T
o buy or not to buy a train ticket – organisational misbehaviour in the digital era
Author*: Carola Aili,
[email protected], Carl-Henric Nilsson,
[email protected], Lars-Erik Nilsson,
[email protected]. *equal contribution Layout and comic art: Maja Lindén,
[email protected]
Buying a train ticket may seem simple Employees of Lund University must buy their tickets for business travel via the university’s contracted travel agency. This means that the Traveller needs to know in advance the departure time s/he wants to travel to purchase tickets via the travel agency – ideally at least a day before. This incurs an administrative cost and time restrictions, making it impossible to change the time of departure. The alternative is to buy your ticket directly in a ticket machine or via your smartphone. This allows for more flexibility regarding the departure time. However, both of these more practical solutions are not allowed. A consequence is that the purpose of the trip may change from business to personal since it is more convenient to pay for the trip with your own money.
Then the university decides how to ... Lund University Lund University has purchased and implemented a system for administrating the reporting of travel expenses within the university. The aim is to make the organisation cost-efficient and comply with the Swedish Accounting Act.
University
Department At this level, all employees need to follow the university rules. The university manages tickets and purchases by assigning account codes and by monitoring, auditing, correcting, attesting and handling physical verifications such as tickets.
Department
Department
Individuals
Individuals
Individual Each employee needs to assign the costs for purchases to the correct account codes. The individual researcher has a choice between adhering to the administrative rules of the university, or purchasing tickets in the most practical way.
And the professor decides whether... And the professor decides ... Organisational misbehaviour captures the behaviour of staff that violates significant organisational norms. They may break the rules because they want to protest or give voice to grievances. They sometimes break the rules because they find it is the only way for them to live up to their professional mission. Neutralisation theory Neutralisation theory focuses on how people make sense of and justify their actions. The basic tenant behind neutralisation theory is that people break the rules they agree with when they can neutralise their action. One neutralisation technique is a condemnation of the condemners. The actor then admits to performing an untoward act, but asserts its irrelevancy by saying that others commit the same or even worse acts without getting caught, punished, condemned, or noticed. Sometimes they are even praised for breaking the rules. Appealing to higher loyalties is another technique. If this is the case, the actor asserts that his action was permissible or even righteous since it served interests of higher moral importance. The researcher in the comic strip finds him/herself worthy of having
a beer instead of carrying out research because the university system repeatedly forces him/her to pay for work-related expenses. The scenario shows the researcher breaking external rules and rules set up by the organisation. In some sense, the researcher is the victim of rules that are dysfunctional while in other aspects the rules may come across as reasonable. The researcher may encounter dysfunctionality by bending the rules so that good work can be carried out but also act in a counterproductive way. For example, when ceasing to carry out the work that needs to be done. When rule that the professional breakes is a rule s/he believes in; s/he may neutralise it. This may be done by for example by appealing to higher loyalties. In that case breaking the rules serves a greater good. s/he can also sit down with a beer and deny any responsibility claiming that the employing organisation brought this on itself.
... to be or not to be a professor? The ambition of Lund University is to provide systems that make work life more efficient for employees. “By using the possibilities of digitisation the government can increase efficiency in operations and quality for users.” (SOU 2016:89. För digitalisering i tiden.
Stockholm: Digitaliseringskommissionen, s. 158.) However, the practical use of the university systems is sometimes much more complex than the commercially available solutions used by anyone.
Being a professor
Not being a professor
1. Finding out the rules
Buying a flexible ticket with an app. Total time estimation: 2 minutes.
It takes time to locate the legal procedure for purchasing a ticket according to University regulations. Total time 1 h 17 minutes. 2. Buying a ticket Posing I am at the railway station without a profile at the university travel agency. To purchase a ticket, I then have to call a colleague, set up a three-party call with them and the travel agency to book the trip using my colleague’s profile. Then I need to contact the department administrator to book the ticket using my colleague’s account and transfer this to my account. Total time estimation: 50 man-minutes.
About the DigiWork theme DigiWork is a cross-disciplinary theme that critically explores work and organisation in the digital age. The theme investigates how the digital revolution transforms how we work and the challenges this poses for individual actors (workers), for business organisations and for society as a whole.
2 min
50 min
The Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies
