By Jilde Garst & Vincent Blok

In our society, how we prioritize values, as well as how we translate these values to norms, is constantly changing. Values and norms are rules or beliefs that guide us in evaluating whether someone’s behavior and consequences are morally right or wrong. These are not always formalized in laws and regulations. Take, for example, the current COVID-19 crisis. With a skyrocketing demand for particular medical supplies, companies are provided with new norms for the value ‘solidarity’. Breweries and fashion brands that shift their production to medical supplies are praised, while pharmaceutical companies that hesitate to publicly share the secret composition of their test kits are scrutinized.

This crisis is, however, an extreme case. Often, changes in values and norms are more subtle. Our case study focused on the food industry and how it adapts its products to the changing definition of the value ‘health’. What is considered a “healthy” food product changes over time due to new scientific insights, new consumption habits, and changes in food production and sales. In our research, we investigated how eight food companies respond to changing health norms. We identified three organizational capabilities required to be sensitive for values and norms: a) Value Receptivity; b) Value Articulation; c) Value Reflexivity.

Value Receptivity was determined by where companies get their information on health norms. Some companies continuously monitored the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders – including policy makers, scientists and NGOs – while others based their definition of ‘health’ only on consumer research. The first group were better able to explain why certain health norms were important. Furthermore, these companies found it easier to navigate public health debates, as awareness of the variety of viewpoints allowed them to choose the best way forward. The companies that relied mostly on consumer research, on the other hand, were not sure what to do with these debates and jumped from one health norm to the next without a clear strategy.

Value Articulation concerned the capability of companies to communicate health norms within their organization. Some companies had a detailed set of health-oriented requirements for each product, while others varied these for each product line. Next to this (in)consistency, the implementation of the requirements also differed as several companies accepted exceptions without actively discouraging them. The other companies had clear rules when exceptions to health norms were allowed. Although inconsistency and exceptions allow for experimentation, health requirements were more often traded off against price or taste requirements when exceptions were not discouraged.

This articulation within the organization led to behavior and product outcomes that were not always anticipated. Therefore, the final capability was the ability of a company to evaluate these outcomes: Value Reflexivity. This required two kinds of input. First, a company needed to have an overview of its own behavior. The majority of the investigated companies had no system in place to monitor the nutritional composition of their products. Without this data, the companies were more reliant on the second type of input: how external actors evaluated their products. All companies received feedback from actors, such as NGOs and scientists. However, in handling this feedback, we saw a clear distinction between companies that saw all feedback as input for internal discussions and companies that dismissed any negative feedback as not relevant or not ‘practical’.

In conclusion, our study shows that for a company to be sensitive to societal values and norms, there needs to be three organizational capabilities:

1) becoming receptive to changes in norms,

2) consistently articulating norms in its organization, and

3) reflecting on their behavior by using feedback of external stakeholders.

This value-sensitivity might not only support a company in maintaining its own legitimacy, but might also increase a company’s awareness of their role in moving existing norms towards more positive societal impact.

Reference:

Garst, J., Blok, V., Branzei, O., Jansen, L., & Omta, O.S.W.F. 2019. Toward a Value-Sensitive Absorptive Capacity Framework: Navigating Intervalue and Intravalue Conflicts to Answer the Societal Call for Health. Business & Society. Available online: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0007650319876108