Taboos

Introduction

A taboo is a social prohibition against a particular act, object, word, or subject. Originating in social anthropology, the idea of taboo has had a small but significant influence on studies of organization through the cultural turn of the 1980s, in which issues of symbolism came to the fore in organizational analysis. For managers, the study of organizational taboos can bring to light issues of strategic significance that may be ignored because they are considered too risqué, threatening, or otherwise out of bounds. For academic researchers, the study of organizational taboos can uncover the political and semantic structures of organizations and highlight power relations that usually remain hidden from the view of both participants and observers. (Ten Bos, 17)

Conceptual Overview

The word taboo is of Polynesian origin and combines a sense of both the forbidden and the sacred. Studies of organizational taboos have tended to focus on the former connotation, examining organizational prohibitions on topics such as failure, workplace bullying, sabotage, harassment, sexual activity, emotions, gender conflict, and violence. The word taboo is employed, often tangentially rather than as a central theoretical resource, to refer to topics and activities that are unacknowledged by members of the organization and the discussion of which is prohibited. (Martin, 259)

In some cases, writers evince a desire to transgress the taboo and bring issues such as sexual inequality or bullying onto the formal organizational agenda. In such cases, the taboo is primarily discursive and functions to conceal, and thereby perpetuate, the behavior whose undesirability is assumed. Prohibitions of the taboo are deemed irrational and stand in the way of progress and enlightenment. For example, a taboo on failure can prevent organizational learning as failure cannot be openly admitted, and so mistakes cannot be interrogated and learned from. (Ten Bos, 17)

In 1990, Joanne Martin wrote what is perhaps the best-known study of organizational taboos when she examined the attitudes toward working mothers displayed in a television interview with the CEO of a multinational corporation. Her deconstructive analysis of the CEO's speech brought to light three main taboos—nurturance, sexuality, and emotion—each of which was taboo because it breached the traditional divide between the public and private and brought underlying patterns of gender conflict to light. Behind these three taboos was the prohibition on speaking openly about gender conflict, which is a forbidden topic in light of organizational assumptions about rationality, neutrality, legitimate authority, and equality of treatment. ...