Euphemisms and Ethics: A Language-Centered Analysis of Penn State’s Sexual Abuse Scandal

For 15 years, former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky used his Penn State University perquisites to lure young and fatherless boys by offering them special access to one of the most revered football programs in the country. He repeatedly used the football locker room as a space to groom, molest, and rape his victims. In February 2001, an eye-witness alerted Penn State\u27s top leaders that Sandusky was caught sexually assaulting a young boy in the showers. Instead of taking swift action against Sandusky, leaders began a cover-up that is considered one of the worst scandals in sports history. While public outcry has focused on the leaders\u27 silence, we focus on the talk that occurred within the organization by key personnel. Drawing from court documents and internal investigative reports, we examine two euphemism clusters that unfolded in the scandal. The first cluster comprises reporting euphemisms, in which personnel used coded language to report the assault up the chain of command. The second cluster comprises responding euphemisms, in which Penn State\u27s top leaders relied on an innocuous, but patently false, interpretation of earlier euphemisms as a decision-making framework to chart their course of (in)action. We use this case to demonstrate how euphemistic language impairs ethical decision-making, particularly by framing meaning and visibility of acts, encouraging mindless processing of moral considerations, and providing a shield against psychological and material consequences. Further, we argue that euphemism may serve as a disguised retort to critical upward communication in organizations

Beyond Compliance: A Multi-Case Study Analysis of University Behavior and Policy Negotiation in Response to the Dear Colleague Letter on Campus Sexual Violence.

This qualitative, multi-case study research examines the dynamic processes undertaken at three universities in their review and negotiation of policy and programming following newly imposed federal compliance requirements. Organizing review teams to interpret and respond to Title IX obligations set out in the highly contentious and ambiguous 2011 Dear Colleague Letter on campus sexual violence, these universities developed forward-thinking results that enhanced opportunity for the institution and its students. In doing so, the universities exceeded minimal compliance expectations by creating new organizational structures and protocols that influenced not only change on campus, but broader field developments and the construction of compliance. This study looks at the institutional processes that enabled such advances to occur. Organizational effectiveness necessitates that institutions draw on different design and intervention strategies to address a broad range of situations. In the context of the review process, institutional actors across multiple organizational positions played vital roles in the teams’ successes. Leadership was demonstrated at various levels across subject-matter experts. These leaders’ abilities to engage others in collective action and induce cooperation proved essential in overcoming tension, ambiguity, and pressure from different constituents to advance successful policy negotiations and arrive at substantive solutions. Participants did not perceive any one group or interest as dominating the negotiation process. Despite the increasingly legal environment in which universities operate, neither legalistic decision criteria nor any inherent or perceived authority from legal counsel was found to take priority over organizational, interpersonal, or social factors relevant to organizational decision making. By addressing the organizational dynamics and behavior underlying university responses to compliance obligations, this study advances greater understanding of the internal negotiation of process and strategy in explaining organizational adaptation in uncertain times. Such research is important because models and practices perceived as legitimate diffuse across fields and are adopted by other organizations, influencing normative standards and the courts’ interpretation of what good compliance entails. With changes to the university’s regulatory environment accelerating and pressure to comply with burgeoning legal obligations mounting, this research is necessary to better understand how universities’ responses to laws shape normative practices and the construction of compliancePHDHigher EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135851/1/larakov_1.pd

Maximizing Influence and Sensesight: A Grounded Theory Study of How Executives Make Sense and Lead in Complexity

U.S. health care reform is a significant driver of complexity in healthcare organizations. The highly regulated directive began with the Affordable Care Act of 2008 and seeks to improve value of patient care by reducing costs and improving quality. However, to implement the required changes, executives must continue daily operations while they dismantle and reassemble core clinical and financial processes of the organization. The shift toward value exacerbates complexity in the already complicated and high stakes healthcare field. Complexity challenges improvement efforts and negatively impacts quality of care. Complexity also affects how executives make sense and lead. For success, executive leaders must understand the environment and maximize their influence as they balance operational logistics and cultural aspects of change. Cognitive and social-cognitive processes, such as sensemaking and sensegiving, play a pivotal role in how the leader calibrates a direction and influences the organization. This qualitative constructivist grounded theory study of 17 executive leaders explains the processes executives used to make sense and maximize influence in complex circumstances. The major finding in this study theorizes how sensesight, or insight emerging from sensemaking about sensegiving, maximizes influence during situational demands. The findings provide a theoretical model illustrating the processes and could benefit executives attempting to lead in complexity

Aspects of Leadership

Aspects of Leadership is a new book edited by Lieutenant Colonel Carroll Connelley and Dr. Paolo Tripodi, the Ethics Branch head, and comprised of essays by a group of 20 leadership and ethics scholars and practitioners. The Lejeune Leadership Institute Ethics Branch, Marine Corps University, provides current and relevant scholarly research and instruction on ethics and moral leadership and the law of war. This collection of essays provides timely and insightful views on current leadership behavior and ethical concerns that men and women of the armed forces face in the demanding, complex, and prolonged decade of armed conflict

Nordic welfare financiers made global portfolio investors : institutional change in pension fund governance in Sweden and Finland

Pension funds have lately emerged as an essential field of study in various disciplines within social sciences. Political economists, economic geographers and some social policy researchers have studied the role of pension funds very broadly for instance in context of labour market relations, economic development and financial systems. Yet comparative studies in social and public policy have for long studied pension funding mostly in respect to its role in pension systems and reforms, and to the effects of investment returns to the development of retirement income benefits. Whereas the comparative studies have mostly focused on the savings and ‘liability side’ (e.g. pension benefits) of pension funds, in this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis on the politics of ‘the asset side’. It is argued that the economic and social consequences of the usage of pension capital need to be understood as intrinsic parts of pension regimes that cannot be left outside classification of these regimes in social sciences. Our comparative analysis studies the historical regulative institutional development paths of pension fund investment governance in Finnish (TEL/TyEL) and Swedish (ATP/AP, PPM) first pillar, second tier pension systems. The time period of the analysis is from the establishment of these systems in late 1950s and early 1960s to the recent reforms of last few years. Both systems have developed so that the role of financier of national economy has decreased and the role of more global portfolio investor increased over time. We argue, however, that there have been very significant differences between the institutional development paths leading to the new investor roles. The Swedish model has included more paradigmatic qualitative changes in the whole pension regime whereas the changes in Finnish pension fund governance have been rather parametric and quantitative. The financial crisis of 2007–08 has also illustrated some essential differences between the current systems