In this final video, I want to cover a few questions. And the first one that I want to cover is, how can industries and organizations avoid getting trapped by myths? And this was posed by Ben Bernard. Actually, I really liked this question because a few of you made responses that really elaborated and provided insights into the theory of the week. Ben wrote, in my field, software development, a methodology called agile software development is now quite prominent. Agile software development began as a rejection of the myth that software should be built with the heavy processes, planning, upfront design, and detailed contracts that had been inherited from other fields. And instead focused on collaboration and interaction. Responsiveness to changing requirements and producing working software as quickly as possible. So, projects and teams adhering to these agile principles developed alternative processes that seemed to help them better pursue these goals than established engineering practices. And Ben goes on to ask, I'm wondering, have others seen similar cycles from one myth replacing another? And he assumes, I think, in his question, that adopting a myth isn't a good thing necessarily. That if you have a rationalized myth, it's not supported per se. And the neat response occurred from Troy, [INAUDIBLE] read it, too. There are a few I'm going to read here today on this third question. And Troy says, in my field, the US Army medicine, the six sigma ideas have been widely hailed as the best thing since sliced bread. And he says, six sigma's in the operations management philosophy. The basic idea is that every process has a statistical standard deviation, a sigma. And if you can refine the process to the point that six sigmas fall within the range of acceptable outputs, you'll have only one in a million chance that the product, the output is faulty. And he goes on to say, well, what is the standard deviation of a multi-trauma patient? Or, for the wider army, what is the standard deviation of battle? And I can even think about for schooling, what's standard deviation of a successful class? So, this is the myth, right? That we have these measurements of best practice or even indicators. And he says, it's interesting for me, he says, that rather than avoiding being trap by myths, is how do you effectively use them? And he thinks the US Army does this very well. And he had asked if we had thoughts. I think that often this is a mimetic process. And I think Anna picks up on this. That, you're adopting things that are perceived as legitimate without any kind of focus on the efficiency of them. You assume they're rational, that they do contribute to efficiency. And I think that's the point. That we rotate this things. And Keith tries to paraphrase this. And I think he does an exceptional job. I mean, you deserve big kudos Keith because you get it. He says, this is a great question. If I have correctly understood neoinstitutional theory, it poses that organisation's success is in part imbued through adoption of broadly perceived cultural indicators of success. The cognitive controls described suggests that if it looks and sounds like a duck, it must be a duck. I think it's look and quack like a duck. So using your example, if it is widely understood that agile software development is successful, firms need to be perceived to be doing agile software development to be successful. There's lots of pump and show of the trappings of agile software design, and this may not deliver results. Indeed, it may inhibit the very creativity and freedom that it was supposed to be enabling, but it may nonetheless help the company succeed. So, Ong's example he says of transparent procurement is spot on as well. This theory, again, assuming I've understood, you have, would postulate that it is important that actors perceive your organization as having transparent procurement processes, especially if this is the culturally expected norm. Perception will lead to success, even potentially in instances where it's in fact, particularly unhelpful. Indeed, possibly quite a waste of time and energy to actually run double-blind bidding processes. And then he goes on to say, another example might be holding presidential elections in non-democratic states. Governments seek legitimacy through culturally accepted indicators of democratic governance. So they hold these elections with great fanfare, but the truth, the elections are kind of rigged, there's no real choice. So, Keith that's a terrific answer. And sorry to bore everyone if you didn't want me to read it, but I thought it was definitely worth reading. Other people go on to talk about, like Ken, yes Ken, I am reading and listening, about managerialism as a new logic that's infiltrating non-profits. Saying, I think that's true in schooling with the accountability movements. Here we have this notion of choice, of accountability, of free markets, managerialism, kind of entering the development of schooling with the effect on schooling. Here's that myth that we think were rationalize, make it better. On the other hand, we had in the past this decoupling and teacher professionalism that we thought would develop a more rational efficient system. So these two logics or two competing institutionalized or rationalized myths are kind of clashing. And that's kind of debate right now. So, I think this is kind of a reflection of the fact that in an environment, there can be multiple public opinions or notions of what is a rational procedure. And so these can kind of appeal to different facets of an organization and try to be adoptive. In fact, a lot of organizations try to have legitimacy with different segments of the population. And that's why they appeal, like universities do, to not just teaching, but to research, to community outreach, etc. Now, you guys also raised the question about measurements and metrics as a means to re-couple these institutions and to avoid or to get away from rationalized myths. But I'm not sure that's necessarily a solution. We have to keep in mind that anytime we measure things and quantify them, when you're standardizing them into a comparable form that simplifies the reality and information. And by doing that, we kind of also ignore other kinds of outcomes or processes. So, it helps establish a logic of confidence by narrowing our band of focus through a metric. We ignore other things. And a great example's like tenure and promotion in universities. Right now, you'll see a lot of effort to use the H-index, or citation indices of faculty. And it's not always a clear reflection of the best faculty, the most talented faculty. Sometimes the most cited works are terrible. And they're cited exactly [LAUGH] for that reason. Or they're a fluff site. They're not necessarily a substantive site, and on it goes. So, we have interpretations of what may be missed by this metric, but it does create a confidence. Like if you can say that these are the people we have and they have this kind of citation index and it's better than Notre Dame or whatever, that we then have this legitimacy. However, it's this confidence in the metric. And