Abstract
When the idea of using values in organizations was introduced in the 1980s, the aim was normative and idealistic. Values were something which organizations not only could but ought to employ in order to become better in all meanings of the term — better at honouring their purposes, better at motivating employees, customers and users, and better at creating profits. Values were viewed as a tool that could be used to continuously excite the organization to minimize the difference between the demands of the values and the organizational reality.
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Notes
This perspective is presented in Verner C. Petersen, Beyond Rules in Society and Business, Cheltenham, 2002.
This is the thesis in Nils Brunsson, The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations, 2nd edn, Oslo, 2003.
Machiavelli claims that a prince — that is, a leader — has to necessarily be able to present illusions and be ‘a great liar and deceiver’ in order to prevent his actions from demotivating the audience (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, London, 1961, p. 100).
Richard Sennett, The Tall of Public Man, New York, 1976, p. 264.
Niklas Luhmann, Organisation und Entscheidung, Opladen, 2000, pp. 417ff. See also
Ole Thyssen, ‘The Invisibility of the Organisation’ Ephemera, V (3), 2005, pp. 519–36.
Henry Mintzberg, Power in and Around Organizations, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1983, p. 228.
Aristotle, ‘Rhetoric’, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton, 2004, p. 2154.
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Toronto, 1980, p. 110.
A list of the twenty most used values in Danish organizations can be found in Mette Morsing and Peter Pruzan, ‘Values in Leadership — Perspectives, Potentials and Perplexity’, in L. Zsolnai (ed.), Ethics in the Economy: Handbook of Business Ethics, Berlin, 2002, pp. 259–94.
L. Russell Ackoff, Creating the Corporate Tuture, New York, 1982, p. 29.
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© 2009 Ole Thyssen
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Thyssen, O. (2009). Beautiful Lies — Values in Practice. In: Business Ethics and Organizational Values. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250932_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250932_12
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