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Michael Litschka Matthias Karmasin, (2012),"Ethical implications of the mediatization of organizations",
Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Vol. 10 Iss 4 pp. 222 - 239
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Matthias Karmasin
Received 3 February 2012
Revised 15 May 2012
Accepted 20 July 2012
Journal of Information,
Communication and Ethics in Society
Vol. 10 No. 4, 2012
pp. 222-239
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1477-996X
DOI 10.1108/14779961211285863
environments are more and more determined by media, organizations are also subject to
the process of mediatisation. As Silverstone (2005, p. 190) puts it, mediatization can go very
far, in that politics, like experience, can no longer even be thought outside a media frame.
An important societal consequence here is:
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In earlier societies, social institutions like family, school and church were the most important
providers of information, tradition and moral orientation for the individual member of
society. Today, these institutions have lost some of their former authority, and the media
have to some extent taken over their role as providers of information and moral orientation, at
the same time as the media have become societys most important storyteller about society
itself (Hjarvard, 2008, p. 7).
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of private and public sphere would suggest), only privately owned means of production
and distribution. Ortmann et al. (1997, p. 19) describe the return of society to
organizational theory in the introduction to their anthology:
Part of this dodginess comes from the fact that organization and modern society relate to one
another in recursive constitution so that organizations produce and reproduce exactly those
social structures and institutions under which they operate sometimes, but not always,
with strategic goals. To take this view, defined by Giddens as duality and recursivity of
structure, into account also when the relationship of organization and society is concerned, we
take as a good panacea against all isms and especially the one way thinking of new
institutionalism [. . .][2].
Consequently, communication science has already argued in a few places (Saxer, 1999;
Schmidt, 2000) that organization is understood as communicative construct. The process
of organizing is therefore a process of communication, of creating and dismissing and
finally of processing its own deconstruction (Ortmann, 2002, p. 106). The result of such
processes is organizations which produce content (and by that also publicity and
attentiveness) with specific intentions, even if their strategic core competence lies in other
areas. The organization becomes the network hub within communication and each
enterprise is also a media enterprise. A media company is not only a producer and
distributor of mass media and mass media specific supplies any more. The output
of media companies within the context of conglomerate concentration, convergence, and
changing ways of refinancing reaches beyond the selection and processing of content,
and is moving towards trade (tele-shopping, e-commerce, merchandising) and services
(consulting, financial services, distance learning, logistics, etc.). This is not only true for
the content industry in the narrow sense of the word. A media enterprise in the sense
of the above-mentioned example is not only a (public or private) broadcasting company,
a publishing house, or any journalistically-orientated firm, but any organization
producing, allocating or providing content. This wider sense of media enterprises takes
into account the fact that in the course of convergence and conglomerate concentration,
the boundaries between industries and economic sectors disappear.
This understanding of the organization reflects the dual role of it as:
.
producer of social capital (economy of attention, organization as part of the
public sphere); and
.
producer of real capital (economics of communication and production,
organization as part of society).
By such thinking we take into account the primary role of the organization as
a principal structuring element in a society of organizations (Perrow, 1996) as well
the role of enterprises as central element of value added (in material and immaterial
points of view)[3]. Organizations determine when, where and for how much time
human beings work, live, love or consume. Organizations like schools, universities,
hospitals, media, production companies, banks, insurances, etc. decide upon the
condition Humana. They decide upon possibilities and conditions of purchase, upon
capital flows that determine winners and losers in professional life, upon pensions and
retirement provisions, they compress time (see just-in-time-production) and expand
time (in the hope for interest payments), they define spaces for gainful employments
and structure networks, they simply construe the world in a complex environment.
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Taking all this into consideration, they also become moral instances with the possibility
of being attributed to ethical responsibility (Ulrich, 2001; Noll, 2002; Gobel, 2006;
Karmasin and Litschka, 2008).
In the rest of this paper the discussion centers on ways of how such responsibility
can be defined and given its place within the organization. This is a task for business
ethics and, where media enterprises are concerned, for media ethics based on economic
ethical concepts.
