4. Recontextualizing the Management Idea of ‘Business Ethics’
4.7. Recontextualizing the ethics program
4.7.1. Recontextualizations in the corporate headquarters
Although still in Europe, in the corporate headquarters in Switzerland, the Ferring Philosophy and the ethics program entered a new sociocultural context. This context was not necessarily ‘Swiss’, in so far as
62 Interview with ethics officer, Spring 2017.
125 the corporate headquarters is inhabited by staff and managers from various countries, and the
arguments made in the following do thus not necessarily point towards traits of Swiss particularity. But the context was certainly different from its Scandinavian origin and Danish leadership.
As mentioned earlier, the Global Ethics Office is an independent business unit, and is not part of the Compliance Department, the Legal Department, the Human Resources Department or wherever one might imagine an ethics program to belong. However, the local ethics coordinators in charge of facilitating the Ferring Philosophy Workshop and getting the message across at various company sites are placed within these related departments. These coordinators are thus not formally part of the Global Ethics Office but are collaboration partners of the Global Ethics Office placed in different departments. At headquarters, the local responsibility for ethics is placed within Human Resources, a business function that is keen on developing global processes and standards. However, during the first five months of the fieldwork and – I am told – a period of another six months before that, there was no specific ethics coordinator working at headquarters. The original ethics coordinator went on maternity leave, and a new one was not appointed during this entire time. However, there has been one
employee from human resources who has conducted the workshops at headquarters every quarter, but no attempts have been made to adapt the program or efforts beyond what is formally required.
When discussing the Ferring Philosophy with human resources officers at headquarters, one of the most prevalent comments was the Philosophy’s lack of ‘operationalizability’. Human resources officers were simply unsure how to put the Philosophy into practice and what behaviours would indicate that it was in fact being followed.
As Benjamin from HR in the global headquarters describes in an interview:
‘This is where I struggle in Ferring since I arrived. I think the Ethics Office is somehow dealing with a piece of the culture (…) So when you think about culture and more specifically a company culture, you are talking about a number of different things. You are talking about how people talk to each other, how they behave with each other, how leaders are role modelling, how their managers see that, interpret that and behave like that with their own people, so that it’s cascaded, right? And then you have the whole management or evaluation of that. So, what behaviours are accepted, acceptable or not at all? And when we get to Ferring, what is very interesting is that in the Ferring
126 philosophy, behaviours are not described very easily to understand. They are not
measured. And there is no consequence.’63
What I find particularly interesting about this quote is firstly that Benjamin expects what he describes as
‘company culture’ to be measurable, and secondly that the Global Ethics Office and the Ferring Philosophy do not live up to this ideal because of a perceived lack of clear behavioural guidance, measurability and consequence. In the excerpt and the conversation surrounding it, Benjamin
elaborates on his convictions about the ‘company culture’ cascading down from the management level to the organization, and that such cascading of a desired company culture will be successful only if there is a proper management and evaluation system in place to track it. As he says in the excerpt , there are no clear guidelines on what are exactly the preferred behaviours in Ferring, nor are such behaviours measured or attached to consequences if not being adhered to. For him, management and evaluation of measures are the obvious tools with which to shape company culture, in which the Ferring Philosophy, according to him, plays a central role.
Built into the ethos of the HR function is to consider employees as resources with which the company can increase its (financial) performance. Performance management systems and various ways to render employees’ activities in the workplace accountable are key tools in what seems like a universalized HR toolbox applied widely across all types of companies. Within this realm, as expressed by Benjamin, if something is important, it must be ensured through what he terms ‘clear guidance’ and effective structures to evaluate if this guidance has been followed.
In a response to their own request for behavioural guidance, at the time of the interview, the Global HR Department was working on a set of ‘Leadership Principles’ that were launched the following year after this interview. These Leadership Principles illustrate quite well what Benjamin understands by
behavioural guidance. The Leadership Principles are not intended to challenge the ethics program, he explains, but rather to define the preferred behaviours expected from the company and to render these behaviours accountable:
‘If we want to drive a company from here to there’, he says and shows with his hands the distance between here and there, ‘we have – and this is one of the projects that we are working on – to identify what are the behaviours that will allow us to get there? When we look at what we have come through up to now, they [the new Leadership Principles]
63 Interview with human resources officer, headquarters, Autumn 2017.
127 link very much to the Ferring Philosophy, there is no contradiction there. They are very much aligned. But they [the Leadership Principles] are spelled out in a much easier way that people can understand. And how you embed that is that you work through systems and structures to embed that in… Every…. Single… Process... That you can…’, he says with emphasis on each word… ‘and then you identify how you are going to measure it and how you are going to make sure that that measure has a consequence.’64
Within the local framework of meaning in global HR at headquarters, where more operational and strategic tasks are traditionally undertaken, performance management is a valued tool to measure and manage performance and to, ultimately, ensure that adequate performance is identified and
underperformance dealt with. Rendering measurable the mind-set of moral education that the Global Ethics Office promotes is not an easy task, and in response to this perceived shortcoming, it seems, Global HR has created the new Leadership Principles.
