By David M. Boje, Feb 11, 2007
CHAPTER 14: WHAT STORY CONSULTANTS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE ‘L-WORD’?
Liar is a four-letter word. Itcomes from the root leogon (lEogere, from lEogan), to tell lies. One definition of liar, is ‘storyteller.’ In French, the L-word is menteu, which is pretty close to ‘mentor’, which is what a story consultant does. A liar is a teller of fables. Fable is from the French word, fabuliste or the Latin fbula. Liar is the composer of fables. To lie has a double meaning, on in love is to lie down to have sexual intercourse (to lie with someone). Lie in lying, is to make statements or stories one knows to be false with the intent to deceive or give a false impression, or perhaps just to equivocate to confuse, conceal or evade the storylistener getting near the truth. A fib is a softer lie, sometimes called the white lie. White lies are stories told to be polite, to evade an embarrassment, like telling Aunt Lilly you lover her Christmas fruitcake, knowing full well it tastes awful, but she does take such pride in it. Enough etymology!
Story is used by liars to conceal something, and bluff opponents. To lie is promise falsely and to lie with something hidden or buried (entombed). That is its double meaning. Liars are storytelling deceivers, fibbers, falsifiers, perjurers, and prevaricators. Liars just are not sincere, and can be boastful. Lying is a culturally based social activity.
Satin is ultimate liar, the author of lies, but story consultants can be a facilitator of lies, training liars in their fabuliste competencies. Those who become skillful, become consummate liars.
Story consultants teach liars certain competencies:
Immanuel Kant (1785: 14) was very clear about the supposed right to lie as being very much against his Categorical Imperative: “Always act in such a way that you can also will that the maxim of your action should become a universal law.” We know it as the golden rule – ‘don’t lie unto others, lest they turn around an lie unto you.’
Yet, we know that people do lie, and that story consultants are hired to coach liars to lie without getting caught.
Business Week published an article by Roberts and Engardio (2006) about story consulting in China. For $5,000 Lai Mingwei said his ‘Corporate Responsibility Management & Consulting Co.’ would help Mr. Tang Yinghong an administrator for the Ningbo Beifa Group factory, maker of pens, mechanical pencils, and highlighters sold to Wal-Mart, pas a monitor’s audit. Beifa’s located in Chinese coastal city of Ningbo. Mingwei’s consulting firm is in Shanghai. Wal-Mart has their four strikes and you are out policy. Beifa had been caught three times already by Wal-Mart’s monitors, violating China’s minimum wage and overtime rules.
Most sweatshops keep two or three sets of books, hiding the original payroll records, when paying less than minimum wage, or not paying overtime rates. In China the minimum wage varies by province. Overtime pay is time and a half after 8 hours, triple pay for Saturday and Sunday. In China there is not much enforcement of this by the government. Hiring underage workers, and getting caught will usually prompt Wal-Mart and other global corporations to cancel a contract on the first strike.
This kind of story consulting works as follows:
This new breed of Chinese story consultants sprang up to help clients like Beifa to keep their Wal-Mart contracts. Last year Wal-Mart did or commissioned consultants to do 13,600 audit inspections a year in its 7,200 factories. They terminated 141 contracts for any very serious infraction, such as boing found with child labor. At first glance it might seem that Mr. Mingwei of the ‘Corporate Responsibility Management & Consulting Co’ is undermining monitoring, and subverting the ethical codes crafted by corporations. You may not know it by the monitors, are often consulting firms (with names like Verité, which means ‘truth’ in French) are contracted by corporations, or their accounting firms, or commissioned by organizations funded by corporations, with ethical sounding names like, ‘Fair Labor Association.’ In other words, most of the monitors are story consultants, and so is Mr. Mingwei.
Story consulting is a tale of monitoring deception that occurs for socioeconomic reasons. For example, Wal-Mart puts a low price pressure onto its factories in China. The factories are motivated to cheat on Wal-Mart’s code of ethics, in particular on the labor standards. However Wal-Mart is willing to give its contracting sweatshops three strikes, because cheating on wages and overtime (working conditions, including health & safety) keeps prices low to consumer. Roberts and Engardio (2006: 2) assert that this lets corporations such as Nike, Adidas, Disney, Target, and Wal-Mart promote the image of its ethics codes being the “badge of responsible [global] capitalism.” The socioeconomic motive for the Chinese government is not to enforce labor laws too much as it would change the incentive for corporations to subcontract with factories built in China.