2. Communication and legitimization of organizations: rights and social
contracts
The public exposure of organizations has led to a global discussion about the nature,
goals, and responsibility of them in the information/knowledge society. Basically, we
can divide the views of the many writers on this topic into two world views[4]: either
the development described above is seen as having bad consequences for society and
being a sign of the problematic implications of capitalism, or it is seen as giving hope
for an integration of organizational and societal preferences. Both viewpoints criticize
the shareholder focus of modern organizations, but while the first group puts an
emphasis on social (and media) policy to keep the possibilities of, e.g. companies within
clear cut borders, the other group believes in the self-restraining power of the
stakeholder approach to organizational management. To manage for stakeholders
(without the need for public intervention) would bring out the positive effects of
self-regulation, and the more stakeholders are included into the firm strategy, the more
societal needs can be accounted for by the organization.
The first group sees the evil implications of organizations (especially firms), in the
form of globalization, conglomerate concentration, new exploitation, loss of flexibility
and puts them under general suspicion (Glotz, 2000; Ferguson, 2001; Soros, 2001;
Forrester, 2001; Mies, 2001). These authors criticize that through concentration and
mediatisation, the power of enterprises grows and is misused, that incentives for
unethical behavior rise, that the possibilities to sanction such behavior decline, and
that the information society degenerates to a global exploitation society under digital
prefixes[5]. Only a strong framework order policy may secure the bonum commune
and organizations can be directed towards social responsibility only through the threat
of enforcement.
The second group mostly sees the benefits of publicly exposed organizations. Public
communication influences politics, consumption, and investment and by that coerces
the return of society into organizations[6]. Concentration exposes them to the public
and makes them the focal point of ethical demands beyond market or state. The process
of dealing with the self-produced public sphere allows them to understand ethical
demands not as an imposition but as an economic necessity and competitive advantage
(Porter and Kramer, 2003). This group hopes for the re-integration of ethics into
the economy[7] for the control and pressure of the media as fourth power, for the
involvement of stakeholders, and for a globalization of not only commerce but also the
public (Karmasin, 2002). The stakeholder approach is one way organizations can
hope to live up to such expectations. As Freeman and Evan (1993, p. 262) put it:
A stakeholder theory of the firm must redefine the purpose of the firm. The stockholder
theory claims that the purpose of the firm is to maximize the welfare of the stockholders,
perhaps subject to some moral or social constraints, either because such maximization leads
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to the greatest good or because of property right: The purpose of the firm is quite different in
our view. [. . .] The very purpose of the firm is, in our view, to serve as a vehicle for
coordinating stakeholder interests.
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by autonomous, rational adults (like the right to freedom), as they are capable of primary
self-dependent actions. It is obvious that the named rights as well as freedom in
general do not have a universally agreed upon meaning (see the discussion in Sen (2009),
on human rights and positive freedoms). Also, even if there were such a consent, they
might be violated quite easily and must therefore be secured by the respective laws.
The actions of a corporation, then, are secondary actions, as they are constituted by
primary actions of such rational adults. Corporations are not identical to the persons
of whom they consist, even though hierarchical structures give some persons more
responsibility and authority than others. That is, also their rights are not identical,
but derived rights from individual persons rights. It follows that corporations (or other
organizations) have secondary moral rights, and if all moral rights are equal, also
secondary moral rights bring with them obligations and duties. One of them would be to
accept the rights of all other persons and corporations as equal; so corporative rights can
imply duties to individuals, too, e.g. to not to claim more freedom for itself than to assign
to its own organizational members. As organizational rights are secondary rights,
derived from individual rights, they cannot claim priority above individual rights.
But even as a secondary moral actor (with secondary moral rights and obligations)
organizations can be made responsible for their actions, and this can be done
independently of individual moral responsibilities, from which their moral obligations
are derived. This is because they must first secure the primary rights of persons
before they can claim their secondary rights, e.g. to freedom (Werhane, 1992, p. 332).
