Don’t Waste a Good Disaster: A Systems Approach to an Ethics of International Institutional Failures

This keynote paper provides a control systems perspective of failed internationalised institutional arrangements. In the past years we have experienced dramatic international systems failure across important institutions. Banks, religious institutions and governmental systems have all experienced catastrophic crises which have proven difficult to assess and address. This paper examines these failures as complex systems failures and highlights the role of socio-cultural systems in their failure. Firstly, the institutional arrangements are formally defined as complex systems. Secondly, the paper proposes the systemic failure as a failure of institutional culture which can be accounted for by certain systemic aspects of the cultural systems which underpin institutional life. The paper utilises a three layer model of culture to demonstrate systems effects in the institutional arrangements. The paper then presents empirical findings from a study of a large scale medical system implementation to demonstrate the role of cultural symbolic factors in the system implementation.