Political Propositions, 737 MAX and Challenger

All five propositions of the political frame came into play in both the 737 MAX and Challenger incidents:

1. Organizations are coalitions. Both Boeing and NASA housed internal coalitions (such as engineers and senior management) and operated in the context of larger coalitions. Boeing was part of a global ecosystem that included suppliers, customers, and government regulators. NASA was part of a complex coalition of contractors, Congress, the White House, the military, the media—even the American public. Consider, for example, why Christa McAuliffe was aboard. Her expertise as a teacher was not critical to the mission. But the American public was getting bored with white male pilots in space. Moreover, as a teacher, McAuliffe represented a national commitment to universal education. Human interest was good for NASA and Congress; it built public support for the space program. McAuliffe's participation was a media magnet because it was a great human‐interest story. Symbolically, Christa McAuliffe represented all Americans; everyone flew with her.
2. Coalition members have enduring differences. Boeing's emphasis on reducing time, costs, and complexity conflicted with the FAA's responsibility for flight safety. NASA's hunger for funding competed with the public's interest in lower taxes. Pilots' concerns for safety were at odds with pressures on Boeing and NASA to move quickly
3. Important decisions involve allocating scarce resources. In both cases, time and money were in short supply. Delay carried a high price—not just in dollars but also in further erosion of support from key constituents. Boeing feared falling behind Airbus in a critical segment of the market. In both cases, senior managers overruled engineers in the rush to keep their customers satisfied.
4. Scarce resources and enduring differences make conflict central and power the most important asset. The teleconference on the eve of the Challenger launch began as a debate between the contractor and NASA. As sole customer, NASA was in the driver's seat. When managers at Morton Thiokol sensed NASA's level of disappointment and frustration, the scene shifted to a tense standoff between engineers and managers. Managers relied on their authority to override the engineers' technical expertise and make decisions based more on business than technical concerns.
5. Goals and decisions emerge from bargaining, negotiation, and jockeying for position among competing stakeholders. The FAA is a huge agency with conflicting responsibilities both to promote the airline industry and to keep the skies safe, as exemplified in the FAA's decision not to ground the MAX after the first fatal accident. Boeing is a huge company and a powerful political player in its own right. The FAA has a budget of more than $15 billion a year, but has often been hampered by marginal, stopgap funding. Short on personnel, it had delegated some of its oversight responsibilities to the industries it regulates, including Boeing in the case of the 737 MAX. Similarly, political bargaining and powerful allies had propelled Morton Thiokol into the rocket motor business. Thiokol's engineers had been attempting to focus management's attention on the booster joint problem for many months. But management feared that acknowledging a problem, in addition to costing time and money, would erode the company's credibility. For both Boeing and Thiokol, a very large business was at stake.

Implications of the Political Propositions

The assumptions of the political frame explain that organizations are inevitably political. A coalition forms because its members need each other, even though their interests may only partly overlap. The assumption of enduring differences implies that political activity is more visible and dominant under conditions of diversity than of homogeneity. Agreement and harmony are easier to achieve when everyone shares similar values, beliefs, and cultural ways. Very often, that's not the case.

The concept of scarce resources suggests that politics will be more salient and intense in difficult times. Schools and colleges, for example, have lived through alternating eras of feast and famine related to peaks and valleys in economic and demographic trends. When money and students are plentiful (as they were in the 1960s and again in the 1990s), administrators spend time designing new buildings and initiating innovative programs. Work is fun when you're delivering good news and constituents applaud. Conversely, when resources dry up, you may have to shutter buildings, close programs, and lay off staff. In the run‐up to Fall 2020, the pandemic created a painful dilemma for leaders in colleges and universities. They risked spikes in Covid‐19 infections if they brought students to campus, but huge splashes of red ink if they did not. Conflict mushroomed on many campuses where administrators mandated faculty to return to the classroom, and professors concerned about their health fought back.