Workers have an incentive, especially if they are poor rural migrants, to work more hours than the government allows, even if the sweatshop does not pay overtime, has poor health and safety processes.
Everyone knows that monitoring is a game just like ‘liar’s poker.’ Nike, for example, concedes, “Cheating is far more pervasive than they had imagined” (Roberts & Engardio (2006: 2). Hannah Jones, Nike’s VP for Corporate Responsibility says, “we still have the same core problems” (p. 2, adding monitoring, “doesn’t per se lead to sustainable improvements’ (p. 2). Peter Wang, general manager of Zhi Qiao Garments Co in Panyu City in China, employs 600 workers. One of Nike’s monitors caught the factory cheating by falsifying wage records for overtime. The economic pressure for Peter Wang is that Nike does not pay enough in its contract to allow for overtime wages. Wang says, “any improvement you make cost more money” but he points out, “the price [Nike pays] never increases one penny” (p. 2). He adds, “but compliance with labor codes definitely raises costs.” (p. 2). Estimates among those doing monitoring consulting work are that only 5% of China’s contract-factories obey hour limits, and only 20% comply with minimum wage rules. Monitors say they find falsification of payroll records on the rise from 46% to 75%.
Ron Cheg, a Taiwanese General Manager of Shoetown Footwear Company, employs 15,000 workers in Qingyuan, Guangdong China, claims, “we can’t ask Nike to increase our price… [so] how can we affod to pay the higher salary?” to workers (p. 6).
The CEO of Fair Labor Association (FLA) is a story consultant named Auret van Heerden. He claims McDonald’s, Walt Disney, and Wal-Mart are doing thousands of monitor audits a year. He hopes they will burn out on doing audits, and hire the FLA, which does audits very infrequently, and uses its story consulting to write impenetrable reports, it posts on the web. FLA is a coalition of 20 apparel and sporting goods makers and retailers, including Nike, Adidas Group, Eddie Bauer, and Nordstrom. FLA has done about 3 reports since the Kukdong Nike-Reebok scandal prompted FLA to hire its first monitor-consultant, called Verité in 2001. In November 2005, FLA did its third major study, a study of 569 factories owned by 88 suppliers, in China and around the world, employing 3000,000 workers, and once again, as in all its reports, “found labor-code violations in every single one” (p. 4). FLA found an average of 18 violations per factory ranging form excessive hours, underpayment of wages, health and safety, and worker harassment violations. You might be asking yourself, ‘well what is the use of this monitoring and storytelling in the reports of violations, if it all keeps happening?’ Without story consulting there would be far fewer reported violations.
Auret van Heerden admits that monitoring “for many retailers… a way of covering themselves” (p. 2). The way this form of Liar’s Poker works is FLA puts the corporations in the role of enforcer of their ethics codes, and the bad guy with the black hat, oh that’s just the contractors, doing what they do best, cheat on wages, and such things. Story consulting has help FLA, factory personnel, corporations, government, and workers to become quite cleaver and sophisticated in concealing noncompliance tieh laws and ethical codes.
Another reason for story consulting to train workers, supervisors, monitors, FLA, and member corporations in the art of the lie, is that China lacks meaningful rule of labor law, and the state unions do not help labor much at all.
There is an alternative to contracting with sweatshops. Factories owned directly in China by General Electric and Motorola, do not seem to need story consultants to train supervisors, receptionists, and workers to lie, because their substantive and authentic work conditions (wages, hours, safety, etc) are not egregious abuses, carrying the threat of scandal.
With the tightening labor supply in China, workers are demanding better wages, and enforcement laws and corporation’s ethical codes. Corporations are therefore threatening to move production contracts to Africa.
Factory monitoring and corporate codes of ethics is fabuliste, simply fantasy crafted by liars.
At some point the incentives for cheating, on wages, hours, underage workers (often with false IDs or no ID) and safety just gets out of hand. Garment workers, for example, toil over 80 hours a week and make about 42 cents per hour. Local minimum wages can be as low as 43 cents an hour, but workers are obligated to toil an extra 3 to 5 hours for no pay at all, or pay that has no overtime rate (Roberts & Engardio, 2006).
The way in which story consultants obscure the grounds (of evidence) so that warrants or claims (in the parlance of Critical Thinking) make a code of ethics believable is through acts of storytelling that meets the definition of the L-word.
