The Dark Side of Organizations and a Method to Reveal It (original) (raw)
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Information misbehavior: How organizations use information to deceive
JASIST, 2023
Recent examples of organizational wrongdoing such as those that led to the opioid crisis and the 2008 financial meltdown show that organizations can deliberately use information to deceive others, resulting in serious harm. This brief communication explores the role of information in organizational wrongdoing. We analyze a dataset consisting of 80 cases of high-penalty corporate wrongdoing in the United States in the period 2000-2020. Our analysis of documents filed by the US Department of Justice and federal regulatory agencies in those cases found that organizations use two general information strategies to deceive and mislead. First, organizations can "sow doubt" on statements by others that hurt the organization's interests. Second, organizations can "exploit trust" that others have placed in them to provide truthful information. Our analysis suggests that which strategy is adopted depends on the degree that the organization's external information use environment is "contested" or "controlled." Across the cases examined, we observe three types of information behaviors that implement the strategy of sowing doubt and exploiting trust: information obfuscation, information concealment, and information falsification.
Theorizing and Researching the Dark Side of Organization
Organization Studies, 2014
The paper offers an introduction to research that concerns itself with the ‘dark side’ of organization and attempts to bring theoretical resources from a range of disciplines to bear upon the problem. This stream of research has emerged most visibly since the 1990s, although its concerns can be found in much earlier research. Frustrations with the tendencies of mainstream work to overlook, ignore or suppress difficult ethical, political and ideological issues, which may well mean life or death to some people, has in recent years led to a research that self-identifies its concerns as being with the dark side. We structure our review around key contributions on the dark side of organizational behaviour, mainly in psychology but also including the concept of organizational misbehaviour; the sociology of the dark side, with particular reference to mistakes, misconduct and disaster; and a wider range of critical approaches to the dark side including Marxist, post-Marxist and postcolonial...
The Dark Side of Organization (Special Issue), 2014
The paper offers an introduction to research that concerns itself with the 'dark side' of organization and attempts to bring theoretical resources from a range of disciplines to bear upon the problem. This stream of research has emerged most visibly since the 1990s, although its concerns can be found in much earlier research. Frustrations with the tendencies of mainstream work to overlook, ignore or suppress difficult ethical, political and ideological issues, which may well mean life or death to some people, has in recent years led to a research that self-identifies its concerns as being with the dark side. We structure our review around key contributions on the dark side of organizational behaviour, mainly in psychology but also including the concept of organizational misbehaviour; the sociology of the dark side, with particular reference to mistakes, misconduct and disaster; and a wider range of critical approaches to the dark side including Marxist, post-Marxist and postcolonial perspectives. We also undertake a review of methodologies for investigating dark side phenomena, and finally introduce the five papers that comprise this special issue.
The Escalation of Deception in Organizations
Journal of Business Ethics, 2007
We develop a process model that explains the escalation of deception in corrupt organizations. If undetected, an initial lie can begin a process whereby the ease, severity and pervasiveness of deception increases overtime so that it eventually becomes an organization level phenomenon. We propose that organizational complexity has an amplifying effect. A feedback loop between organization level deception and each of the escalation stages positively reinforces the process.
The Nature and Circulation of False Information
Springer eBooks, 2022
This chapter focuses on the nature of disinformation (false information spread with intent to deceive) and misinformation (false information spread without specific deceptive intent), inquiring into processes that increase their circulation online. As befits any study of media systems, it addresses interconnections between technologies, media forms, wider media and political environments, people and impacts. It opens with a discussion on the role of deception in citizen-political communications. This highlights the long-standing debate on whether political leaders should lie to their citizens, addressing evidence of such activity in the areas of national security and election campaigns. It then discusses the nature and scale of two key forms of contemporary disinformation: fake news and deepfakes. Widening the focus beyond intentionally deceptive forms to false information in general, the chapter then examines the dynamics of spreading false information online, discussing why people engage with such processes. deceptIon In cItIzen-polItIcal communIcatIons The role of deception in citizen-political communications has a long lineage. These span deliberations by Plato in 380 BC and Machiavelli in 1532 over whether leaders should lie to their publics. Plato advocated that
Harming by Deceit: Epistemic Malevolence and Organizational Wrongdoing
Journal of Business Ethics, 2023
Research on organizational epistemic vice alleges that some organizations are epistemically malevolent, i.e. they habitually harm others by deceiving them. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on epistemic malevolence. We connect the discussion of epistemic malevolence to the empirical literature on organizational deception. The existing empirical literature does not pay sufficient attention to the impact of an organization's ability to control compromising information on its deception strategy. We address this gap by studying eighty high-penalty corporate misconduct cases between 2000 and 2020 in the United States. We find that organizations use two different strategies to deceive: Organizations 'sow doubt' when they contest information about them or their impacts that others have access to. By contrast, organizations 'exploit trust' when they deceive others by obfuscating, concealing, or falsifying information that they themselves control. While previous research has focused on cases of 'sowing doubt', we find that organizations 'exploit trust' in the majority of cases that we studied. This has important policy implications because the strategy of 'exploiting trust' calls for a different response from regulators and organizations than the strategy of 'sowing doubt'.
Re-Viewing Organizational Corruption
Academy of Management Review, 2008
This special topic forum was designed to stimulate theory development on corruption in organizational life as a systemic and synergistic phenomenon. Given the multiple perspectives and bodies of literature that can be brought to bear on the phenomenon, we introduce the forum with a micro view, macro view, wide view, long view, and deep view of organizational corruption. These views suggest that there is much need for conceptual work that is integrative, interactionist, and processual in nature.