Differences and scarce resources make power a key resource. Power in organizations is basically the capacity to make things happen and affect outcomes (Ocasio, Pozner, and Milner, 2020). Pfeffer defines power as “the potential ability to influence behavior, to change the course of events, to overcome resistance, and to get people to do things they would not otherwise do” (1992, p. 30). Social scientists often emphasize a tight linkage between power and dependency: if A has something B wants, A has leverage. In much of organizational life, individuals and groups are interdependent; they need things from one another, and power relationships are multidirectional. From the view of the political frame, power is a “daily mechanism of our social existence” (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977, p. 32).

The final proposition of the political frame emphasizes that goals are not set by edict at the top but evolve through an ongoing process of negotiation and bargaining. Few organizations have a unitary apex. Who, for example, is at the head of a public company? The CEO? This is the structural view, but the CEO reports to the board. The board, in turn, is elected by and accountable to shareholders. And the shareholders are often a large and scattered group of absentee owners. They have little time, interest, or capacity to influence the organization in which each has a sliver of ownership. But if a corporate raider or a hedge fund acquires a major ownership stake, the stage is set for a contest for control of the company.

This political view of organization might seem strange in light of traditional assumptions of control from the top. Yet the same dynamics of conflict, coalitions, and power are found at every level of human affairs. Mann (1986, 2013) tells us that's how society works. Society is not a cohesive unit but is “constituted of multiple, overlapping and intersecting networks of power” (Mann, 1986, p. 1). David Eagleman says that the same is true of the human brain. He presents data from psychology and neuroscience to show that almost all of our mental activity takes place outside awareness. Here's what he says is going on politically inside your brain:

Small groups are constantly making decisions and sending out messages to other groups. Out of these local interactions, emerge larger coalitions. By the time you read a mental headline, the important action has already transpired, the deals are done. You have surprisingly little access to what happened behind the scenes. Entire political movements gain ground‐up support and become unstoppable movements before you ever catch wind of them as a feeling or intuition or thought that strikes you. You're the last one on the chain of command to hear the information. (Eagleman, 2011, p. 6)

Multiple constituents jockey for influence at every level, from the individual brain to global society. This is especially apparent in the public sector. When Xi Jinping came to power as head of China's Communist Party in November 2012, his first public speech made no mention of Marx or Mao but emphasized the need to solve the problem of “corruption [and] being out of touch with the people” (Demick, 2012). Xi understood that corruption represented a potentially fatal threat to the party's continued dominance. But the party elite he hoped to influence included more than 80 billionaires (Anderlini, 2013; van Kerckhove, 2013), perhaps the largest concentration of wealth the world has ever seen.

Those superrich included both successful entrepreneurs and members of the so‐called black‐collar class, Communist officials whose sway over business created opportunities to trade power for cash. Xi knew that something had to be done about rampant corruption, but he was up against formidable opposition from party and government officials who were in no hurry to change a system that was making them and their families rich. When Xi launched a new austerity campaign in 2013, ordering the elite to cut back on lavish banquets and similar luxuries, a new catchphrase became popular in Chinese officialdom, “Eat quietly, take gently and play secretly” (Jacobs, 2013).

The challenges Xi faced in fighting corruption mirrored those that had hindered China's efforts for more than a decade to protect intellectual property. When it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the Chinese government promised to get serious about ensuring that products carrying brands such as Coca‐Cola, Microsoft, Sony, and Rolex were authentic. The central government passed laws, threw the book at the occasional unlucky offender, blustered in the media, and put pressure on local governments. Yet 15 years later, name‐brand knockoffs and pirated music continued to be sold all over China, and Western tourists in Beijing still encountered a steady stream of vendors offering “Rolex” watches at amazing prices (Powell, 2007).

Why have the anti‐piracy efforts had limited impact? The Chinese government is far from monolithic and is only one of many players in a complex power game. Norton (2013) argues that Chinese bureaucracy operates less like a top‐down hierarchy and more like a series of concentric circles in which multiple players are involved in every significant decision. Newly affluent Chinese consumers often put a high value on foreign brands, and in 2019 products from abroad for the first time grew faster than domestic ones (Lannes and Deng, 2020). Businesses understand that a homemade carbonated fluid can fetch a better price if it carries a foreign brand name. The problem has been so widespread that Coca‐Cola's Chinese affiliate found itself not only raiding factories but also chasing pirates who slapped Coke labels on bottles in delivery trucks while on route to retail outlets.