The bottom line result of the stakeholder community co-authoring codes of ethics, monitoring them, hiring story consultants to make better liars of everyone --- is that even activists are fooled into believing the storytelling meets Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm Theory tests for fidelity and probability.
Instead of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, to not lie or steal, story consulting allows the working day to be stretched, wages cheated, then covered up by a game of Liar’s Poker.
It is a socioeconomic context in which lying with stories really works to the advantage of most everyone in the stakeholder community. Every agent in the stakeholder community becomes complicity in lying with story, some to save contracts, others to lower prices, and some unfortunates to hold onto a job. Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, where agents would not support the right to lie and deceive, is turned upside down and inside out. Everyone has more incentive to lie, gets punished more for telling the truth than for being caught in a lie. For Kant, the moral imperative is to treat humanity is an end unto itself, never as just a means. The postmodern maxim of story-liars is universalized in the violation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Each stakeholder has selfish reasons to lie.
Kant’s famous formula of autonomy, that agents of stakeholders are co-authors of their universalizable maxim, not to lie, because they would not lies told to them, is bent out of shape in the storytelling world of monitors, codes of ethics, and story consulting. Humanity everywhere is used as means to ends. Everyone lies for his or her ulterior motive.
Telling story-lies is against the Categorical Imperative. The story liars co-author acts of deception, falsify economic collective memory, and seem to reward good liars, and punish bad ones, who manage to get caught.
Answerability is an ethical obligation to use story consulting to transform of stakeholder community playing the liar’s game into one where the authenticity and substance of story is a Categorical Imperative.
Fishers rational assessments of fidelity and probability, does not train people skillful enough to tell if the liar’s story game is being played on them. People lie for socioeconomic, and quite rational “empirical motives” (Kant, 1785: 3).
I support a transcendental moral philosophy that treats telling authentic and substantive story as an ethical obligation. The practical ethics of story consulting training workers to lie, managers to tell fable-stories, and monitors to spin a story that puts the corporation making the contracts, setting the terms, into the role of ethical policeman, seems highly perverted.
Practical reasons for telling lie, fibbing to keep ones job or contract, or market share, takes a good deal of “intelligence, wit, judgment, and whatever talents of the mind one might want to name” (Kant, 1785: 7). But it also includes arrogance, the manipulation of grounds, warrants, claims to meet the listener’s test of fidelity and probability.
Some admire the liar, their will to story, and their competencies. Story consulting that trains the liar to falsify economic history in a stakeholder community where co-authoring lies has much economic incentive, makes Bakhtin’s answerability obligation seemingly as useless as Kant’s Categorical Imperative.
Even the activist and most reporters seem unable to detect the story liar. Liars seem rewarded economically, for spreading story lies. Liars do not obey the law, do not care about humanity as end unto itself, and aim instead for practical ethics, for whatever story will work.
Kant (1785: 15, footnote) argues “everyone should always tell the truth and believe what you are saying is true When you lie, you do not thereby will that everyone else lie and not believe that what you are saying is true.” The liar makes promises falsely, revises economic memory, hides the original books, substitutes falsified records, and in certain stakeholder communities the lies get them what they want, more cash. In short, it’s a stakeholder community that will set the standards for lying. It’s the community that rewards the liar for telling stories that are cunning, making false promises, turning perpetrator into the character with the white hat. In as stakeholder community, where the stakes are high, and people have fear, and are too afraid of losing, to tell any authentic story, you have to wonder about the motivation of story consulting. Will the story consultant go with the flow, teach the liar, or set the storytellers straight? In a stakeholder community where it’s everyone’s economic duty to lie, deviating to form a different kind of story consulting practice will be difficult. It is a question of the will to lie versus the will to truth (as close as that is possible to be).
Kant’s Categorical Imperative does not provide the countervailing forces in kinds of stakeholder community, where the liar’s game is rewarded:
Then I immediately become aware that I can indeed will the lie but can not at all will a universal law to lie” (Kant, 1785: 15).
If liars populate the stakeholder community, then there is only one imperative. ‘It’s your duty to lie to every monitor, says the factory manager to the factory worker, then quickly adds, ‘but if you cheat on your production quota, you are fired.’ Wal-Mart and Nike say to the contractors, ‘It’s in your contract to produce this quota for this bid,’ then adds, ‘but if you get caught four times violating the ethics codes, I’ll cancel your contract!’