Putting on the Velvet Glove: The Paradox of “Soft” Core Values in “Hard” Organizations
| Date | 01 January 2018 |
| Published date | 01 January 2018 |
| Author | Arild Wæraas |
| DOI | 10.1177/0095399715581471 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2015
Article
Administration & Society
2018, Vol. 50(1) 53 –77
Putting on the Velvet
© The Author(s) 2015
DOI: 10.1177/0095399715581471
Glove: The Paradox of
journals.sagepub.com/home/aas
“Soft” Core Values in
“Hard” Organizations
Arild Wæraas1
Abstract
Following New Public Management and Reinventing Government reforms,
public sector organizations are expected to pursue values such as efficiency,
performance, and accountability, reflecting a “hard” identity as managed
organizations. By examining the contents of 394 core values retrieved from
U.S. federal agencies, this study examines the importance of “hard” values
relative to other values reflecting alternative identities. It finds that the
agencies prefer to rely on “soft” values such as integrity, respect, openness,
and customer orientation to express their identities. The article discusses
the implications of these findings for our understanding of organizational
actorhood in a public sector context.
Keywords
construction of organization, organizational actorhood, public values,
legitimacy
Introduction
Bureaucracies depend on the legitimated authority of the state to act and make
decisions. They are instruments for political leadership in implementing
1Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway
Corresponding Author:
Arild Wæraas, School of Economics and Business, Norwegian University of Life Sciences,
Christian M Falsens vei 18, 1432 Ås, Norway.
Email: arild.waraas@nmbu.no
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Administration & Society 50(1)
public policies, not expected to have their own agenda or possess the capacity
to act on the basis of their own goals, interests, and strategies. Over the last
decades, however, a growing trend in most Organization for Economic
Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries has been to turn public
sector entities into actors in their own right (Brunsson & Sahlin-Andersson,
2000; De Boer, Enders, & Leisyte, 2007). Comprehensive reforms have
installed more rational features in public sector entities and made them more
similar to the abstract and generalized idea of what a sovereign, empowered
organizational actor is and looks like.
The explicitly stated rationale for many of these reforms is the lack of
efficiency in public bureaucracies. Since the 1970s, public sector entities
have been associated with declining legitimacy and negatively charged labels
and stereotypes such as inefficiency, waste, rules, incompetence, and rigidity.
Comprehensive reforms referred to as New Public Management (Hood,
1995) or Reinventing Government (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992) were under-
taken to address these problems and restore trust in government. The ideal
public sector entity is the autonomous, empowered, accountable organization
whose objectives and performance are clearly specified, monitored, and eval-
uated (Brunsson & Sahlin-Andersson, 2000), and whose behavior is man-
aged by “hard” values such as efficiency, results, and performance (Waldo,
1992). A general identity as formal organization has become a dominant
script (Drori, Meyer, & Hwang, 2006a; Meyer & Bromley, 2013; Meyer,
Drori, & Hwang, 2006), prompting social entities to emphasize similarity
with other organizations and tone down their category-specific and institu-
tion-specific identities.
In this article, I seek to extend the work of scholars who have described
the proliferation of organization- and actorhood-building reforms in the pub-
lic sector by highlighting how “hard” aspects of organizational actorhood
combine with “soft” values and characteristics in expressions of organiza-
tional identity. By “hard,” I mean values and characteristics that indicate cal-
culation, work, energy, and production, such as efficiency, performance,
rationality, results, excellence, and accountability (cf. Waldo, 1992). By con-
trast, “soft” values and characteristics are associated with people, family,
care, emotions, and community, such as compassion, trust, integrity, respect,
and inclusion (cf. Brickson, 2005; Lebow & Simon, 1997). Although it seems
reasonable to expect empowered public sector entities to claim to represent
hard values such as efficiency, results, and performance in an attempt to con-
form with legitimacy requirements, we do not know if this is an identity with
which these entities want to be associated. I challenge the notion of “hard”
actorhood by opening up the possibility that alternative identities may exist.
