Journal of Organizational Change Management

Emerald Article: Performativity in place of responsibility?

Barbara Czarniawska

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Barbara Czarniawska, (2011),"Performativity in place of responsibility?", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 24
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Barbara Czarniawska, (2011),"Performativity in place of responsibility?", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 24
Iss: 6 pp. 823 - 829
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09534811111175779
Barbara Czarniawska, (2011),"Performativity in place of responsibility?", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 24
Iss: 6 pp. 823 - 829
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Performativity in place
of responsibility?

Performativity
in place of
responsibility?

Barbara Czarniawska
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

823

Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to question the common conviction that responsibility is the
major factor influencing performance.
Design/methodology/approach The paper takes the form of a comparison of two recent cases of
ecological catastrophes.
Findings In emergency situations, locating parties able to perform gives better results than
establishing responsibility for the accident.
Research limitations/implications More similar cases should be examined systematically.
Practical implications If the conclusions are accepted, the conventional mode of acting in
emergencies may change.
Social implications Hopefully, the paper may redirect attention from responsibility to
performativity.
Originality/value The paper opposes a commonly accepted belief and the corresponding mode of
acting.
Keywords Organizational performance, Disaster management, Emergency measures, Responsibilities,
Performativity
Paper type Research paper

Organizing in action nets

Following in the steps of others, beginning with Weick (1969/1979), I have tried for the
past ten years or more to convince organization scholars that they should focus on the
process of organizing, and not on but one of its results formal organizations
(Czarniawska, 1997, 2008). I argue that it is not that organizations produce organizing, but
that organizing produces organizations. Reification of the concept of organization into a
stable and separate entity most likely accomplished under the auspices of systems
theory led many organization scholars to neglect instances of organizing that occurred
beyond and among organizations. My remedy was to study the construction, stabilization,
maintenance, destruction, and reconstruction of action nets. Instead of studying the
building-like structures called organizations, or even the connections among previously
defined actors called networks, organization scholars should be studying construction
and maintenance of connections among collective actions. These collective actions need
not be performed within the bounds of a formal organization; an action net can involve
actions performed by several formal organizations or simply by assemblies of human and
non-human actants (Latour, 2005)). The actions can be connected loosely or temporarily.
The genealogy of this idea leads straight to actor-network theory, although I have
also added a pinch of new institutionalism: in a given institutional order, certain
collective actions seem obvious or even necessary candidates to be connected to others
(producing to selling, for example), whereas other connections (producing to hoarding,
for example) may seem strange or innovative, depending on the situation.

Journal of Organizational Change

Management
Vol. 24 No. 6, 2011
pp. 823-829
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0953-4814
DOI 10.1108/09534811111175779

