It is not easy to get to the bottom of an organization’s culture. Culture cannot be decided and is therefore not easy to discuss. Fortunately, organizational sociology provides a heuristic that helps to investigate the relevant phenomena. We call them the searchlights of organizational culture.
In this series, we present these searchlights. This article discusses swaps.
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What we understand by swaps is an “exchange of services that is deliberately aspired to” (Luhmann 1995: 338)1 between members of an organization to ensure cooperation. If we take a closer look at this, something that initially sounds trivial and routine is actually highly complex because, strictly speaking, swaps should never happen in organizations. After all, you should not have to
go down to the bazaar to negotiate with members of the organization on services their employment contract actually requires them to perform. And if it does become necessary and rules are being strictly followed, the normal solution would be a complaint to a superior – so those further up the hierarchical ladder can deal with it.
Swaps: The deliberately pursued exchange of services between members of an organization to ensure cooperation.
So far, so naive. After all, the fact that you will not necessarily get very far in an organization by purely following the rules will become clear (or made clear to you) when you have made such a bold attempt. Although organizations are actually designed to obstruct swaps through their division of labor, accountabilities and powers, bartering, dealing, and trading go on all the time.
Anyone who has ever wanted to offload a particularly unpleasant shift, take on an exciting project or take a step up the internal career ladder knows that full well. The go-ahead for an expensive training program or a half-day off that has to be approved as an exception to the rule is often nothing more nor less than a swap. The currencies used in the swaps are as many and varied as organizations themselves.
What function do swaps fulfil for an organization?
These swapping relationships actually perform an important function in organizations – not despite their running counter to the formally established structures, but for that very reason. You could even say that informal swapping relationships support formal structures because all the useful and necessary actions in an organization cannot simply be prescribed and made predictable
– and most certainly not those actions that go beyond formal predictability. Swapping is therefore needed to satisfy all these informal needs and keep a business going beyond the formal options and requirements.
For example, formal rules may require that an intern has to translate an urgent presentation quickly, but not that they have to work on it until late into the evening. The IT service department may formally be obliged to repair somebody’s imploded work laptop, but whether it is done immediately or not until the day after tomorrow is not laid down in the rules. And whether absences on a shift should be compensated by colleagues’ willingness to fill the gap at short notice is, in many cases, not envisaged in work rules.
In such cases, it is helpful to be able to offer something in exchange – whether in the form of generous praise at the next meeting, increased flexibility in getting a holiday approved in shortstaffed summer months, or the assurance of only having to take on nice tasks to make sure at least somebody is on duty. In a nutshell, if there are no such swaps, not much or at least not enough will be achieved to enable an organization to operate really effectively. On the other hand, everything that is done on a dailybasis in informal bazaars and personal swapping relationships cannot be easily formalized.
What consequential problems does this entail?
To perform their motivating and mobilizing functions, swap processes often have to be carried out in secret, since they would otherwise clash with an organization’s formal logic. After all, even if every individual instance of a swap may comply with the rules, this will cease to be the case when the deals are linked to form a complex of mutual reciprocity.
The price is high since the more an organization is geared towards such informal swapping relationships, the more fragile the whole construct becomes. The actions of the organization’s members can no longer be rationally controlled since swaps are always based on personal relationships and mutual dependencies. And this proves to be particularly problematic when key players in the swapping game leave the field.
That is why it is always worthwhile to accurately track the swaps in your own organization and understand their functions and consequences. For example, is an informal swap of shifts at a bus station functionally sensible because it enables bus drivers to flexibly divide up their work in line with their own needs, e.g., to get free time for a daughter’s birthday?
Or is it more likely to be dysfunctional because only long-standing employees with an established network can take part in such an informal swapping ring? And that would lead to newer colleagues only getting unpleasant shifts and their handing in their notice before long? In the second case, a better – a formal – mechanism may be required to allow all the employees the most flexible and fairest possible choice of shift. That is what we call smart organizing.
These questions should be considered:
- What forms of help are being swapped?
- Where do employees need to have something to offer to reach their goal?
- What resources are the hard currencies in swap deals?
- What are they used for?
This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Nail the pudding to the wall! How to analyse, discuss – and successfully influence – your organization’s culture”. The full whitepaper is available to download free of charge here.
Literature
[1] Luhmann, Niklas (1995). Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organisation (4th edition). Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.