Consider the way people conceptualize the production process.

A brief digression: In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an accountant tells us why his job is not boring.  He recounts, in excruciating detail, the many “not at all boring” things that happen in his day.  But why is this funny?  Because it plays on a common stenotype that accountants are very boring people who find exciting exactly those routine details of daily life the rest of us dismiss as ordinary.  For the stereotype to resemble reality, one of two things must be happening: Either people who choose to be accountants bore us, or the profession socializes new members to think and act in a way the rest of us find boring.

 

Organizational culture is the same.  Organizations tend to recruit people who think in a way compatible with the organization’s view of the world, or else socialize them to think that way.  They train, reward and punish employees to reinforce the organization’s beliefs, and they allocate resources in accordance with those beliefs.

 

Now suppose an organization makes a cultural assumption that technical expertise is the only really valid form of knowledge and, therefore, that knowledge built from hands-on experience has very little value outside of day-to-day operations.  From what we said above, people in such a company are likely to make at least two kinds of errors.  First, engineers who are reasonably-but not intimately-familiar with the process may conclude that there are no preventive opportunities because they can’t see them.  Second, the company may send in a “SWAT” team of technical experts to ferret out opportunities comparable to those described in many case studies.  Not surprisingly, the team doesn’t find many and concludes the opportunities don’t exist.

 

Other important cultural beliefs also affect companies’ prevention behavior regarding pollution prevention.

A brief digression: In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an accountant tells us why his job is not boring.  He recounts, in excruciating detail, the many “not at all boring” things that happen in his day.  But why is this funny?  Because it plays on a common stenotype that accountants are very boring people who find exciting exactly those routine details of daily life the rest of us dismiss as ordinary.  For the stereotype to resemble reality, one of two things must be happening: Either people who choose to be accountants bore us, or the profession socializes new members to think and act in a way the rest of us find boring.

 

Organizational culture is the same.  Organizations tend to recruit people who think in a way compatible with the organization’s view of the world, or else socialize them to think that way.  They train, reward and punish employees to reinforce the organization’s beliefs, and they allocate resources in accordance with those beliefs.

 

Now suppose an organization makes a cultural assumption that technical expertise is the only really valid form of knowledge and, therefore, that knowledge built from hands-on experience has very little value outside of day-to-day operations.  From what we said above, people in such a company are likely to make at least two kinds of errors.  First, engineers who are reasonably-but not intimately-familiar with the process may conclude that there are no preventive opportunities because they can’t see them.  Second, the company may send in a “SWAT” team of technical experts to ferret out opportunities comparable to those described in many case studies.  Not surprisingly, the team doesn’t find many and concludes the opportunities don’t exist.

 

Other important cultural beliefs also affect companies’ prevention behavior regarding pollution prevention.  Consider the way people conceptualize the production process.  Do they think of it in terms of technology or people?  How do they see their jobs and the jobs of others?  Do they look for opportunities to improve things or wait for things to go wrong?  Finally, do they see unusual events as problems to be solved or opportunities to get even deeper insight into the way things work?

 

Pollution prevention presents a difficult information processing problem because it requires people to understand more than the intimate details of the production process; they must also understand the technical possibilities.  Such specialized information is generally carried into the organization by technical specialists or vendors.  Such information is, for the most part, accessible only to people with the skills and communications link to get and understand it.

 

Pollution prevention solutions, then, require a nexus between two very dissimilar types of information: contextual and technical.  The organizational problem lies in bringing the two together.  This is notoriously difficult because they tend to be held by different actors in the organizational cast.  We saw above that process engineers and “SWAT” teams are unlikely to find opportunities and solutions.  Let’s look at one last player, the environmental manager.  Environmental managers, an obvious choice, are generally responsible for helping a firm comply with the law.  While their work may expose them to many pollution prevention solutions, they often have trouble getting access to production areas.  People in production often perceive them as “the compliance police.”  Also, most of their work-applying for permits, running treatment plants, reporting spills, and filling out waste manifests-doesn’t require intimate process knowledge.

 

How do they see their jobs and the jobs of others?  Do they look for opportunities to improve things or wait for things to go wrong?  Finally, do they see unusual events as problems to be solved or opportunities to get even deeper insight into the way things work?

 

Pollution prevention presents a difficult information processing problem because it requires people to understand more than the intimate details of the production process; they must also understand the technical possibilities.  Such specialized information is generally carried into the organization by technical specialists or vendors.  Such information is, for the most part, accessible only to people with the skills and communications link to get and understand it.

 

Pollution prevention solutions, then, require a nexus between two very dissimilar types of information: contextual and technical.  The organizational problem lies in bringing the two together.  This is notoriously difficult because they tend to be held by different actors in the organizational cast.  We saw above that process engineers and “SWAT” teams are unlikely to find opportunities and solutions.  Let’s look at one last player, the environmental manager.  Environmental managers, an obvious choice, are generally responsible for helping a firm comply with the law.  While their work may expose them to many pollution prevention solutions, they often have trouble getting access to production areas.  People in production often perceive them as “the compliance police.”  Also, most of their work-applying for permits, running treatment plants, reporting spills, and filling out waste manifests-doesn’t require intimate process knowledge.