Research note: "It caught us off guard"
Petar Vujosevic
Examining how wider culture impacts the workplace. Practical output: DEI & employer brand strategy research & training.
Part I: the first lens through which current corporate and societal DEI actions make more sense.
This is a research note explaining some of the thinking behind the article “Companies don't create culture. Culture creates companies” from issue #1.
It contains background information, expanded thinking and footnotes.
These research notes can read more pretentious than the magazine article as they are the work to get the steak on a plate, not the steak on the plate.
Border|Land is a reader-supported publication. To receive more research notes, or buy print copy of the magazine, please go here.
One of the things that lead to creating Border|Land Magazine was this phrase I heard over and over again "it caught us off guard".
In particular in the wake of the George Floyd killing, quite a few EDI/HR leaders used that exact phrase in conversations.
Not in context of that specific incident being the catalyst for activism. Nobody could have foreseen that.
But in context of the fact that there was so much anger and frustration within black communities [across the world] about many issues [not just policing] that were triggered by that singular event in Minnesota, USA.
And that this frustration and anger was much closer to boiling point, then leaders ever imagined.
It left many companies scrambling. Throwing out any and all plans, and completely refocusing efforts and attention.
Judging by the reaction to current protests happening in western cities, many today are again caught off guard.
Perhaps one of the fundamental lenses through which Border|Land views things, might be of use.
LENS: In a multi-polar world nothing & nobody is too sacred for critical analysis
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, America and America1 has dominated the world.
From culture, technology and business, the American way of seeing, naming and doing things seeped into every country it touched (to larger or lesser extend).
Simultaneously immigrants coming to western [americanised] countries seemed to tether interpretations of their cultures to Western (americanised) social and political realities.
Peace, love and hamburgers for everybody.
Until not.
The early 2000's saw the world slowly enter the last leg of this unipolar world and started to see the makings of a multi-polar world.
First in ways that closely mimicked the American Exceptionalism Playbook.
From small [we are Silicon Valley of X], via large [The Chinese Century2] and quirky [foreign ownership of western sports teams] ways and narratives.
And slowly but surely more countries went from net importers of Anglo culture to becoming net exporters of their own, driven by geo-political and monetary reasons3.
Amplified by a blossoming phenomenon called internet culture [Myspace, FB, Tumblr, Twitter] things started to become weird.
While [still] heavily indebted to Western tech [Social Media] Language (English) and worldview [Critical Studies, Capitalism], internet culture has allowed for a cultural-aesthetic reimagining4 of The American way of seeing and doing.
People no longer feel the need to mimic or toe the dominant Western cultural party line to gain mainstream acceptance. They just find/build their tribes online where shared values transcend borders.
Tribes that over time also started to function as distribution/consumer networks, that can be activated to show support, buy products/services, share messages and ideas, while bypassing approved norms and messages5.
Again, nothing new under the sun if we look at wider culture, where for example K-pop and K-Beauty are prime example of South Korean soft power, or the instagram foodie culture making Oaxaca a place of global pilgrimage.
But corporate cultures have been quite Unipolar in nature.
Now you might have read up to now and thought, this all sounds very macro, theoretical and abstract, right?
Something that the Nike’s, Meta’s, Amazon’s, Disney’s, IKEA's of the world hire people with weird job titles to think about.
So let's make it small, immediate and relevant to Corporate Culture.
Firstly, internet/network culture has strengthened for many of us immigrants or of immigrant descent, the digital umbilical cord to the mother/fatherland6. For good and bad.
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Now imagine you are an HR Director or DEI Leader of a SME in the UK Midlands, Brussels, Berlin or Dearborn Michigan?
How would you have gone into work these last few weeks?
There is a good chance many of your employees were wondering, if not outright asking, what the company position on the Israel/Palestine issue is, since the company has positions on so many other social issues.
Or you might have been wondering how to deal with the fact that employees of your company were at various rallies?
And again, you might have felt caught off guard by it all, because you make garden furniture in Bradford.
To thrive in a multipolar world, overlaid by internet/network culture, a shift might be in order, when it comes to corporate thinking.
A shift from thinking and doing in terms of 'strategy' to thinking and doing in terms of sense-making. Before you can chart a course, you need to have a map.
Any corporate culture will have to start really understanding who our "whole self" employees7 are and how that meshes with they type of corporate culture that we want.
Companies need to explore [not top down like mentor-mentee or expert/novice] concerns that include:
who wins and who loses in the current and future interpretation of our corporate culture?
Who doesn't appear at all to be heard? On what values is this building block based? Who influenced it? What power interests could be behind it?
Now some might recognise these types of questions. As they have been used to interrogate ethnic/gender bias from recruitment, pay gap, funding access and more for the last two decades in the corporate world.
Yet those interrogations were rooted in a Unipolar world, with a single dominant culture [Anglo] and personification [Man].
But in a multipolar world, we are all subject to critical analysis. Nobody is above questioning. Everything is open to re-interpretation and re-alignment.
Corporate cultures need to be ready to be critically and collectively investigated. To be open to have the meaning of various words like inclusion, equity and other building blocks of corporate culture be challenged from all sides. Not just assume that the old unipolar definitions are a good enough guideline.
"There is no point denying the conflicts around issues of gender, free speech, race and culture. But the nature of the conflicts has started to change. Many remain firmly rooted in progressive vs conservative narratives. However, some conflicts have started to feel more like civil war.
The transgender debate is pitting self declared progressives against each other. And in the wake of the transgender debate, Muslims (longtime, if silent partners of progressives in the West) are standing up for their views.
Throughout North America and Europe, Muslim parents, kids and leaders are finding their voice and also finding their place in the progressive universe being questioned."
Quote from the article “Companies don't create culture. Culture creates companies“
Things are getting weird. Strange bedfellows8 are finding common ground and new common enemies. And none of it will magically stop at the Corporate Walls.
Companies will need to start making sense of things already happening in wider culture and is present in the body of their organisation by way of the “ whole self 9” employee.
1 In hindsight a very “Exceptional America” take on the end of the Cold War https://www.jstor.org/stable/20044692
2 https://www.middletownpress.com/news/article/CENTRIST-S-JOURNAL-American-century-Chinese-11869232.php
3 https://medium.com/@vtchakarova/the-russia-china-alliance-what-does-the-dragonbear-aim-to-achieve-in-global-affairs-e09b1add1c4a
4 Afrobeat: https://hypebeast.com/2023/7/burna-boy-first-african-singer-to-sell-out-united-states-stadium
5 Example of internet culture activating networks of shared values, removed from geography and historic alignment https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0034115/