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On the Possibility of a Paratelic Initiation of Organizational Wrongdoing

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Don’t play the game by the rules. Change it.

– KPMG advertisement, Copenhagen Airport, November 2015.

With his small joke, the stupidest of all ideas became reasonable, even almost sensible, maybe even genius. The alternative—sanity—became insane.

– Jonathan Safran Foer (2016), Here I Am, Hamish Hamilton, p. 387.

Abstract

In terms of reversal theory, both dominant and alternative explanations of the initiation of organizational wrongdoing assume that its perpetrators act in a telic state of mind. This leaves us with explanations of organizational wrongdoing that are insufficiently appreciative of the agent’s experience. The human mind can be creative and imaginative, too, and people can fully immerse in their activity. We suggest that the paratelic state of mind is relevant for the phenomenological understanding of the initiation of original, creative, daring courses of action, and that the paratelic state of mind may originate courses of action that social control agents, at a later moment in time, may label as organizational wrongdoing. Our proposal is especially relevant when organizational agents are on a course of exploration, facing uncertainty, complexity, and unavailability of information.

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Notes

  1. We use the word ‘agent’ as a short hand for one or more organizational members who act on behalf of the organization; they are employees with some level of discretion and autonomy, such as managers at various hierarchical levels in the organization or specialists.

  2. Interpreted as strain, this demand may be a seen as a shortcut to wrongdoing, but this interpretation sidelines the agent’s experience.

  3. Some of the dominant and alternative explanations that Palmer (2012) discusses deal with questions of how organizational wrongdoing perpetuates and how bystanders become implicated in wrongdoing that is already occurring.

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Acknowledgements

We presented earlier versions of the paper at various workshops and conferences, including the 2016 Organization Studies Workshop (Mykonos, Greece), the 2016 EGOS Colloquium (Naples, Italy), and the 2016 EBEN conference (Nottingham, UK). The development of the manuscript has significantly benefited from discussions at these events, as well as from the comments and questions kindly provided by the anonymous Reviewers of this journal, and by many of our colleagues, including Jonne Arjoranta, Laure Cabantous, Robbin Derry, Nick Dessing, Marianna Fotaki, Ed Freeman, Dirk Lindebaum, Mollie Painter, and Mike Zundel.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Organization, Hanken School of Economics, PO Box 479, 00101, Helsinki, Finland

    Mikko Vesa & Frank den Hond

  2. FSW Department of Organization Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Frank den Hond

  3. Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Tampere, Tampereen yliopisto, 33014, Tampere, Finland

    J. Tuomas Harviainen

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  1. Mikko Vesa
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Correspondence to Frank den Hond.

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Vesa, M., Hond, F.d. & Harviainen, J.T. On the Possibility of a Paratelic Initiation of Organizational Wrongdoing. J Bus Ethics 160, 1–15 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3852-z

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