Pirates are often local businesses with plenty of guanxi (connections) who share the loot with local government and police officials. As one New York Times reporter discovered when he was imprisoned for several hours in a toy factory, “Factory bosses can overrule the police, and Chinese government officials are not as powerful as you might suspect” (Barboza, 2007, pp. 4–3). Moreover, the concept of intellectual property rights is new to many Chinese. They find it hard to see the merit of punishing a hard‐working Chinese entrepreneur in order to protect a foreign corporation. In short, divergent interests and multiple power centers have limited officials' ability to translate intention into action.

Authorities and Partisans

Gamson (1968) describes the relationship between two antagonists—partisans and authorities—that are often central to the politics of both organizations and society. By virtue of the office they hold, authorities are entitled to make decisions binding on their subordinates. Any member of a coalition who wants to exert bottom‐up pressure is a potential partisan. Gamson describes the relationship in this way: “Authorities are the recipients or targets of influence, and the agents or initiators of social control. Potential partisans have the opposite roles—as agents or initiators of influence, and targets or recipients of social control” (p. 76).

In a family, parents function as authorities and children as partisans. Parents initiate social control, making binding decisions about bedtime, television viewing, or cell phone use. As the recipients of parental decisions, children in turn try to influence the decision makers. They argue for a later bedtime or point out the injustice of giving one child something another wants. They try to split authorities by lobbying one parent after the other has refused. They may form a coalition (with siblings, grandparents, and so on) in an attempt to strengthen their bargaining position.

Authority is essential to anyone in a formal position because social control depends on it. Officeholders can exert control only so long as partisans respect or fear them enough that their authority or power remains intact. If partisans are convinced that existing authorities are too evil or incompetent to continue, they will risk trying to wrest control—unless they regard the authorities as too formidable. Conversely, if partisans trust authority and see it as legitimate, they will accept and support it in the event of an attack (Baldridge, 1971; Gamson, 1968). In almost any instance of unrest or revolution, there is a sharp cleavage between rebels and loyalists.

If partisan opposition becomes too powerful, authority systems may collapse. The process can be very swift, as illustrated by events in China and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Arab Spring of 2011–2013. In both cases, established regimes had lost legitimacy years earlier but held on through coercion and control of access to decision making. When massive demonstrations erupted, authorities faced an unnerving choice: activate the police and army in the hope of preserving power or watch their authority fade away. Authorities in China and Romania in 1989, Libya in 2011, and Egypt and Syria in 2012, chose the first course. It led to bloodshed in every case, but only the Chinese were able to quash their opposition quickly. Elsewhere, authorities' attempts to quell dissent with force were futile, and their legitimacy evaporated.

The period of evaporation is typically heady but always hazardous. When the old regime collapses, the question is whether new authority can reconstitute itself quickly enough to avoid chaos. Authorities and partisans both have reason to fear a specter such as Bosnia and Liberia in the 1990s, Somalia for much of the last three decades, Iraq in the aftermath of U.S. intervention, or Libya and Syria since the Arab Spring of 2011. All are tragic examples of chronic turmoil and misery, with no authority strong enough to bring partisan strife under control.

Sources of Power

Authorities and partisans both have many potential sources of power. A number of social scientists (Baldridge, 1971; French and Raven, 1959; Kanter, 1977; Mann, 1986; Pfeffer, 1981, 1992; Russ, 1994) have tried to identify the various wellsprings of power. Ocasio, Pozner, and Milner (2020) conceptualize power as arising from different forms of political capital, including cultural, economic, institutional, knowledge, organizational, reputational, social, and symbolic. Those forms roughly parallel our list of major types of power in organizations:

