Organizing values: The principles of rationalization and individualization

This chapter focuses on the interplay between organizations and values. Whereas organizational responses to normative expectations have been a major research topic, there is comparatively little research on societal impacts of these organizational responses. Against this background, we show that organizational responses to value issues can have far-reaching external effects of transforming the meaning of these values, leading to surprising field dynamics. These effects are far from being arbitrary because organizations tend to shape the meaning of societal values by aligning them with the organizational principles of rationalization and individualization. We illustrate rationalization- and individualization-based organizational responses and their societal effects by looking at two cases: the professionalization of human resource experts that resulted in the reinterpretation of equal employment opportunity as a business case for diversity, and the marketization of notions of fairness in status markets. We conclude that the organizational principles of rationalization and individualization trace a corridor for the processing of values in organizational contexts that profoundly shapes the meaning of these values.