Against All Odds: How Rituals Sustain Engagement with Intractable Social Problems – Frey‐Heger – Journal of Management Studies – Wiley Online Library
Corinna Frey-Heger, Marian Konstantin Gatzweiler, Michael Barrett
Summary: Some of today’s social or environmental problems seem intractable, unsolvable even. Recurring heat waves, climate change, humanitarian conflict and crisis are examples of problems that often seem unsolvable. People working on these problems can experience them as so vast that they wonder whether their work is making any difference at all. In our new Journal of Management Studies article, we argue that representations, including metrics, models or assessments, play a powerful role in sustaining engagement with problems that seem too difficult and overwhelming to handle. Even though actors are often aware of such representations’ limits, they continue using them regardless of their known flaws. In the paper, we explore what makes them do so.
The pervasive use of representations and assessments
Representations, from metrics of CO2 emissions to poverty reduction models, often provide a starting point for addressing intractable problems. Every year, organizations around the world conduct assessments, produce reports, and update metrics and indicators. People keep on assessing as if another round of measurement might finally bring more clarity or closure, or because donors and grant institutions keep asking for it.
For years, we have studied a humanitarian organization and the representations they use to assess refugee crises in Rwanda, and worldwide. They were doing the same as in producing tons of needs assessments and collecting hundreds of indicators on shelter, education, or protection goals.
We were puzzled by the fact that these representations remained so pervasive and indispensable, even when our ethnographic insights revealed that people usually understood their clear limitations, and often were aware that the information they provided was actively flawed. In a way, these assessments remained important irrespective of the direct practical or instrumental outcomes they produced.
Over time, we found out why: These representations helped people continue working on a problem that felt impossible to solve.
Representations as rituals
What we find was that these representations work as rituals. Rituals keep people engaged because they are symbolically and emotionally meaningful for those who practice them, often irrespective of any direct instrumental results they produce. Drawing on such insights, we show how representations derive their power not from their instrumental adequacy but their meaning-making capacity. This meaning-making capacity is crucial in situations when actors risk experiencing their efforts as insufficient and meaningless relative to a problem’s magnitude.
Representations can work as rituals when they produce a shared rhythm, they generate emotional involvement, and they display a common take on the problem, all indispensable features when facing problems that seem too difficult to solve. In the end, the emotional intensity of participating in a ritual instigates deeper attributions of meaning that become difficult to undo. In our case, the participatory assessments, where humanitarians faced overwhelming needs in refugee camps first-hand, for instance proved really emotional and tied humanitarians to their representation of the problem.
Over time, such representations can therefore begin to take on a life of their own. They shape what organizations pay attention to, how they define problems, and which responses appear legitimate, leaving less space to question and doubt the initial representations. This is especially true for what we call latent rituals, rituals that are not recognized as such by those who perform them because they appear rational at the surface.
Against all odds
For managers and academics alike, recognizing the power of rituals when dealing with intractable social problems is crucial. While some have criticized the disappearance of rituals in contemporary society, rituals seem to play a more important role in how engagement and perseverance is sustained than we realized. From humanitarian and medical teams working in protracted conflict and war zones, to conservation organizations confronting constant biodiversity loss, to organizations tackling persistent poverty or homelessness, many contemporary organizations rely on people who keep going – not knowing whether the problems they confront may ever be fully solved.
As rituals, representations actively shape engagement and perseverance and sustain engagement against the odds.
