Transforming risks into moral issues in organizations

Management systems seeking to forecast and/or contain risks are prolific in organizations. However, there is another way to deal with risks: to transform them into moral issues. Instead of calculating possible courses of action and deriving subsequent measures, organizations call on the responsibility and diligence of their members to abate risks. This can be seen, for example, in cases where technological failure is attributed to the incorrect behaviour of employees (Perrow 1987). The implicit assumption is that if organizational members behave in a morally correct way, risks can be avoided.

This is often considered a problem because when they recur to morality, organizations avoid the search for systemic deficiencies in structures or in decision-making processes and therefore renounce efforts which could lead to their own improvement (Ortmann 2009). This contribution examines from a sociological perspective how, in uncertain situations characterised by conflicts and divergent opinions about specific technical questions, moral communication can become a functional manner of dealing with risks. By identifying and sanctioning scapegoats, organizations can display themselves as moral actors and acquire the internal and external backing necessary to continue operating. This is vital in the short term, but can be dangerous over time, because morality sets high expectations but gives little specific advice for action in complex systems.