culture is both a dynamic phenomenon that surrounds us at all times, being constantly enacted and created by our interactions with others and shaped by leadership behavior, and a set of structures, routines, rules, and norms that guide and constrain behavior. When one brings culture to the level of the organization and even down to groups within the organization, one can see clearly how culture is created, embedded, evolved, and ultimately manipulated, and, at the same time, how culture constrains, stabilizes, and provides structure and meaning to the group members. These dynamic processes of culture creation and management are the essence of leadership and make one realize that leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin. (3rd edition, p. 1)

According to Schein, there is a cognitive and affective component of action within an organization that has little to do with rational calculation of interests and more to do with how the actors frame their choices. The values and expectations of the organization help to shape the actions of the participants. And one crucial aspect of leaders, according to Schein, is the role they play in helping to shape the culture of the organizations they lead.

It is intriguing that several pressing organizational problems have been found to rotate around the culture of the organization within which behavior takes place. The prevalence of sexual and gender harassment appears to depend a great deal on the culture of respect and civility that an organization has embodied -- or has failed to embody. The ways in which accidents occur in large industrial systems seems to depend in part on the culture of safety that has been established within the organization. And the incidence of corrupt and dishonest practices within businesses seems to be influenced by the culture of integrity that the organization has managed to create. In each instance experience seems to demonstrate that "good" culture leads to less socially harmful behavior, while "bad" culture leads to more such behavior.

Consider first the prominence that the idea of safety culture has come to play in the nuclear industry after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Here are a few passages from a review document authored by the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (link).

There also seems to be a general agreement in the nuclear community on the elements of safety culture. Elements commonly included at the organization level are senior management commitment to safety, organizational effectiveness, effective communications, organizational learning, and a working environment that rewards identifying safety issues. Elements commonly identified at the individual level include personal accountability, questioning attitude, and procedural adherence. Financial health of the organization and the impact of regulatory bodies are occasionally identified as external factors potentially affecting safety culture. 

The working paper goes on to consider two issues: has research validated the causal relationship between safety culture and safe performance? And should the NRC create regulatory requirements aimed at observing and enhancing the safety culture in a nuclear plant? They note that current safety statistics do not permit measurement of the association between safety culture and safe performance, but that experience in the industry suggests that the answers to both questions are probably affirmative:

On the other hand, even at the current level of industry maturity, we are confronted with events such as the recent reactor vessel head corrosion identified so belatedly at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant. Problems subsequently identified in other programmatic areas suggest that these may not be isolated events, but the result of a generally degraded plant safety culture. The head degradation was so severe that a major accident could have resulted and was possibly imminent. If, indeed, the true cause of such an event proves to be degradation of the facility's safety culture, is it acceptable that the reactor oversight program has to wait for an event of such significance to occur before its true root cause, degraded culture, is identified? This event seems to make the case for the need to better understand the issues driving the culture of nuclear power plants and to strive to identify effective performance indicators of resulting latent conditions that would provide leading, rather than lagging, indications of future plant problems. (7-8)

Researchers in the area of sexual harassment have devoted quite a bit of attention to the topic of workplace culture as well. This theme is emphasized in the National Academy study on sexual and gender harassment (link); the authors make the point that gender harassment is chiefly aimed at expressing disrespect towards the target rather than sexual exploitation. This has an important implication for institutional change. An institution that creates a strong core set of values emphasizing civility and respect is less conducive to gender harassment. They summarize this analysis in the statement of findings as well:

Organizational climate is, by far, the greatest predictor of the occurrence of sexual harassment, and ameliorating it can prevent people from sexually harassing others. A person more likely to engage in harassing behaviors is significantly less likely to do so in an environment that does not support harassing behaviors and/or has strong, clear, transparent consequences for these behaviors. (50)

Ben Walsh is representative of this approach. Here is the abstract of a research article by Walsh, Lee, Jensen, McGonagle, and Samnani on workplace incivility (link):

Scholars have called for research on the antecedents of mistreatment in organizations such as workplace incivility, as well as the theoretical mechanisms that explain their linkage. To address this call, the present study draws upon social information processing and social cognitive theories to investigate the relationship between positive leader behaviors—those associated with charismatic leadership and ethical leadership—and workers’ experiences of workplace incivility through their perceptions of norms for respect. Relationships were separately examined in two field studies using multi- source data (employees and coworkers in study 1, employees and supervisors in study 2). Results suggest that charismatic leadership (study 1) and ethical leadership (study 2) are negatively related to employee experiences of workplace incivility through employee perceptions of norms for respect. Norms for respect appear to operate as a mediating mechanism through which positive forms of leadership may negatively relate to workplace incivility. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for organizations regarding leader behaviors that foster norms for respect and curb uncivil behaviors at work.

David Hess, an expert on corporate corruption, takes a similar approach to the problem of corruption and bribery by officials of multinational corporations (link). Hess argues that bribery often has to do with organizational culture and individual behavior, and that effective steps to reduce the incidence of bribery must proceed on the basis of an adequate analysis of both culture and behavior. And he links this issue to fundamental problems in the area of corporate social responsibility.

Corporations must combat corruption. By allowing their employees to pay bribes they are contributing to a system that prevents the realization of basic human rights in many countries. Ensuring that employees do not pay bribes is not accomplished by simply adopting a compliance and ethics program, however. This essay provided a brief overview of why otherwise good employees pay bribes in the wrong organizational environment, and what corporations must focus on to prevent those situations from arising. In short, preventing bribe payments must be treated as an ethical issue, not just a legal compliance issue, and the corporation must actively manage its corporate culture to ensure it supports the ethical behavior of employees.

As this passage emphasizes, Hess believes that controlling corrupt practices requires changing incentives within the corporation while equally changing the ethical culture of the corporation; he believes that the ethical culture of a company can have effects on the degree to which employees engage in bribery and other corrupt practices.

What is in common among each of these examples -- and other examples are available as well -- is that intangible features of the work environment are likely to influence behavior of the actors in that environment, and thereby affect the favorable and unfavorable outcomes of the organization's functioning as well. Moreover, if we take the lead offered by Schein and work on the assumption that leaders can influence culture through their advocacy for the values that the organization embodies, then leadership has a core responsibility to facilitate a work culture that embodies these favorable outcomes. Work culture can be cultivated to encourage safety and to discourage bad outcomes like sexual harassment and corruption.