The OMT Responsible Research Award is given to a paper that offers both credible and useful knowledge that can potentially advance business practices toward a better society. The 2021 winners are Thomas J. Fewer (Drexel University) and Dali Ma (Drexel University) with their paper paper “Boeing’s Jedi Mind Tricks: Discursive Framing and the Dark Side of Institutional Entrepreneurship”.
Congratulations on winning the OMT Responsible Research Award! Can you please tell us what your paper is about?
Thank you! We are very excited to be receiving this award. The paper is a case study on the training certification process of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, which, following FAA certification in 2017, experienced two fatal accidents in 2019-2020. In the paper we uncover the deceptive strategies that Boeing used to convince the FAA that major changes to the existing 737-NG (the previous generation aircraft) were only minor alterations, to receive a favorable pilot training certification on the aircraft. We use emails and instant messages among Boeing employees and between Boeing employees and FAA officials to understand these strategies. We complement this data with Boeing’s internal reports and presentations, as well as investigative reports and legal proceedings conducted by US and international governments and domestic and international regulatory bodies and committees.
What is the origin of the paper and how did it evolve?
We are particularly interested in understanding catastrophic organizational accidents that are born from technical failure. When the legal proceedings were going on regarding the 737 MAX accidents, we were very interested in understanding the shortcomings in the aircraft. When the U.S. Senate committee eventually released the discourses to the public, we decided to explore these documents to make sense of what was going on. We began to identify different themes within the discourses that explained how Boeing was able to convince the FAA that the 737 MAX was a simple derivative of the 737-NG. The concept of “deception” was born out of what the investigative reports were saying: Boeing intentionally deceived the FAA. We therefore made it our objective to determine the strategies of how Boeing was able to do that.
Your paper explores framing strategies to deceive other organizations. Can you tell us more about your key learnings for theorizing the dark side of organizational life?
We position the paper in the literature on the framing of organizational misconduct and evoke the concept of a “social control agent” in the FAA. Because the line surrounding right and wrong- legal or illegal- ethical or unethical- is “gray,” it can be manipulated by organizations. In this study we look at the framing strategies through which Boeing was able to manipulate the FAA’s ability to evaluate and judge organizational conduct. In this sense our perspective of misconduct is socially constructed, it is a negotiated process between Boeing and the FAA. Boeing framed their behavior in a way which made it appear compliant with FAA rules.
We identified the processes which coincided with this framing. First, we saw that Boeing was labeling their new technical system in a way which made it appear different than what it actually was. Second, we saw that Boeing strategically organized information about the system in a way which made it difficult for the FAA to properly evaluate the system. For example, Boeing fragmented system information across many documents and communication channels, intentionally complicated information about the system, and kept sloppy records about the system. Finally, we identified the promotion tactics that Boeing used to “sell” the FAA on their framing. We observed Boeing intentionally overplaying and downplaying elements of the system and making fact-like claims to place pressure on the FAA to certify the aircraft.
Our hope is that these findings will open a scholarly discourse around how organizations may intentionally manipulate social control agents as they engage in unethical, immoral, or illegal behaviors.
Would you like to share any obstacles you came along during the research process? If so, how did you overcome them?
The biggest obstacle that we faced in this project is a product of the nature of our data. First, the discourse data, while interesting, was voluntarily released by Boeing to the US Senate, which was then released to the public. So, naturally there are discourses taking place that we do not know about and cannot consider in our analysis. Second, it's also difficult to prove intentionality of the emergent strategies that we identified playing out in the discourse data.
We addressed both shortcomings by collecting additional data. First, we were able to triangulate the emergent strategies within the discourse data as well as identify other strategies which did not emerge in the initial analysis of the discourse data. By going through the investigative reports, congressional hearings, and interviews and testimonies with key individuals, we were able to identify additional strategies. These regulatory investigations had access to the entire breath of email an instant message data and were therefore able to consider all discourses. Second, these supplemental data sources enabled us to demonstrate intentionality of Boeing’s strategy of deception. These additional data sources compiled and analyzed copious amounts of data which allowed us to confirm that the strategies identified were frequently occurring over time and in a directed manner.
Again, congratulations for winning the award! If you were able to do this study again, what if anything would you do differently?
Great question. We think that approaching both the investigative (non-discourse) materials and the discourse data simultaneously would have allowed us to identify the emergent strategies much quicker. We say this because many of the strategies that we initially identified in the discourse data were quickly confirmed in our analysis of the investigative materials. On the other hand, the strategies which were first identified in the investigative materials required us to return to the discourse data to identify and confirm these. A more fruitful approach would have been approaching both data sources simultaneously and iterating between analysis of both.
Finally, do you have any advice for members of the OMT community who aim to receive the Responsible Research Award in the future?
We took on this project due to our mutual interest in organizational misconduct in high-risk technology organizations. The availability of data associated with this case presented a real opportunity to understand how this failure occurred. From the beginning of this project, our goal was to identify the processes behind Boeing's misconduct not only offering theoretical contributions to the literature on organizational misconduct but also practical implications for policy makers seeking to prevent events like this from happening again. We believe high-risk technology organizations, such as aerospace and defense companies, offer a fruitful and increasingly impactful context to understand the processes behind catastrophic failure resultant from misconduct.