As Brannen (2004) writes, firm assets such as policies, objects, events or behaviours can be understood through a semiotic lens. As such, these assets consist of two components: a signifier and a signified. The signifier refers to the material world and the actual objects or policies that are shared, whereas the signified refers to the idea that is expressed in this object or policy (Brannen 2004:601). Within the context of Ferring Pharmaceuticals, the signifier is the Ferring Philosophy, and what is signified is the ethos of moral education outlined earlier in this chapter. However, as Brannen (2004) writes, when the signifier changes context, i.e., when it travels from one system of signification to another, the signified is often left behind.
The signified (the notions of moral education and individual critical thinking) is held in high esteem in the Scandinavian context from which the Global Ethics Office has been operating. But in a new context, a new meaning is attached to the signifier (the Ferring Philosophy) when it arrives at the HR
department at the corporate headquarters. It has entered a new system of signification. The
Scandinavian cultural context that gives resonance to the approach of the Global Ethics Office has been
‘left behind’. And thus, as the signifier is detached from its original signified, the focus on complexity, moral education and individual responsibility that was originally perceived as valuable is now seen as a liability because of the lack of measurability. What is different from Brannen’s empirical studies of this process, however, is the fact that human resources officers at headquarters do not attempt to adjust the ethics program to make it more comparable with the local context, as Brannen’s concept of
64 Interview with human resources officer, Switzerland, Autumn 2017.
128 recontextualization suggests. After what Brannen terms the ‘initial semiosis’, where new meanings are attached to the firm offering that is introduced (e.g. an ethics program), there occurs an ‘ongoing semiosis’ in which ‘meanings of firm assets evolve as they are utilized and made sense of in the new context.’ (Brannen 2004:605). Brannen calls these evolutions of firm assets ‘cross-cultural innovations’
and writes that ‘[a]s the firm assets are implemented and then intermixed within the new host environment, they continue to undergo recontextualization’ (Brannen 2004:605). The third stage of Brannen’s concept of recontextualization is ‘reflexive semiosis’ where these new cross-cultural innovations feed back and are incorporated into the original context (ibid.).
Within Ferring, only the initial semiosis – the first stage of recontextualization – occurred. The ethics program was never transformed into any such ‘cross-cultural innovation’, it was never adapted to the local setting. Instead of adapting the Danish-oriented ethics program to the local context of
headquarters, the Global HR Department invents an entirely new values program, the Leadership Principles. They could have adjusted the ethics program to fit the local demands for operationalizability by e.g. creating ‘Ferring Philosophy principles’ or ‘ethical behaviours’ or some other ‘tweak’. But it did not happen. Instead, the ethics program was left aside, and the HR Department in Switzerland
developed a ‘work-around’ by which there is a minimum of engagement, yet still adhering to the Global Ethics Office’s requirements to conduct ethics training four times per year, with respect to its ties with the owner of the company. But besides complying with the obligatory training requirements, the HR officers simply rejected the program (and the code of ethics in particular) as a starting point for working towards operationalizing employee’s values and behaviours. As Lauren, an employee from Global HR at headquarters explained in an interview about the process of developing the Leadership Principles:
‘One of the things we didn’t want to do since the beginning is to have anything that would somehow look as a stain into the Ferring philosophy. Right? Neither putting it down or pushing it aside… It’s the heart of Ferring, and the owner is very… vigilant to that. So it needs to be something that is complementary to the Ferring Philosophy but that gives more guidance. (…) but how can we work around it in a way that expresses it to people in a more obvious way?’, she asks, implicitly referring to the Leadership Principles as the answer.65
65 Interview with human resources officer, Switzerland, Autumn, 2017.
129 Thus, within the ethos and logic of the HR function with its ‘goal setting’, ‘measuring’ and
‘consequences’, the global HR group tries to ‘work around’ the Ferring Philosophy by developing a set of Leadership Principles that express Ferring’s preferred behaviours in what they consider a more
‘obvious way’.
