Many businesses today regulate talk about their corporate culture. They even come up with statements about what their corporate culture is. Here, for example, on the screen, you see Google's corporate culture statement. I'll give you just a minute to read it. If you want to pause, that would be fine. This may well accurately reflect the embodied culture of people at Google. What I have been calling the team's habitus. As a student of culture however, I'm well aware that statements about culture have to be looked at critically. I cannot assume that what people describe is the same as what they do when they actually live the culture every day. The statements are themselves part of culture. We can learn to repeat them in the same way we learn any culture. Like the pledge of allegiance to the flag in the United States. But statements about culture maybe they are not because they are accurate descriptions, but rather because they serve some other purposes. They may, for example, be part of an attempt to create a public image for the company. An image that covers over a different internally experienced culture. One story you might remember concerned the Enron Corporation, an energy, commodities, and services corporation that went bankrupt in 2001 amidst numerous scandals. Enron, as a team, seemed to have been highly successful. Fortune magazine had named Enron, quote, America's most innovative company. The company had a code of ethics, which included the following statement. Relations with the company's many publics, customers, stockholders, governments, employees, suppliers, press, and bankers will be conducted in honesty, candor, and fairness. As the subsequent trials revealed, however, the embodied culture at Enron was quite distinct. 16 people eventually pleaded guilty of criminal acts, 5 others were also found guilty. The Chairman of the Board, Kenneth Lay, the CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, and the Chief Financial Officer, Andrew Fastow were convicted of crimes. The chairman was convicted on six counts of securities and wire fraud. The former CEO, Skilling, was indicted on 35 counts, including fraud, and he pleaded guilty to all of them. The CFO, Fastow, was indicted on 78 accounts, but he turned witness for the prosecution. He pleaded guilty to two accounts of securities and wire fraud. So fraud and deceit were the actual practices at Enron, even though the code of ethics called for quote, honesty, unquote and candor. So in the case of Enron, as in many others, what people inside the company say about their culture may or may not correspond to what the embodied culture of the group is. The central values at Enron seem to have been greed and profit at all costs, even if it means engaging in dishonest, secretive, and unfair practices. The opposite of its stated values. And even if it means engaging in overtly illegal activities. The example contains a more general lesson about the role of words as part of team culture. Words are part of culture, they can be socially learned and socially transmitted, as in the case of the explicitly formulated values in the Enron code of ethics. However, words have two kinds of meaning. They have semantic meaning, or what the words are about. Thus the semantic meaning of the words quoted above is that, Enron employees should always tell the truth when they interact with the outside world. But the words also have a second kind of meaning, which anthropologists call their pragmatic meaning. That is, the contextually significant role the words play in ongoing social relations. Thus, the Enron code of ethics may have been part of an attempt to reassure those with whom the company did business, that the company was actually ethical. And it had a code that demonstrated its interest in ethics. The pragmatic meaning of words produced inside the group, does not necessarily contradict, it does not necessarily, I'll repeat that, contradict the semantic meaning of those words. But it is important for us to recognize this as a possibility when we try to understand team culture. An ethics code could be crafted by a group, for example, when members of the group feel the need for guidance regarding expected behavior. We do not in fact know the circumstances surrounding the crafting of the code of ethics at Enron. Though if I had to speculate, I would say it was probably an imitation of what other companies were doing at the time. It may not have been intentionally cynical. Not intentionally designed to cover up the corrupt activities of the group. Merely an attempt to look basically like every other major corporation at the time.
