A Theory of Culture-Switching: Leadership and Red Tape during Hurricane Katrina

The La Follette School takes no stand on policy issues; opinions expressed in this paper reflect the views of individual researchers and authors. Abstract This paper draws upon studies of organizational culture and sensemaking to develop a theory of culture-switching. Culture-switching occurs when organizational actors shift emphasis from one existing organizational cultural assumption to another to reshape organizational action. The concept is demonstrated in a case-study of the Hurricane Katrina response by the US Department of Defense (DOD). A slow initial DOD response arose because of self-imposed red-tape designed to limit engagement in crisis response, reflecting a cultural assumption of the need to maintain autonomy. DOD leaders altered the nature of the response by committing to another widely-shared cultural assumption: a " can-do " approach to achieving difficult goals regardless of obstacles. The case illustrates how different organizational cultural assumptions interact with red tape to foster either inertia or a proactive response. 2 After Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc across the US Gulf Coast in 2005, federal agencies were criticized for inertia and red tape. One Congressional review of the disaster was titled " A Failure of Initiative " (House Report, 2006). The White House (2006, p.70) review stated: " Most important, we must eliminate the extraordinary red tape and resulting delays in the process of requests for assistance in response efforts. " For the largest federal agency actually involved in the response, the US Department of Defense (DOD), the story was more complicated. Early in the response, the DOD caused a good deal of the delay by imposing rules that required detailed vetting of requests for aid. But in the latter part of the response the DOD was responsive, cutting through red tape. How was such a large organization able to alter the nature of its response in such a short space of time? This article argues that DOD leaders engaged in " culture-switching " , that is, they departed from an organizational response that reflected one pre-existing cultural assumption by committing clearly to a different cultural assumption. The next section outlines the theoretical framework that underpins the concept of culture-switching. While the concept has been inductively developed from the Katrina case study that follows, it draws strongly from studies of organizational culture and sensemaking. To provide a theoretical setting to apply the concept of culture-switching, the article next examines a previously established hypothesis about the relationship between culture and …