However, it is important to note that the quest for operationalizability does not necessarily mean that the Ferring philosophy is disregarded by headquarters or by the Global HR Department. Later in the fieldwork, in a video conference held by HR for local counterparts globally, Phil, another HR officer, describes the connection between the Leadership Principles and the Ferring Philosophy as follows:
‘The Ferring philosophy defines the values and ethical standards and it’s there in everything we do. And it has a pretty high level identity focus, where the [leadership]
principles help to put it into practice. The Ferring mission sets clear direction for the future, guides our decisions and what we need to achieve. The Ferring Leadership Principles define what kind of leadership we need [in order] to be able to achieve the mission. And also what are the behaviours that we need to put in place to enable the mission. So everything fits together with these three different roles. All interlinked and supporting each other’.66
In the video conference, Phil further explains that the launch of the Leadership Principles entails descriptions of each principle and of its preferred behaviours as well as role model stories for each, all aimed at making the principles more operational for employees. And thus, the ways in which these principles are communicated as well as the principles themselves express a response to the criticism that has been raised about the Ferring Philosophy and its perceived lack of operationalizability.
The seven Leadership Principles are: Performance, Empowerment, Innovation, Accountability,
Collaboration, Transparency and Purpose. Each principle has its own set of responsibilities for managers and employees. For example, the leadership principle ‘Transparency’ has the tagline ‘We listen and share. We communicate honestly, we do it often, we make it simple, we make it clear’ and the responsibilities for ‘people managers’ (i.e.managers with subordinates) and ‘individual contributors’
are outlined in the following Table 5.
66 Video conference training for human resources officers globally, attended from China in Spring 2018.
130 Table 5 - Leadership Principle, 'Transparency'
PEOPLE MANAGERS
• Align communication across the organization/department/teams according to the target audience.
• Communicate organizational or managerial decisions in a timely manner, explaining the reasons behind them.
• Communicate successes, failures and learnings.
• Provide honest and constructive feedback.
• Listen to others’ opinions.
• Communicate openly across hierarchical levels to ensure effectiveness and involvement.
INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS
• Proactively seek and share complete and accurate information in a timely manner.
• Be candid about motives, decisions, failures and learnings.
• Take feedback as an opportunity to grow and support others.
• Listen to others and make sure you fully understand the message.
• Communicate openly across. hierarchical levels to ensure effectiveness and involvement.
Thus, the approach in the Leadership Principles is more command-oriented than the Ferring Philosophy, but I would argue that the content of these principles could have also been built from the Ferring Philosophy. Precisely because of the very open approach of the Global Ethics Office, there could have been sufficient elasticity to recontextualize the Ferring Philosophy in a way that would allow for the same messages around Accountability, Collaboration, Transparency etc. from the Leadership Principles to be expressed as part of – or at least adjacent to – the ethics program.
However, the Ferring Philosophy as a firm asset gains new meaning when it travels from Denmark to corporate headquarters in Switzerland. In the Scandinavian sociocultural context in which it originates, the moral educational approach is perceived as not only legitimate but also preferable to other, more directive approaches, as exemplified in the ethics officers’ much expressed distinctions between ethics and compliance and the ideals of individual emancipation and ‘using your head’. In the headquarter context among HR officers, however, this ideal is turned into a shortcoming as exemplified in Benjamin and Lauren’s call for more clear behavioural guidance and the development of the global Leadership Principles. Moreover, because of this perceived shortcoming, the Ferring Philosophy is not
recontextualized, as we have seen with similar values programs in previous studies (see e.g. Gertsen and Zølner 2012b; Søderberg 2015). Instead of local adaptation following recontextualization, what
131 happens is a local rejection of the code of ethics and the invention of a new approach deemed more suitable.
Due to the highly international nature of the headquarters and the many nationalities represented here, it would be incorrect to ascribe the criticism raised here to any particular national cultural belonging. Managers and staff in Switzerland belong to what Moore (2005) has termed the Transnational Capitalist Society, which a ‘globe-spanning, transnational but locally-engaged, social formation which does not comprise a single, solidary group, but a variety of different groups with complex and social connections between them’ (Moore 2005:164). Drawing on this concept, Moore emphasizes the multiple belonging and flexible ascription to various cultural communities among business people in multinational corporations. Similarly, within the global headquarters in Ferring, the staff come from various national backgrounds, and many have lived and worked in several countries throughout their careers. Despite this national cultural diversity, the criticism of the ethics program for its lack of operationalizibility was prevalent among the global human resources officers at
headquarters, regardless of nationality.
In the following, I will move to a different context and discuss how the Ferring Philosophy and the efforts of the Global Ethics Office that articulate it are interpreted – and perhaps recontextualized - within a subsidiary in China.