An example would be that organizations cannot deny its workers some basic labor
security measures (primary right) by pointing to the economic (secondary) right to
expand in another country with fewer regulations regarding labor security.
Using another approach often used in business ethics, namely social contract
theory, we find even more compelling arguments for a re-definition of the concept of an
organization. Social contract theory (contractarianism) tries to explain moral actions
as coming from an agreement between individuals, which they commit themselves to,
according to strategic deliberations. As such, this approach is functionalist in nature,
because the arising (mostly implicit) contracts must be advantageous to any of the
participating parties. Starting from an original state, where people have different
knowledge about their status or fortune or talents, they begin to bargain and construct
a society in which their preferences can be best fulfilled (a cooperative surplus can be
reached). This agreement is idealized insofar as it is infeasible to have all members of
a society bargain about such a topic, but nevertheless it is binding because there are
good reasons why everybody could have agreed to the arising norms had he or she
really participated in the bargaining (Kersting, 1996, p. 265). A paradigmatic social
contract approach to a just society came from Rawls (1988, 2006), who conceptualized
society as a fair system of cooperation to reach mutual benefits. Other world views
on the functioning of societies could of course also be used here, e.g. a discourse ethical
or a system theoretic view.
Returning to our problem of legitimizing that organizations have specific obligations
and social responsibilities, which is a demand we have seen coming especially from
stakeholder theory, an application of social contract theory to business and media ethics
seems fit. Why should an organization accept certain stakeholder rights, prioritize some
rights over others, and give itself restrictions which may constrain its own rights?
Donaldson (1989, p. 44ff.) gives a contractarian answer.
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After having given some arguments why the mediatization of organizations leads to
ethical legitimization processes in order to keep the license to operate, we want to
present some empirical findings for Austrian companies. What exactly are structural,
organizational, and political barriers to such processes?
3. Some empirical findings: organizational and communicative barriers for
ethical decision making in Austria
In a project for the Jubilee Fund of the Austrian Central Bank (Project No. 12939) a survey
was conducted on how managers make decisions in ethical dilemma situations. In the
quantitative part of the project, the underlying ethical decision bases in such situations
were analyzed (e.g. fairness criteria, altruism, reciprocity (Litschka et al., 2011)).
The qualitative part consisted of expert interviews with researchers and managers in
order to explore communicative and organizational barriers to these ethical decisions.
For the interpretation of the data we relied on qualitative research methods with an
approach adapted to management science (Glaser and Laudel, 2009; Bogner et al., 2009;
Myers, 2009). The interviews gave a picture of how respondents understand the relevant
research question and construct the respective reality (Cropley, 2005).
Sampling was undertaken with a view to integrate different disciplines and different
industries; five professors from economics, business administration, communication
sciences, and economic history, working in three different Austrian universities, made
up the sample of researchers, while nine managers from banking and finance,
information technology, education, steel industry, airline industry, oil industry,
commerce, and PR (all working in Austrian headquarters, but partly in international
companies) represented the management part of respondents.
The guided interview included the topics, among others (Table I).
The 14 interviews were conducted, recorded, transcribed, and interpreted using
qualitative analysis techniques. We did not follow a hermeneutic-interpretative
approach like in Grondin (2009) or Wernet (2006), but used the research logic of Mayring
(2002, 2008) and Mayring and Glaser-Zikuda (2008). Here are some of the results
concerning structural and communicational problems.
Basically all interviewed organizations were of the opinion that it is sensible to have
written guidelines and codices which can then be anchored in the corporate culture.
While the academic experts (professors) in the survey stressed the importance of giving
ethics a place within enterprises and combining such guidelines with the respective
possibilities to sanction them, managers put their trust more in intrinsic motivations of
employees to follow such guidelines. Also, managers are more prone to use for example
an ethics codex as an instrument of external communication (Section 4), a fact also
exemplified by their understanding of the concept of stakeholder as target group.
Scientists on the other hand see the stakeholder approach as a socially desired strategy
of organizations and want conflicting interests of stakeholders to be ethically analyzed.
