The post is based on the literature review presented in the paper
VALUES WORK: A PROCESS STUDY OF THE EMERGENCE AND PERFORMANCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES PRACTICES
Academy of Management Journal
2013. Vol. 56. No. 1. 84-112.
VALUES WORK: A PROCESS STUDY OF THE EMERGENCE AND PERFORMANCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES PRACTICES
JOEL GEHMAN, University of Alberta, LINDA K. TREVIÑO and RAGHU GARUD,
Pennsylvania State University
PERSPECTIVES ON VALUES
An overview of the literature based on cognitive, cultural, and practice perspectives.
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The approach was inspired hy Reckwitz's (2002) discussion, as well as the numerous literatures that have circulated cognitive, cultural, and practice "turns" (e.g., Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001).
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Cognitive Perspective on Values
Multiple strands of literature have explored values from a cognitive perspective, united around a definition of values as abstract conceptions of the desirable (Rohan, 2000). One strand has theorized
and validated various typologies of individual human values (Rokeach, 1973; Vernon & Allport, 1931). Schwartz (1992) offered a circumplex model of over 50 discrete values such as honesty, loyalty, authority, and power. Organizational scholars have extended these efforts by developing typologies of individual workplace values (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983; Sagie, Elizur, & Koslowsky, 1996). These scholars have concluded that people differ primarily in the arrangements of their value priorities, rather than in the presence or absence of particular values (Schwartz, 1992; Williams, 1979).
Other researchers have considered individual and collective values as distinct phenomena (Hofstede,
Neuijen, Ohayv, & Sanders, 1990; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Cupta, 2004), suggesting that collectives such as organizations have values too. For instance, Schwartz (1999) found that individual and collective values differ significantly from one another structurally. As .one example, in hierarchical organizations, members must accept that they are inferior to some and superior to others. In this case, the values of "humility" and "power" are positively correlated at the collective level despite being negatively correlated at the individual level. An important issue left unaddressed by this work concerns how tensions between individual and collective values are worked out (Callon,
Lascoumes, & Barthe, 2009). Some scholars have attempted to address this issue by taking a "fit" approach (Kristof, 1996; Ostroff & Judge, 2007), examining the extent to which congruence between individual and organizational values explains outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and employee turnover (Chatman, 1991; Edwards & Cable, 2009). Others have related individual values and occupational choices Qudge & Bretz, 1992; Spokane, Meir, & Catalano, 2000), as well as managerial values and organizational strategies (Hage & Dewar, 1973; Hambrick & Brandon, 1988). Despite the empirical tractability of this approach, these scholars have proposed that more research is needed on how individual and organizational values come together (Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman, & Johnson, 2005: 321), describing these processes as "a theoretical black box that has been largely neglected" (Edwards, Cable, Williamson, Lambert, & Shipp, 2006: 822).
Viewed broadly, these different cognitive perspectives have offered increasingly nuanced vocabularies for describing values in abstract terms, while demonstrating the importance of both individual and collective values. Yet, in conceiving of values as abstractions, cognitive perspectives undertheorize the connections between individuals and collectives, and relatedly, how abstract values
come to be embodied and manifest in organizational practices.
Cultural Perspective on Values
Another approach to values is offered by those who have taken a cultural perspective that focuses
on the manifestation of values in various artifacts, rituals, and symbols (Harrison & Beyer, 1984; Mar
tin, 1992; Schein, 1985). One prominent strand of organizational culture studies emphasizes the role
of entrepreneurs and executives in instilling their personal values into an organization through a topdown, or hierarchical, process (Barnard, 1938; Schein, 1985). For instance, some scholars have
suggested that senior executives play an important role in influencing whether organizations adopt
compliance-driven or aspiration-oriented ethics programs (Weaver, Treviño, & Cochran, 1999).
Charismatic leadership is one avenue through which values are thought to be instilled (Brown &
Treviño, 2009; Fanelli & Misangyi, 2006). Consequently, some consider "engineering" an organization's values to be an essential executive function (Kunda, 1992; Peters & Waterman, 1982).
