Rational techniques as myth-based rituals: the role of reflective practitioners in remunerative justice.

Political, social, economic, and organizational forces often compel public administrators to address the problem of justly remunerating employees. This problem is fundamentally "wicked," but for a host of reasons, administrators seek to "tame" the problem by performing rituals and invoking myths. After all, wicked problems lack objective solutions, implementing potential solutions add to the problem, it is impossible to determine when the problem is resolved, and the problem encountered is only a symptom of other problems. (1)

The rituals consist of certain rational techniques, including job evaluations, salary surveys, position classifications, and merit pay determinations. The outcomes of such rituals lay the foundations of remunerative myths that include comparable worth, position matching, objective categorization, and meaningful evaluation. Administrators who perform these rituals and myths to solve salary-assignment problems, thus, appear authoritative, deterministic, objective, and just. Rational techniques do have the advantage of being efficient. They may also be fairly accurate in static work contexts where employees' duties and responsibilities are relatively stable, organizational problems are largely predictable, and employees' personal lives present few serious problems or challenges to the organization. In those contexts, myths and rituals become solutions to remunerative problems since they embody previous distributionary experiences and patterns that have proven acceptable to administrators and governing authorities.

In the rapidly changing and often-contentious compensation environments of the present, however, traditional beliefs and values are evolving. Timeworn remunerative practices are now contested and protested within and outside public organizations. Organizational compensation contexts include "doing more with less," downsizing, cutback management, outsourcing, salary compression, salary creep, a host of salary inequities, and position classification malfunctions. In addition, employees' personal lives and organizational culture are becoming evermore intertwined as employees demand paternity and maternity leave, day care, elder care, affordable health insurance, and same-sex partner benefits.

In today's compensation contexts, it is essential that public administrators become truly reflective practitioners (2) who participate thoughtfully and actively in the molding of just remunerative schemes within their organizations. The remunerative problems and conflicts that administrators face in a technically complex, politically aggressive, and culturally dynamic environment requires much more than neutral scientists who apply so-called "objective criteria." The problems require more than managers who sort employees into an array of supposedly logical categories in order to facilitate the mechanistic production of a "necessary" remunerative solution. Public administrators must therefore develop a new sort of expertise, one that is capable of coping innovatively and holistically with what might seem to be overwhelming amounts of conflicting information and irreconcilable norms. Currently, scholars refer to such implicit expertise as praxis, or "knowing-in-action."

This article supplements the writing of scholars who have suggested how reflective practitioners might counter the myths and rituals that dominate so much of organizational problem solving. First, this article establishes the wickedness of salary-assignment problems. It then discusses the reasons that administrators make recourse to myths and rituals, the advantages to invoking myth and rational techniques in salary assignments, the role of the operative remunerative myth, and the scientific method used to tame the wicked problem. In the next section, the problems of using rational techniques for salary assignments are examined. These problems include reductionism and the embedded nature of human beings, the phronetic gap, the giving of grounds, the limitations of the rational context, and hierarchalgaps. The final sections of the article detail the implications that continuing to rely on traditional remunerative practices hold for the reflective practitioner and provide an alternative to myth-based remuneration.

The Jigsaw Puzzle and the Wicked Problem

In most public sector organizations, salary assignments do not change dramatically from one fiscal year to another. Moreover, current practices fuel the expectation that employees will receive pay increases each year. In these organizations there are no techniques such as zero-base salary assignments, a practice whereby employees' duties and responsibilities justify salary assignments and where incongruence between performance and pay could lead to significant salary increases or decreases. Using such techniques and laborious justifications, however, could lead to remunerative justice.

Salary distributions are opinions based on a broad range of interests and a complex array of evaluative decisions. The interests may include fiscal conservativism, parochialism, and traditionalism. Evaluative decisions are often made in the interest of pay equity, be it internal, external, or individual) In a rank-in-person classification system, interests are highly personal. With a rank-in-job classification system, the evaluative decisions may be rationalized with recourse to job analyses, job descriptions, job evaluations, salary surveys, position management, performance appraisals, promotions, merit pay, longevity pay, and a host of other tools and systems. When public administrators utilize each of these techniques, they add another piece to the salary assignment jigsaw puzzle, a complex puzzle designed to solve a wicked problem. Wicked salary-assignment problems offer public administrators challenges and opportunities to direct their organizations toward remunerative justice. Through various policies and procedures, administrators shape the discourse on compensation. Administrators need to ask critical questions about rational techniques. These questions include:

* What does the organization hope to accomplish?

