Organizing for inconsistencies: On organizational conflict, depression and hypocrisy as substitutes for action

How do organizations handle and act out inconsistent norms in their environment? It is claimed that organizations use structures, processes and outputs to reflect external inconsistencies, in order to acquire support and legitimacy in the environment. To this end organizations establish conflicting subunits and construct conflicting ideologies, they carry out depressive processes by exploiting problems and employing rationalistic decision procedures, and they produce hypocritical outputs in the shape of talk (the spoken and written word), decisions and material products. But these inconsistencies, which thus serve a useful purpose, also represent an obstacle to organizational action. Organizations solve this dilemma by decoupling the reflection of inconsistencies from organizational action. They achieve this in several ways: over time, issues, environments and subunits. But inconsistent environments, structures, processes and outputs interact and reinforce one another, thereby politicizing organizations, making them less apt to act but more apt to survive.