In our survey, ethical dilemma situations could be attached to three levels of
analysis: the individual level of management, the organizational level of the enterprise,
Framework order problems
Ethical dilemma situations in management
Structural problems and organization of ethics
CSR
Ethical problems of new ICT
Ethical conflicts with personnel management
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Table I.
Topics of semi
structured interviews
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and the social level of the market and politics. These levels correspond with the
respective concepts used in ethics, namely management ethics, business ethics, and
economic ethics.
On the individual level, role conflicts of managers (i.e. to be another person in the job
than in private life, with corresponding conflicts of ethical norms when their income is
concerned) were cited very often. Experts also called this problem homo oeconomicus
vs homo politicus. It also seems that modern organizations are not fit to guarantee
a certain work-life balance, as their primary goal is concerned with productivity.
The orientations towards bonus payments was also mentioned as problematic, because
sustainable decisions are not to be expected from such short-term incentives.
On the organizational level, the informational advantage (in the sense of asymmetric
information) of enterprises was stressed. According to the respondents not to use
this advantage to the detriment of customers or employees was a demand of fairness,
and clear rules for this behavior were wished for. The short-term necessity of publishing
quarterly reports that might be sugarcoated for the public was seen as a direct
antagonism to the demand of the stakeholder approach, which promotes transparency
and openness towards stakeholders. For such (and other) short-term necessities,
a shareholder-orientated strategy of firms was charged. Some managers were even
forced to dismiss people just because of this dominance of shareholder value. They said
that even when the business administrative sustainability of an organization was
secured, there could still exist a lack of social and ecological sustainability. One
important question on the organizational level was the tasks and moral limits of the new
information and communication technologies (ICTs). While managers deemed it
necessary to have the possibility of observing certain behavior of their employees
(e.g. have access to e-mails if they consent to that), they also were aware of the basic
problem of data protection and private sphere that employees must be able to enjoy.
Professors said that the pressure to legitimize an organizations action has become
harder as the flood of information that could be reported has also increased. So there
might be a dilemma of making organizational decisions transparent to stakeholders and
processing only as much information as is feasible.
On the social level of the market, the competitive pressure in modern market
economies led some organizations to opportunistic behavior in the sense of adapting
for example company goals to only include monetary or shareholder targets. This
framework order might prefer particular interests (of economic organizations) to
collective rationality (demanding also fairness or distributive justice). An example given
by respondents was the social goal of full employment that is contrasted (and impeded)
by the organizational goal of cost cutting and personnel reductions. Therefore, the
economic freedom the market economy can provide is not always concurrent to the
responsibility (communicative and social) the organization should take on.
Both respondent groups have also given some explanations as to why, in their opinion,
such dilemma situations can arise; they identified the following structural reasons.
On the individual level, the very career driven and opportunistic behavior of
managers was ascribed to the problematic incentive of bonus payments according to
short-term decisions (quarterly reports, etc.). From this and the fact that managers do
not get any kind of education concerning ethical reasoning, emerges a role model lacking
competence to decide on ethical matters and leading to bad personnel decisions.
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this fact can also be exposed by the media. From an ethical standpoint the medias role
as fourth power has become more meaningful and technical possibilities of
communication have increased the legitimization pressure of organizations.
While many of the above-listed problems are seen in a similar way by both managers
and researchers, there are some different views as to possible solutions. Managers
say that incentives to their actions and decisions are predetermined by organizational
culture, whereas professors stress the fact that this culture must be actively influenced
in the direction of a positive incentive system. Managers concentrate on the individual
and organizational level, scientists rather see the framework order as a central starting
point for solutions. In addition, professors see a void in the Austrian educational system,
as the economic core courses economics and business administration often do not teach
ethical reflection capabilities (via learning of basic theoretical concepts and solving
case studies).
Following the theoretical analysis of Chapters 1 and 2 and the empirical examples
of Chapter 3 we now suggest some communicative and organizational measures to
incorporate ethics, rules, and incentives into an organization.