These identities are relevant, supplemental, perhaps competing, and perhaps
Wæraas
55
perceived as more legitimate than the identity as formal organization—even
for those entities that have been subjected to comprehensive organization-
building reforms—and if so, they will inevitably come to expression.
To inquire into these assumptions, this study examines an organization-
building element whose contents are particularly expressive of identity: core
value statements. A core value statement is a brief definition of an entity’s
values, articulated in an official setting such as a strategy document or a pub-
lically available webpage. As a very visible organizational building block,
ideal for shaping legitimacy (Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975), its contents can be
expected to reflect hard actorhood values so as to conform to prevailing mod-
ern norms of rationality and efficiency (Drori et al., 2006a). Claiming adher-
ence to hard values might be relevant for any public sector entity whose
commitment to efficient service production has been questioned. This has
indeed been the case for many entities in the public sectors of the entire
OECD area at least since the 1980s. However, this study of the core value
statements of federal agencies in the United States highlights the importance
of other types of values. Reflecting a mix of identities, the values primarily
facilitate an understanding of the agencies as caring about good relationships
and wanting to be associated with soft rather than hard values. The most fre-
quently occurring values are those that are important in interpersonal rela-
tionships such as integrity, respect, and openness.
This is a paradox with important implications for our understanding of
organizational actorhood in general and the construction of organization in a
public sector setting in particular. It questions the legitimacy of the identity as
rational organization, drawing attention instead to a relational identity
expressed by people-oriented values. This emphasis suggests that the rela-
tional identity is the more “appropriate” and legitimate one, more so than the
identity as formal, managed organization. As a result, I argue that rational,
output-oriented thinking is one aspect of organizational actorhood—another
is a social dimension that thus far has tended to be neglected in the research
on and theorizing of the construction of organization. This study highlights
the need to explore this dimension to expand our understanding of how
empowered organizational actors are constituted, perceive themselves, and
want to be perceived.
The American context is chosen for this study because it is a setting char-
acterized by “incomplete” entities often criticized for not being sufficiently
efficient, accountable, or performance-oriented, and thus have been, and still
are, under strong pressures of transitioning toward higher degrees of organi-
zation. The first part of the article presents the central tenets of organizational
actorhood theory and shows how actorhood reforms in the U.S. federal
administration have followed from a global proliferation of a general concept
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Administration & Society 50(1)
of “organization.” The second part describes the methodological approaches
that were chosen. The third part presents the results, followed by a discussion
of how the findings improve our understanding of organizational actorhood.
Theoretical Observations
Actorhood Theory and the Proliferation of “Organization”
The corporation is the “prototype” organization. It is “empowered, like a real
person, to conduct business in its own name, acquire assets, employ workers,
pay taxes, and go to court to assert its rights and defend its actions” (Bakan,
2004, p. 16). It is an organizational actor in its own right with the ability to
set goals, develop strategies, make decisions, and act on behalf of its inter-
ests, “deliberately choosing its own actions and that can thus be held respon-
sible for what it does” (Krücken & Meier, 2006, p. 241).
This prototype model of organization has currently become a dominant
and socially legitimate ideal to follow in practice (Brunsson & Sahlin-
Andersson, 2000; Drori et al., 2006a; Krücken & Meier, 2006; Meyer &
Bromley, 2013; Meyer et al., 2006). It is reflected in the now rather universal
adoption of standard organizational building blocks such as accounting pro-
cedures, annual reports, risk management, performance management, com-
munication strategies, branding, and mission and core value statements.
These are the building blocks of “organization” and the benchmarks of orga-
nizational actorhood (Power, Scheytt, Soin, & Sahlin, 2009); they are some-
thing that social entities need to have to be seen as “complete” organizational
actors with a demonstrated capability to set goals and pursue them rationally.
As noted by Drori, Meyer, and Hwang (2006b) “the core meaning of the term
organization seems to sharply focus on the idea of actorhood” (p. 1). Similarly,
King, Felin,...
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