JOCM
24,6

824

According to this perspective, formal organizations are but fragments of action nets,
stabilized and legitimized by their registration as legal entities. From the point of view of
organizing, they can be indeed be treated as tools to achieve certain goals, as suggested
by Perrow (1986) long ago. As tools, they should be kept and maintained because they
are doing their work or they should be dropped and replaced (Weick, 1996).
It can be claimed, however, that the reason for this insistence on responsibility is
that attribution of responsibility is a key societal action, which is always given priority.
If so, a focus on formal organizations may be necessary. Focusing on action nets rather
than organizations will make the attribution of responsibility more difficult or may
delay it. I now take a closer look at this argument.
Whereas the noun organization previously denoted either an association or the
process of organizing (in anthropology, for example), organization scholars using the
term in recent times seem to be referring, explicitly or implicitly, to a corporation a legal
person. This kind of reasoning becomes even more obvious when public administration
units are encouraged or forced to assume the shapes of real organizations,
i.e. corporations.
The history of corporations in the USA the usual country of reference is a history
of competition, never concluded, between the school of thought that conceptualizes
corporations as natural persons, and the school of thought that sees them as artificial
persons (Lamoreaux, 2004). In corporate law, Lamoreaux has said, the two theories tend
to hybridize rather than blend. Thus, organizations becoming legal persons acquire
the right to an identity, a will, and an image all necessary elements for attributing
responsibility to them.
But what good does it do, such attribution of responsibility? Does it make the person
artificial or natural redress the inappropriate behavior or engage in appropriate
behavior? This is far from sure. There are several problems related to responsibility
attribution, especially to legal persons: its symbolic nature, the reattribution of
responsibility, and the location of a culprit.
Thurman Arnold, famous US lawyer and anti-trust regulator, noted as early as 1937
that as an attribution of responsibility is a symbolic action, the response it evokes is of a
symbolic character as well (Arnold, 1937, p. 230). He wrote about the ritual of corporate
reorganization: a ritual based on the doctrine of vicarious atonement through which
the debts of an industrial organization are forgiven. He quoted several scandals of the
day, showing how a political coalition led by the lawyers in an insolvency case
submitted the guilty company to public punishment, leaving the political and financial
interests intact.
The second problem is revealed by actor-network theory: in case of organizations,
especially large ones, public opinion and the law deal with macro actors: networks that
pretend to be united in an actorhood. It does not take a conspiracy theorist to assume that
the attribution of responsibility will be re-directed within the network, which may reveal
the culprit, or may merely find an appropriate scapegoat.
My choice of words suggests the nature of the third problem. Is the purpose of
responsibility attribution the location of a culprit? And if so, what good will come of it?
In what follows, I consider two contrasting examples. Both are based on media
reports, which make them even more relevant for my present reasoning, as it is media
presentations that form imitation models for organizers in contemporary societies.

Locating responsibility: BP
On 20 April 2010, Deepwater Horizon, an oilrig belonging to British Petroleum,
exploded while drilling at Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 people
and causing a massive oil spill. The US Government has named BP as the responsible
party, and officials have committed to hold the company accountable for all cleanup
costs and other damage, says Wikipedia[1], which, when I accessed it on 4 July 2010,
had produced a 15-page article on the subject and many subsidiary ones.
A naive but straightforward question may be asked at this point: could the
establishment of the extent of BPs guilt clean the waters from the leaking oil? It
certainly failed to do so for a long time:
The oil from the ruptured well continues to flow as of July 2010. A number of attempts to
staunch the flow were either unsuccessful or have met with only a limited success, and relief
wells to allow termination of the flow are unlikely to be completed for some time[2].

The legal assumption is that location and punishment of the culprit will prevent future
crimes and misdemeanors. But this assumption is constantly debated within and outside
the law. In this case, it was assumed that establishing accountability could help
the victims of the accident, and that the fear of damaged public relations and future costs
in general would hasten the day when the leak would be stopped. Unless, that is, BP
would first invest in strengthening their PR personnel to deal with damage limitation
and only second in stopping the leak as has been demonstrated in cases of other
companies in trouble (Morsing and Beckmann, 2006) [. . .] In any case, the leak had to be
dealt with. But how should one know if it was the same actant within the macro actor
BP who had been guilty of the leak, and who could stop it?
The leak was finally stopped five months later, and only afterwards were the
following measures taken:
The well-kill operations in the Gulf of Mexico were completed on 19 September 2010.
On 29 September, BP announced that it will create a new safety division with sweeping
powers to oversee and audit the companys operations around the world. BP also reveals
plans to re-structure its Upstream segment from a single business into three divisions
Exploration, Development and Production. Incoming group chief executive Bob Dudley says:
These are the first and most urgent steps in a programme I am putting in place to rebuild
trust in BP. The changes are in areas where I believe we most clearly need to act, with
safety and risk management our most urgent priority (www.bp.com/iframe.
do?categoryId 9035136&contentId 7065156; accessed 19 March 2011).