4. Ethics needs organization and communication
4.1 CSR vs PR
The public legitimization discourses already mentioned in Chapter 1 do not only
change the relation between organization and public; they change (as we believe) the
organizational structures themselves. Only if responsibility is institutionalized will
there be a solid legitimate basis beyond solely communicating and selling a certain
image. The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) tries to encompass some of
the supposed dichotomies of ethics and economics. Often, the degree of seriousness this
topic is dealt with depends on the moral disposition of managers themselves.
According to the success of the current business, they may take CSR seriously or they
may not, which can make the concept one of sunshine value, but not of real and
reflected ethics. Activities focusing on sponsoring, contributing, etc. which can all be
attributed to charitable motives and the way profits are distributed, but not the way
profits are earned in the core business, can be called donation ethics (Thielemann and
Ulrich, 2009); such activities are very easily prone to the suspicion of being pure PR
actions, making business ethics the business of ethics.
The central role of institutionalizing ethical questions and problems is to overcome
such suspicions and not to rely on the individual commitment of single individuals.
Such managerial ethics is of course very important within organizations, but very often
not sufficient to reach systematically reproducible patterns of actions which could
also survive a change in management. The goal is therefore to install processes
of self-governance of ethical reflections, which shows that ethical problems must
be solved collectively, not individually (in the sense of process ethics, see Krainer (2001,
p. 229) or Heintel et al. (2006); see also Section 4.3).
4.2 Institutionalizing: some possibilities
The ethical transformation of the organization following the above arguments implies
a systematic, structured, and collective handling of moral problems. The success of
such an ethics management or integrity management depends on processes of
self-commitment (e.g. management systems), structures (e.g. institutions), and internal
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This board of directors should, according to Freeman and Evan (1993), adhere to some
general stakeholder management principles, written down in the codex:
P1: The corporation should be managed for the benefit of its stakeholders, its customers,
suppliers, owners, employees, and local communities: The rights of these groups must be
ensured, and, further, the groups must participate, in some sense, in decisions that
substantially affect their welfare.
P2: Management bears a fiduciary relationship to stakeholders and to the corporation as an
abstract entity. It must act in the interests of the stakeholders as their agent, and it must act in
the interests of the corporation to ensure the survival of the firm, safeguarding the long-term
stakes of each group (Freeman and Evan, 1993, p. 262).
Of course these groups are not homogenous, but we can define certain basic rights
pertaining to all individual members of each group, e.g. the right of not being violated
physically. The respective representatives in the board can also act according to a
specific stakeholder bill of rights, building the basis of a stakeholder assembly, the
content of which Freeman and Evan (1993, p. 264) circumscribe as follows:
Each stakeholder group would have the right to elect representatives and to recall
representatives to boards. [. . .] Each stakeholder group would have the right to free speech,
the right to grievance procedures inside the corporation and if necessary in the courts, the
right to civil disobedience, and other basic political rights.
Karmasin and Weder (2008) describe the path from visibility to transparency any firm
must take if it wants to include a stakeholder approach on all levels of the organization,
not only in strategic management, but also in all other functions (marketing,
controlling, personnel, reporting, etc.). Communication of measures is an integral part
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4. Of course we could include here a third view, a` la Friedman (1970): companies have no other
goal and no other responsibility as to make profits and respect shareholder interests; this
view will not be dealt with in the following.
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About the authors
Dr Michael Litschka is Professor at the University of Applied Sciences St Polten, Austria. He has
a PhD in Economic and Social Sciences and teaches media ethics, media economics, and business
ethics. His main research interests are in economic and organizational ethics, business ethics of
media enterprises, and management ethics. Michael Litschka is the corresponding author and
can be contacted at: michael.litschka@fhstp.ac.at
Matthias Karmasin is Full Professor at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He has a PhD
in Communication Sciences and a PhD in Economic and Social Sciences and teaches media
management, media ethics, and communication sciences. His main research interests are in
organizational communication, business ethics of media enterprises, and philosophy of
communication.