it's not necessarily the case that it captures the complexity of the phenomenon. Or the reality of the efficiency and success, or the qualities that we're interested in. So I think we have to take it with a grain of salt. It's helpful to some extent, but we need to keep in mind that it's only as good as the metric. All right, another thing to also think about in that question is, how complex and uncertain environments are, particularly in modernity. We have all of these contradictions in the environment and rationalized myth is hard to kind of analyze everything endlessly. And the adoption of my [INAUDIBLE] of imitating other firms can be a streamlined short circuit effort. It can kind of help you establish legitimacy for your firm and acquire resources in spite of not being as efficient as you'd like. So there independent of efficiency there are these returns of resources that you get from being a legitimate. So myths aren't necessarily, or adoption of them, is necessarily a bad thing. It's just not a clear indicator of efficiency and content. The fourth question I want to address was written by Carmela. She asked, can an organization exist in a larger social environment with a different value system? And a lot of you guys mentioned, of course it can. They're revolutionary and innovating firms that don't fit, like Satay, Ivan, and so on. Others say, well, the environment changes and the regime does not fit, which is actually more consistent with institutional theory. That's Vernon who mentions this, that the environment changes and these firms don't mirror it culturally. Now Morton says that organizations adapt with organizational forms or formal structures which have legitimacy in the environment, but they don't necessarily adapt their content. So, what it means is that all these firms are conforming ceremonially in terms of their formal structure but not internally in terms of their content or their technology. I think Suneil talks about this too and reinforces it. When I think about charter schools or private schools or for-profit schooling, they're all kind of similar in form to a public school or high school or elementary school. But their content and technology can be somewhat difference. So they can be a maverick in practice, but not necessarily in the ceremonial constructs as we think as legitimate for school. There's a nice piece that would be worth exploring, for those of you interested in this, it was written by Daymond Phillips and Ezra Zuckerman in 2001 of the American Journal of Sociology, where they talk about middle status conformity. And the argument here is that conformity's highest when you have middle ground status. When you're at the top of the field, like a Stanford that has high status, has legitimacy by its status and it can afford to break with other kinds of norms. So it can be a maverick in some regard. On the other hand, if your on the bottom of the status hierarchy, and you don't get any rewards from this identity, you can deviate even further, as opposed to just doing it even one step better by innovating as a maverick at the top. At the bottom, it's kind of rebel against the system in general. That you don't need it to do something quite distinctive. So I think it's feasible that you can have these kinds of innovations, and there are theories about it. Typically, though, the institutional view is that you match. And it's not quite as dynamic as we like. That's why I went into the framing. And I think a lot of you are catching on on the fact that firms do innovate, particularly with content, even though they may buffer their formal organization on the outside in these ways. So, you can appeal the distinct elements in the environment, you can appeal the distinct opinions or segments. So your organization can have a differentiated structure, I think was also something we talked about. Segmenting your structure and then appealing to multiple rationalized myths may be feasible for a lot of firms. So I don't want you to think that it's always just one. The final question that I'm going to address was about corporate responsibility as a rationalized myth. And this is one that Juan asked. And he said, if we consider corporate social responsibility, it seems to be a rationalized myth that people are kind of using as a ceremonial display. And I think there's some validity to that claim. That Troy, Ramon, you guys say, well, of course it is. It's not essential to the function of each organization to do this social responsible behavior. It's more window dressing and a side task that's amplified to get public empathy and support and legitimacy and that dimension of moral legitimacy say. [COUGH] Others of you are less skeptical. You saw it as anyone who investigated the CSR policies or the corporate social responsibility policies of the different firms. That you would quickly understand that some firms go beyond the myth and are ready to question organizational routines to find their own way to produce and interact in a more responsible way. And this was Julia's thinking. I also think Martha saw this too. She said that the outside environment can call the company to task if they just do it as window dressing. So, there is something like that going on. And I think it's true that CSR has spread too. It's kind of diffused, and a couple of anonymous posts mention this. That it's kind of spread across all of corporate America and elsewhere in Europe and beyond. And so, the thing is, that there's some kind of skepticism on whether it's real and substantive. My wonder is, even if it is ceremonial, whether that entails something. And the kind of example I'm thinking about is when we change our language, our rhetoric. And the case in the United States is when 30 years ago we used to write everything he said, blah. And today we say, he or she, and we rotate in an effort to have gender equity in our pronoun usage so that it doesn't privilege one gender. So, it sounds silly. It sounds like it's just window dressing, but in some ways I think it actually runs a little deeper. I think it did change people's assumptions, their beliefs and presuppositions about genders. And I think there's something to that. And whether the form that we change, if we do adopt window dressings maybe, that maybe they run somewhere into the content to some extent. I don't think they're completely decoupled. In fact, a lot of organizations lack that decoupling. So, I think that's something to think about, whether they amplify corporate social responsibility to the point where it's kind of a joke like the Chevron example. That's another matter and we should call them out on it. But nonetheless, this is very interesting. I think it's fair to use the institutional theory to think about these phenomenon. So these have been wonderful questions this week. There are many others, but I've already probably recorded over an hour of screen-side chats this time, and I want to be conscious of your time. So thank you. We have one more week of lectures. And I will try to do one final screen-side chat next week. And then we have the final. So, I look to see you on the forum. Thanks.