Why the formation of three divisions from one should restore the publics trust in
BP remains an open question. Even if it could be established beyond doubt which
organizational unit, or even which natural person was instrumental in creating the oil
leak, this would not have cleared the oil from the Gulf of Mexico. I therefore suggest the
introduction of the concept of performativity the capacity to act that can be
established only by investigating action nets.
The original meaning of performativity is usually traced back to Austins (1962)
notion of performative utterances utterances that are equivalent to what is being
said (The meeting is closed). Various social scientists later developed the notion
and transferred it to different contexts. Callon (1998, p. 2) suggested, for example, that
economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs, shapes and formats the economy,
rather than observing how it functions. Many scholars of science and technology

Performativity
in place of
responsibility?
825

JOCM
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826

adopted this idea, and began writing about performativity, by which they meant that
theories and models bring about the very conditions that they attempt to explain
(MacKenzie, 2008, p. 25). I believe that the notion can be transferred from such
quasi-objects as economic models to collective actions and connections among them
action nets.
To return to the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, one would imagine that the critical
task was to identify the action or actions that would clean the water, and to follow up or
create the connections to other actions that are necessary for performing the crucial
one. Thus, the central operation should be the situating of performativity within
existing action nets, and activating those points and connections (or creating new ones,
if need be). If that was, indeed, the central operation, the media did not report on it in
any detail.
Situating performativity
Successful organizing, especially in crisis situations, seems to require three operations:
apportioning responsibility, situating performativity, and decoupled from the other
two attributing blame (a legal action). The crucial issue is the order in which they are
performed. Here is a short description of a recent event in which the order was, in my
view, correct.
On 5 August 2010, a cave-in at the San Jose` copper and gold mine trapped 33 men
below ground[3]. Probably influenced by previous criticism over the Chilean
governments handling of an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, President Pinera
abandoned his planned participation in the presidential inauguration in Colombia and
traveled to the mine. He issued an appeal to international experts, which was answered
by companies and individuals from around the world. The Swedish company,
Bergteamet, for instance, sent its equipment and technicians to San Jose[4]. All in all,
three extraction plans were prepared and put into operation. It was Plan B using a
US-manufactured drill owned by a Chilean-US joint venture company that reached the
miners, but cooperation included attendance to the health of the miners (because their
situation was judged similar to the astronauts, a team from NASA joined the rescuers)
and psychological and material help to their families. To the estimated more than one
billion people watching the rescue on television, it was clear that the question was and
remained: What needs to be done?.
The miners were extracted on 13 October 2010, after spending 69 days
underground[5]. President Pinera, accompanied by his wife, waited at the mouth of
the shaft throughout the night, and hugged the men as they appeared from the shaft.
Only after the rescue operation was completed, did the president state publicly that
those responsible for the collapse of the mine would be punished, and that Chiles mine
safety regulation would be overhauled.
On 25 October 2010 28 days before the deadline decided by the President
a preliminary report by the Commission on Work Safety delivered 30 proposals aimed
at improving work safety in the mines to Pinera[6]. It was not until 3 March 2011 that
Chiles Mining Minister Laurence Golborne told the media that a congressional
report had found that it was the owners, the San Esteban Mining Company, who were
responsible for delivering a safe workplace and who failed in this responsibility[7].
Imagine, as so often happens, if establishing responsibility had occurred before
establishing performativity. The miners would be still underground.

