7.sept - symbols and seeing

What are symbols?

• A symbol is something that represents or communicates a meaning beyond its literal or practical function.

• For example, a company's logo is not simply a visual design—it can represent the organization's identity, values, and history.

• Similarly, the way employees dress, the design of an office, or the language used within an organization can all function as symbols.

• Symbols are important because they allow organizational members to understand and interpret their environment.

Organizational Symbols

• Organizational symbols are things that stand for ideas, values, meanings, or beliefs that make up an organization.

• They are the visible and experienceable manifestations of organizational life.

• Symbols can be things that organizational members see, hear, touch, smell, taste, or experience.

• They help organizational members make sense of their surroundings and understand what is expected of them.

• A symbol is therefore not only an object itself—it is the meaning that people attach to it.

Symbols and organizational culture

• Culture consists partly of shared meanings, and symbols help create, maintain, and communicate these meanings.

• For example, an organization may officially state that it values equality and teamwork. However, its symbols might communicate something different. If senior managers have luxurious private offices while other employees work in crowded spaces, this can symbolically communicate hierarchy and inequality.

• Therefore, symbols can sometimes reveal organizational culture more clearly than official statements or formal rules.

Symbols, Senses and Sensemaking

• Aristotle identified five basic senses:

  • Sight

  • Hearing

  • Touch

  • Taste

  • Smell

• Our senses are not completely separate. They interact and influence each other.

• We use our senses to experience the organization and then make meaning from what we experience.

• Plasticity = the brain's ability to reorganize its neural pathways based on experience, learning, or injury.

• This means that our experiences can change how we process sight, sound, touch, taste, smell

There are more than five ways of sensing

The five traditional senses are not the only ways humans experience their surroundings. We can also talk about:

• Sense of direction – knowing where you are and where you are going.

• Balance – knowing the position and movement of your body.

• Thermoception – sensing temperature.

• Empathy – sensing or understanding other people's emotional states.

Hierarchy Between the Senses

• n Western societies, sight is often treated as the most important sense.

• We often trust what we can see more than what we hear, feel, smell, etc.

• This is also reflected in science, where there is often a preference for things that are visible and measurable

• Organizations are not only experienced through what we can see. Culture can also be communicated through sounds, smells, physical feelings, interactions, and atmosphere.

How Do We Recognize Symbols?

• Symbols usually do not exist alone.

• Where we find one symbol, we often expect to find other symbols that confirm or reinforce its meaning.

• We understand symbols partly by looking at the context surrounding them

Studying organizational symbols

Researchers studying symbols need to:

• Look at symbols in their specific organizational context.

• Ask what the symbols mean to the people who experience them.

• Avoid simply deciding what a symbol means based on their own assumptions.

• Check whether different organizational members interpret the symbol in similar or different ways.

• Look at multiple symbols together to understand the larger culture.

Symbols can have multiple meanings

• An important point is that symbols do not necessarily have only one meaning. Different people can interpret the same symbol differently depending on their position, experiences, and relationship with the organization.

• For example, a formal dress code might symbolize professionalism to management but symbolize control or conformity to employees.

• This means that organizational culture is not always completely shared or agreed upon.

• Symbols can create common meanings, but they can also reveal differences, conflicts, and power relations within organizations

Functions of Organizational Symbols

1. Symbols provide a tangible expression of shared reality

• Symbols give physical and visible/experienceable form to organizational culture.

• They help express the values, norms, beliefs, and meanings that exist within an organization.

• Instead of culture being something abstract, symbols make parts of it experienceable

• But culture is not always completely shared

• symbols can also show division and conflict, not just agreement.

• Symbols help create norms and values

• Organizational culture develops through everyday interactions.

2. Symbols guide behaviour

• Symbols can tell people how they are expected to behave in a particular situation.

• They help activate internalized norms and values.

• when you enter a classroom, you usually know that you are expected to sit and listen

• The environment itself and its symbols communicate what kind of behaviour is expected.

• People behave differently depending on where they are because different environments communicate different expectations. Symbols therefore help people understand which role they should perform.

• Organizations also make some behaviours visible while other behaviours remain hidden.

3. Symbols provide a frame for conversations about experiences

• Symbols give people a framework for understanding what is happening around them.

• When what happens matches our expectations, we usually don't think much about it.

• But when something doesn't fit the expected framework, we notice it.

• This often leads people to talk about what happened.

• So symbols can create conversation and interpretation, especially when something does not fit our expectations.

4. Symbols integrate different systems of meaning

• Organizations contain many different people and groups, so there can be multiple systems of meaning at the same time.

• These meanings can sometimes compete or conflict.

• Symbols can help bring these different meanings together, even when everyone does not completely agree.

Symbols are central to sensemaking in organizations.

• People constantly use symbols to answer what is happening at the time

• You put things together when you see symbols

• People and non-human elements communicate symbolically all the time.

• Acts: wink, facial expressions

• Talk: metaphors, irony, jokes

• Objects: logos, photographs, office desigm

• An important point is that organizational members are not only employees

Symbols and organizational identity

• Symbols also help employees understand who they are as members of an organization.

• They can create a sense of belonging and distinguish one organization or group from another.

• For instance, uniforms, shared language, traditions, or organizational rituals can strengthen the feeling of being part of a particular group.

• Symbols therefore contribute to the construction of organizational identity.

Symbols and power

• Symbols are also connected to power. People in powerful positions can influence which symbols become important and what meanings are attached to them. Organizational leaders, for example, may use symbols to communicate particular values or create a desired organizational image.