Many scholars have seen organizational cultures predominately in terms of values that are espoused
by management and then harmoniously and uniformly shared by employees (Barley, Meyer, &
Gash, 1988; Detert, Schroeder, & Mauriel, 2000). Yet organizational cultures may remain differentiated or fragmented (Martin, 1992). And efforts at engineering values have even been shown to induce "concertive control" (Barker, 1993). Other studies have shown that imposing values from the top down is difficult to accomplish given the more open, transparent, and virtual forms of organizing now common in many domains (Gha & Edmondson, 2006; Palmisano, 2004). Thus, rather than being homogeneous, "cultural manifestations are interpreted, evaluated, and enacted in varying ways because cultural members have differing interests, experiences, responsibilities and values" (Martin, 2005: 272).
Within the cultural perspective, another strand is a discursive approach, in which organizing is
viewed as contingent upon language, and thus, as the result of ongoing conversations and meaning
making (Heracleous & Barrett, 2001; Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004; Thomas, Sargent, & Hardy,
2011). According to Meyer, "narratives serve to encapsulate and entrench the values that are key to an organization's culture" (1995: 210). In this view, senior managers may hold privileged positions
when it comes to introducing values discourse, but other employees are involved as meanings are negotiated among actors (Gheney, 1999; Ford, Ford, & D'Amelio, 2008). But how these dynamics might unfold in the case of values has not been a concerted focus.
All the above viewpoints are predominately closed system perspectives in which values are assumed
to be internal to an organization and its members.
But an open systems perspective (Emery & Trist, 1965; Scott & Davis, 2007) suggests a variety
variety of stakeholders and institutional actors are likely to influence an organization's values (Freeman, 1984; Kraatz, Ventresca, & Deng, 2010; Suddaby, Elsbach, Greenwood, Meyer, & Zilber,
2010). Notably, Selznick (1957) defined institutionalization as the process of infusing an organization
with values beyond the technical requirements at hand. Once institutionalization has occurred, Selznick argued, organizations would not readily give up or change their values. He conceived of values as "a prime function of leadership" (Selznick, 1957: 27), but later work has shown how organizational values may be translated through social movements, changes in field-level values, and the hiring of outsiders (Amis, Slack, & Hinings, 2002; Kraatz & Moore, 2002; Lounsbury, 2001).
These different cultural perspectives have drawn attention to how values can emerge from a variety
of sources—executives, employees and other stakeholders, the broader institutional environment—
and are manifest in various organizational artifacts, discourses, and practices. However, prior research has seldom studied values practices directly and has stopped short of understanding the processes involved in the emergence and performance of these values practices over time. Moreover, such an approach implies making a shift in how values, practices, and their relationship to one another are conceptualized.
Toward a Practice Perspective on Values
Both cognitive and cultural perspectives define values in "ostensive" terms (Latour, 1986). In other
words, they start with values as given and already objectified phenomena. By contrast, some scholars
have argued for a more dynamic and performative understanding of organizing (Gzarniawska, 1991;
Feldman & Pentland, 2003; Hatch, 2004).
This perspective suggests the need to focus on the processes whereby values emerge in performances. Thus, understanding what is of value, why it is valued, and how it is made recognizable requires attending to the practices through which values are performed. Such an approach is broadly consistent with the "practice turn" (Schatzki et al., 2001; Whittington, 2006) that has contributed new insights to diverse organizational phenomena such as strategies (Ghia & MacKay, 2007; Jarzabkowski, 2005), routines (D'Adderio, 2008; Feldman & Pentland, 2003), work and occupations (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006; O'Mahony & Bechky, 2008), sustainability and innovation (Garud & Gehman, 2012; Garud, Gehman, & Kumaraswamy, 2011), information technologies (Leonardi, 2007; Orlikowski, 2000), and knowledge (Gherardi, 2006; Nicolini, 2011).
At the core of the practice perspective is a relational ontology, one that flattens out conventional dualisms and reconceives of agency as distributed across social and material elements (Latour, 2005). In this perspective, values are to be found in practice (Dewey, 1939; Joas, 2000; Rouse, 2001). As Schatzki explained: "The organization of a practice is normative. . . . By 'normativity' I mean, first, oughtness and, beyond this, acceptability" (2002: 80, 85; see also Rouse, 2001). Thus, practices imply which ends should be pursued, what should be said and done, and how actions should be carried out.
Although offering a potentially promising reconceptualization of values, these literatures have not
explicitly addressed the emergence and performance of practices that are normatively right or wrong, good or bad, and thus, pursued as ends in themselves—what we call values practices.