• Position power (authority): Positions confer certain levels of legitimate authority. Professors assign grades; judges settle disputes. Positions also place incumbents in more or less powerful locations in communications and power networks. It is as helpful to be in the right unit as it is to hold the right job. A lofty title in a backwater department may not carry much weight, but junior members of a powerful unit may have substantial clout (Pfeffer, 1992).
• Control of rewards: The ability to deliver jobs, money, political support, or other rewards brings power. Political bosses and tribal chiefs, among others, cement their power base by delivering services and jobs to loyal supporters (Mihalopoulos and Kimberly, 2006).
• Coercive power: Coercive power rests on the ability to constrain, block, interfere, or punish. A union's ability to walk out, students' capacity to sit in, and an army's ability to clamp down exemplify coercive power. A chilling example is the rise of suicide attacks in recent decades from about three a year worldwide in the 1980s to about one a day in 2016 (Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, 2016). They were only about 3 percent of terror incidents but accounted for almost half the fatalities (Pape, 2006, p. 4).
• Information and expertise: Power flows to those with the information and know‐how to solve important problems. It flows to marketing experts in consumer products industries, to the faculty in elite universities, and to political consultants who can help politicians get elected.
• Reputation: Reputation builds on expertise. In almost any field, people develop records of accomplishment based on their prior performance. Opportunities and influence flow to people with strong reputations, like the Hollywood superstars whose presence in a film sells tickets. Boivie, Graffin, and Gentry (2016) found that the reputation of the analyst, the CEO, and the firm all influenced how a firm's stock price changed in response to buy or sell recommendations from Wall Street analysts.
• Alliances and networks: Getting things done in an organization involves working through a complex network of individuals and groups. Friends and allies make things a lot easier. Kotter (1982) found that a key difference between more and less successful senior managers was attentiveness to building and cultivating ties with friends and allies. Managers who spent too little time building networks had much more difficulty getting things done.
• Access and control of agenda: Organizations and political systems typically give some individuals and groups more access than others to decision arenas. When decisions are made, the interests of those with “a seat at the table” are well represented, while the concerns of absentees are often distorted or ignored (Brown, 1986; Lukes, 1974). Access may come at a price. Shani and Westphal (2016) found that journalists who wrote negative stories about a firm's leadership soon found that CEOs from other firms stopped taking their calls. Because the journalists needed access to do their jobs, they tilted toward more flattering articles about corporate leaders.
• Framing: Control of meaning and symbols is what Mann (1986, 2013) refers to as ideological power. “Establishing the framework within which issues will be viewed and decided is often tantamount to determining the result” (Pfeffer, 1992, p. 203). Elites and opinion leaders often have substantial ability to shape meaning and articulate myths that express identity, beliefs, and values. Viewed positively, this fosters meaning and hope. Viewed cynically, elites can convince others to accept and support things not in their best interests (Brown, 1986; Lakoff, 2004). Lakoff argued that Republican electoral success in 2000 and 2004 owed much to skill in framing issues—recasting, for example, the “estate tax” (which sounds like a tax on the rich) into the “death tax” (which sounds like adding insult to injury).
• Personal power: Individuals who are attractive and socially adept—because of charisma, energy, stamina, political smarts, gift of gab, vision, or other characteristics—are imbued with power independent of other sources. French and Raven (1959) used the term referent power to describe influence that comes when people like you or want to be like you. John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan expanded their influence because they brought levels of charm, humor, and ease that Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush lacked.

A significant form of personal power is skill in the application of influence tactics. After reviewing research on persuasion, Cialdini (2008, 2016) developed a list of six techniques that skilled practitioners use to influence others, often without the targets realizing how they have been hooked:

1. Reciprocation: If I do something for you (send you a card, give you a small gift, or make some effort on your behalf), you're likely to feel you should do something for me as well.
2. Commitment and consistency: If I can get you to take a small step in my direction (maybe getting you to agree that you see at least some positive features in the product or idea I'm selling), I can leverage your desire to be consistent and to live up to your commitments.
3. Social proof: If I offer evidence that everyone (at least everyone you like) is doing it, you're more likely to do it as well. Bars and cafes often salt the tip jar with cash to cue you that tipping is what people do. Sport and film stars might have no more product knowledge than you do, but you may still want the shoes they wear or the cosmetic they use.
4. Liking: The more you like me (perhaps because I tell you how much I like you, or how well you'll do on this task, or how much we have in common), the better the chance you'll do what I ask.
5. Authority: If the boss, or someone with a badge or a fancy title, asks you to do it, you probably will.
6. Scarcity: We put a higher value on something that is scarce or about to become unavailable. (If I can convince you that the price is going up, there are only a few items left, what you want is very rare, or this is your last chance, you're more likely to buy.)