* How will the organization meet its compensation goals?

* What strengths and weaknesses does each approach entail?

* What other methods should be used to achieve our objectives?

* How will the compensation problem change when the solution is implemented?

Raising these questions is critical because rational techniques often prevent them from being asked and provide an illusion of remunerative justice.

In addition, there are a host of management, service, market, public perception, and political issues to be resolved. Internally, salary levels within public sector organizations affect morale, behavior, retention, recruitment, career development, motivation, and productivity. Externally, salaries affect the quality and costs of services. Salaries influence tax rates and other revenue decisions. Elected officials must prioritize budget appropriations when setting salaries, while often competing with private firms for expertise, and officials must also mollify the public's perceptions of bureaucratic fraud, waste, and abuse. Since remunerative injustice is a wicked problem, there are no clear criteria for success. Consequently, administrators and compensation experts innovate constantly, but their solutions to remunerative justice are makeshift and bring no end to internal and external salary disputes.

The Recourse to Myth

Because of the messiness of salary-distribution decisions, public administrators seek out and employ systematic, objective, and satisfying techniques in an attempt to solve thorny compensation problems. They attempt, in other words, to tame their wicked problems. Because this transformation is not possible within the reality of organizational life, it takes place in the alternative reality of myth. Myths in public administration are often reflected in the gap or tension between the "ought" and "is" of various practices. The ought provides a fantasized or glamorized ideal that the is of practices should be achieving. In this article, remunerative justice and pay equity are considered myths for the failure to reach ideals.

Myths embody and express the abstract attitudes, values, and beliefs of those to whom they are addressed through concrete images and behaviors. (4) Myths include the reified communication of information, reports with sacred qualities, revered reports in symbolic forms, information in reports that does not occur or exist in the world, and reports that are a product of transformations. (5) Many terms and events occur in the myth that could not exist in organizational life as ordinarily experienced.

The stories myths tell are easy to remember, understandable to most people regardless of education or intelligence, and more satisfying to the emotions and the imagination than to the intellect. (6) Myths in public sector organizations narrate the origins of salary assignments, including past increases or decreases to salaries. This narrative may be associated with rituals such as cost-of-living-adjustments, annual merit pay determinations, pay raises, promotions, position reclassifications, salary adjustments, and equity pay. Such rituals justify salary distributions. Behind the narratives of every myth is a confrontation with some major human concern. Hence, the events that rational techniques narrate are depicted in symbolic form. The symbols, in turn, are unlike ordinary compensation events such as administering payroll, sick leave, or health care benefits. The symbols are mysteries and enigmas. In a nutshell, the recourse to myth is understood to be a particularly helpful tool for taming wicked problems.

By employing rational techniques and myth, public administrators name and frame compensation issues in publicly acceptable forms. (7) Administrators need to name and frame salary assignments because the wicked problems associated with those decisions are viewed as taming problems. Politically, organizationally, and socially, then, certain traits are invested with organizational significance and attributed to individuals whose identity within the organization is thereby constituted; that is, they are named. In this way, the content of any such salary-assignment myth represents the attitudes, beliefs, and values that are embodied in the social life of an organization while also reflecting certain features of the organization's hierarchical structure and providing a basis for categorizing people within the organization in ways that are acceptable, or at least tolerable, to those involved. (8) Hence, a set of logical distinctions arises that justifies the ordering of individuals relative to one another. In essence compensation decisions are framed. Appropriate myths that incorporate naming and framing thus justify certain claims to salary levels that support the salary-assignment myth and simultaneously deny the legitimacy of claims that contradict the myth. Hence, the core importance of such myths to managers lies in their justificatory or mediating message. The recourse to myth also mediates opposition (9) and justifies decisions regarding major issues. (10) Myths mediate and justify by attributing a set of characteristics and values to characters in the stories they tell. The myth essentializes different actors for the audience and, in the process, defines the characters oppositionally, or relative to the major concern at issue. The actors in a myth are valued according to criteria inherent in mythical categories themselves. Roles within myths provide categories for the diverse individuals acting within the organization. By defining which of the actors' real-life characteristics and experiential contingencies should be recognized or ignored, mythic roles limit the perception and evaluation of the characters being categorized. The roles also mediate discrepancies among role categories by depicting behavior both within and between the categories. (11)

Print Get the Mag Weekly Updates