Feldman’s work argues that the concept of organisational culture rose to promise the 20 th century as the size of organisations increased, and managers still mandated to run them. Organisation culture is that fabric that stands between success and failure as well as serving as the key to innovation, control, productivity, communication, effectiveness and organisational change. The book’s title Memory as a Moral Decision: The Role of Ethics in Organizational Culture is appropriate since the book provides a historical analysis of literature on organisational culture by investigating the world conceptualised by those describing organisational and the moral they have adopted for their employees. The author argues that whereas the existing literature organisational culture addresses ethics, the past has been ignored as the basis of maintaining and stabilising moral commitments.
Feldman’s objective is to investigate the kind of world conceptualised by the organisation towards their employees. To accomplish this goal, the author uses both qualitative and quantitative analysis to explore how organizations have attempted to base found ethics on management rationality while escaping the logic of rationalism. The author further provides some essays that guide his argument throughout the work from part 1 to part 4. Feldman analyses the historical perspective of ethics in organisations that have primarily been depended on executive rationalism and mostly devoid of moralism. According to Feldman, it is the tradition which either too much freedom or restraint with the anarchy of unconstrained liberalism established vis-à-vis totalitarianism on the other.
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From the collections of his essays, the author notes that history, memory and tradition, or put moral weight and wisdom constraints worst excessiveness of individualism via internalization of moral orders which allows each generation to establish its moral codes from the interpretation of the history (Feldman 2002 p.5). One notable assumption in Feldman’s work is that ethics are uniform across all organisations and it is not clear who decides which traditions that need to rescued while others to be dumped since he does not agree with the enlightenment rationalism which is also a tradition (Feldman 2002, p. 105).
Part 1 introduces and defines the concept of moral tradition, primarily focusing the early literature by Chester Barnard and Melville Dalton. From this chapter, Feldman’s set a precedent for his work in part 1, where he raises the tension between ethical relativism and rationalism. Moving on to part two and three, the author explores the contemporary frameworks and critically analyzes new institutionalism. In the final part four, the author explores ethical relativism in current thinking in postmodern organizations, the drive for diversity and deconstructionism. Last, this work is important because it allows for scholars to understand the critical concept of organisation culture since it relates it historical, present and future systems. It applies the concept if cultural studies, psychology and sociology to establish a valuable framework for the ethical research in organisations. This means that managers must be able to navigate the sensitive aspect of understanding organisations culture if they will be able to succeed in rapidly changing world that needs organizations not only to understand their own cultures but also to understand those of their stakeholders.
To sum up, this work Feldman’s argues that the existing organizational literature underestimates the historicity of memory, its social-psychological constitution and its associative character. The author also argues that the organizational culture is devoid of ethical values while the morals are based on beliefs in heroes, models, metaphors, myths and stories told about ethical standards of organizational held by members.
References
Feldman, S. (2019). Memory as a moral decision: The role of ethics in organizational culture . Routledge.