Partisans' multiple sources of power are always a constraint on authorities' capacity to make binding decisions. Officeholders who rely solely on position power generate resistance and get outflanked, outmaneuvered, or overrun by others more versatile in exercising multiple forms of power. Kotter (1985) argues that managerial jobs come with a built‐in “power gap” because position power is rarely enough to get the job done. Expertise, rewards, coercion, allies, access, reputation, framing, and personal power help close the gap.

Power can be volatile, rising and falling with changes in circumstances. An organization that sets new profit records each year is rarely besieged by complaints and demands for change. As many corporate leaders have learned, however, the first bad quarter triggers a stream of calls and letters from board members, stockholders, and financial analysts. In the boom of the late 1990s, “everyone” was getting rich in the stock market, and charismatic CEOs such as Jack Welch of General Electric and Jean‐Marie Messier of France's Vivendi became popular heroes. But when the economy, the market, and the image of business crashed in the first years of the new century, so did these heroic images. In 2002, Welch found himself deeply embarrassed by public revelation of the generous postretirement payouts his old company was bestowing on him. In the same year, Messier was booted out by board members dissatisfied with the company's stock price and his arrogant “American” leadership style.

Clark Kerr once remarked ruefully that his primary tasks as chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley seemed to be providing “sex for the students, parking for the faculty, and football for the alumni.” The remark was half‐facetious, but it reflects an important grain of truth: a president's power lies particularly in zones of indifference—areas only a few people care much about. The zone of indifference can expand or contract markedly, depending on how an organization is performing in the eyes of its major constituents. In the late 1960s, many college presidents lost their jobs because they were blamed for student unrest. Among them was Kerr, who remarked that he left the job just as he entered it, “fired with enthusiasm.” Managers need to track shifting boundaries of zones of indifference so as not to blunder into decisions that stir up unanticipated firestorms of criticism and resistance.

Distribution of Power: Overbounded and Underbounded Systems

Organizations and societies differ markedly in how power is distributed. Alderfer (1979) and Brown (1983) distinguish between overbounded and underbounded systems. In an overbounded system, power is highly concentrated and everything is tightly regulated. In an underbounded system, power is diffuse and the system is very loosely controlled. An overbounded system regulates politics with a firm hand; an underbounded system encourages conflict and power games.

If power is highly regulated, political activity is often forced under wraps. Before the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost (“openness”) in the 1980s, it was common for Westerners to view the Soviets as a vast, amorphous mass of like‐minded people, brainwashed by decades of government propaganda. It was not true, but even so‐called experts on Soviet affairs misread the underlying reality (Alterman, 1989). Ethnic, political, philosophical, and religious differences simmered quietly underground so long as the Kremlin maintained a tightly regulated society. Glasnost took the lid off, leading to an outpouring of debate and dissent that rapidly caused the collapse of the old order in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe. Almost overnight, much of Eastern Europe went from overbounded to underbounded. Most nations in Eastern Europe have since evolved into stable democracies, but many other countries have been less fortunate.

The war in Iraq, beginning in 2003, brought down the overbounded Saddam Hussein regime and created a power vacuum that attracted a host of contenders vying for supremacy. By 2006, Iraq had the formal elements of a new government, including a constitution and an elected parliament, but Iraq has struggled ever since to bring conflict and chaos under control. The Arab Spring, which began with unrest in Tunisia in 2010, brought unrest and revolt to many countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen. Fear of a similar fate drives the leaders of China's ruling Communist Party to mount an ongoing, massive effort to stem the tides of criticism and dissent welling up from China's nearly one billion Internet users.