Situating performativity, attributing responsibility, and apportioning

blame
Common sense would indicate that, especially in situations of emergency, the
order should be the same as it was in the Chilean case: first, find those who can do
what needs to be done (situating performativity) and from among them select those
who would be capable and legitimate helpers (Margalit, 2010)[8]. Only later, when
the critical situation has been resolved, should one attribute responsibility for the
occurrence of emergency; or, in case of natural disasters, that the emergency measures
were not in place (apportioning blame). In March 2011, the Swedish media contrasted
the heroic measures taken by Japan after the earthquake and tsunami with the reaction
of the Swedish government after the tsunami in Thailand in 2004, when the issue most
discussed was whether or not the Swedish Foreign Minister had the right to go to the
theater when the catastrophe was taking place.
Yet such common sense rarely exists when needed. Our studies of organizing in the
face of risk and threat (Czarniawska, 2009) revealed that commonplace action following
a catastrophe consists of assembling a list of actors, divided into two columns: praise
and blame. No wonder, then, that preparation work planning how to meet possible
risks and threats consists almost entirely of the distribution of responsibilities. Even
less wonder that this type of preparation work results in the first place in the creation
of alibis, and only in the second place in a list of actions that need to be performed. As
Mol (2008) noted in the context of the health sector, another sector prone to
emergencies, the first question ought to be What needs to be done? and not, as it often
is, Who is in charge?
In practice, however, and especially in situations of disaster, the first question is
usually Who was in charge? One explanation of this procedure, which reaches
beyond legal and economic reasoning summarized earlier, can be found in narratology.
Attribution of responsibility to corporations follows a strong plot (Czarniawska and
Rhodes, 2006), according to which the villains must be punished for their crimes.
Strong plots are established and repeated patterns of employment, often recognizable
as variation of myths, folk tales, and classic literature. They are strong because they
belong to a common collective memory (as institutionalized patterns of interpretation),
and are retrieved and shared during times when they seem relevant (Margalit, 2003).
The power of such strong plots were observable during the financial crisis of
2007-2010, when the main question, like the subtitle of Daviess (2010) book, was Who
is to blame? Even intellectuals like Paul Krugman could not resist the strong plot of
Reagan did it (Ayan Rand and Allan Greenspan were also often evoked in this
context; see Czarniawska, n.d.).
In one of the classic texts in social psychology on attribution of responsibility,
Fishbein and Ajzen (1973), leaned heavily on the theories of Fritz Heider, who spoke of
levels of causality in the context of responsibility attribution. Although many of those
levels (for example, intentionality) are relevant only for natural persons, the core of
causality lies in commission, or instrumentality who or what actually committed the
deed the main point in attributing responsibility to formal organizations.
The two explanations narratological and psychological may be subsumed under
an anthropological tendency for locating a scapegoat for cathartic purposes. In 1983,
Giuseppe Bonazzi had already made a connection between disasters and organizational
scapegoating. He also pointed out two earlier explanations for this phenomenon:

Performativity
in place of
responsibility?
827

JOCM
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the account of Girard (1982/1986), who saw the ritual sacrifice of the scapegoat as an
institutionalized practice of symbolic control of violence, and the account of Smelser
(1963), who saw scapegoating as a result of emotional and logical oversimplifications
caused by a negative situation.
It seems, therefore, that there is no way of avoiding or diminishing the role of
responsibility attribution in the traditional sense of finding the culprit: the law needs it,
economy demands it, narratology calls for it, psychology justifies it, sociology explains
it, and anthropology corroborates it. The only problem is that, as in Gulf of the Mexico
case, the leak remains where it was. Although all these explanations are convincing,
therefore, they do not justify (in the sense of presenting as just) the presence of the
phenomenon in the supposedly rational organizing processes. On the contrary: studies
of high-reliability organizations (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001; Ely and Meyerson, 2010)
showed that such organizations are characterized by actions running against the
standard scripts, just as happened in Chile. It must be added that Ely and Meyersons
fieldwork was conducted on BPs oil platforms (long before the incident). Their study
demonstrated that on the operational level, performativity goes before responsibility,
and construction and maintenance of action nets goes before the formal division of
tasks and roles. This wisdom does not transfer to higher levels of the organization,
however, and is rarely, if ever, propagated by the media.
Notes
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BP (accessed 4 July 2010).
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon (accessed 4 July 2010).
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Copiapo_mining_accident (accessed 19 March 2011).
4. http://dn.se/nyheter/varlden/svenskar-deltar-i-gruvraddningen (accessed 19 March 2011).
5. http://reuters.com/article/2010/10/13/us-chile-miners-idUSN0925972620101013 (accessed
19 March 2011).
6. The commission held 204 hearings and reviewed 119 online suggestions, available at: http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Copiapo_mining_accident (accessed 19 March 2011).
7. http://vancouversun.com/news/Report blames owners collapse Chile mine/
4374612/story.html#ixzz1H8fELMIF (accessed 19 March 2011).
8. If the only expertise were to have been found in Iran, the Chilean government would have
found itself in the moral dilemma so well described by Margalit which could be called
attributing responsibility, but in a sense different from the usual meaning.
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Corresponding author
Barbara Czarniawska can be contacted at: Barbara.czarniawska@gri.gu.se

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Performativity
in place of
responsibility?
829