• However, employees are not simply passive receivers of these meanings. They can interpret symbols differently, reject their intended meanings, or create their own symbols. Therefore, symbols can also become sites of resistance and contestation.

Rabies in the street

Urban space, poverty and the Commonwealth Games

• Nadal uses the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010 as an example of how ideas about the environment and cleanliness can be used to control urban space. Before the Games, there was a major campaign to “beautify” Delhi and present the city as clean, modern and internationally respectable.

• Terms such as “purification of space,” “a clean and green riverfront,” and “reclaiming public spaces for proper citizens” sound positive, but Nadal shows that they can hide something else.

• In practice, “cleaning up” the city often meant removing slums and poor people from visible public spaces. Environmental language was therefore used to justify social and spatial control.

Slums vs. gated communities

Nadal presents the slum as a symbol of poverty and the gated community as a symbol of wealth and privilege.

These represent two very different ways of experiencing the city.

Slums:

• Associated with poverty and insecure housing.

• People have fewer resources and less access to services.

• Residents are more exposed to public spaces and street animals.

• Poor infrastructure can increase contact with animals.

Gated communities:

• Associated with the wealthy/middle class.

• Private and controlled spaces.

• Better infrastructure and sanitation.

• People can avoid unwanted contact with street animals more easily.

• Represent ideas of safety, cleanliness, order and modernity.

This creates an important class divide in how people experience the urban environment.

Middle class vs. street children

• Nadal contrasts the urban middle class with street children.

• The middle class is generally described as more economically independent, educated and able to afford material belongings. They have greater access to healthcare, education and other services.

• Street children, on the other hand, may live on the street or move between street life and family life. Their everyday lives are much more exposed to risks in the urban environment, including animal bites.

• One particularly important point is that some street children avoid going to hospitals because they fear that the hospital or shelter could be an even worse place than their current situation. So even when healthcare technically exists, vulnerable people may not be able or willing to use it.

Family support and vulnerability

Nadal also finds a relationship between the strength of children's connections to their families and their access to education and healthcare.

So the risk of rabies is not simply about whether a child happens to meet a dog. It is connected to their social circumstances.

Rabies risk is socially unequal.

People who are poor and socially vulnerable are more exposed to the conditions that increase the risk of animal bites, while wealthier people can protect themselves more easily.

Middle-class myopia

Middle-class myopia means that middle-class people can have a limited view of the experiences of poorer people because they experience the city from a very different social position.

They may see things such as slums, street animals, garbage, open spaces, poor sanitation as problems that should simply be removed or controlled.

But they may not fully understand why people live this way or why changing the environment can have serious consequences for poor communities.

For example, a middle-class person might support removing a slum because it looks dirty or unsafe. But for the people living there, that slum is their home. Removing it in the name of “beautification” can make them homeless or force them somewhere else.

So Nadal is showing that different social groups see the same urban environment differently.

Strong preference for government action towards the poor

• Nadal also observes that middle-class people can have a strong preference for government intervention in dealing with poverty and urban problems.

• However, this can be complicated. Government intervention may genuinely improve living conditions, but it can also mean controlling, relocating or excluding poorer people.

• Who gets to decide what a “better” city looks like?

Hinduism

• Nadal explains Hinduism because religion is important for understanding people's relationships with animals, food and the environment.

• Hinduism is not simply presented as a religion but also as a way of life that can influence everyday behavior and ideas about how people should live.

Dharma:

• Dharma refers to the principles of order, duty and right living.

• It can involve duties, ethics, moral behaviours

• For Nadal's discussion, an important part is the idea that humans have a duty to care for living beings.

  This helps explain why some people feed or care for street animals even when those animals are seen as a problem by others.

Karma

• Karma is the idea that a person's actions, thoughts, words and intentions have consequences that influence their future.

• It is connected to the larger cycle of death and rebirth.

• For Nadal, this helps explain why helping living creatures can have moral and religious importance. Caring for an animal can therefore be more than simply an act of kindness—it can be connected to ideas about duty, morality and one's future.

Purity and impurity

• The dichotomy between pure and impure is important in Nadal's discussion of food and social relationships.

• In Hindu contexts, ideas of purity and impurity can influence what people eat, who they eat with, how food is prepared, and how people relate socially to one another.

• Food is therefore not simply about nutrition.

A symbolic perspective on food in India

• Nadal uses food as a way to understand relationships between humans and non-human animals in urban India.

• Food is not only something people eat. It has social, cultural, religious and symbolic meanings. It can show relationships between people and animals and can also tell us something about power, social class, religion and ideas about purity and impurity.

• Who is eating whom, and what does this tell us about relationships between humans and non-humans?

• This means looking at food chains and food webs involving both humans and non-human animals.

Food chains and food webs

• A food chain shows who eats whom in a relatively simple sequence.

• A food web is more complicated because many different species are connected through eating and being eaten.

• Nadal uses this idea to show that humans are not separate from the food web. Humans create food, consume food, throw food away, feed animals and produce other organic material that animals can consume.

• This means that the urban environment is a multispecies environment where humans and animals depend on or affect each other.

• Food connects humans and non-human animals.

Different forms of eating

Nadal introduces different types of eating that are important for understanding the urban food web.

Saprophagy = eating dead or decaying organic material.

• For example, animals eating decomposing organic matter in garbage or other waste.

Necrophagy = eating dead animal or human flesh, particularly decomposing bodies/carcasses.

• This is especially important in Nadal's discussion of vultures and dogs, because both can consume animal carcasses.

Coprophagy = eating feces.

• This is another example of how material that humans consider waste can become a food source for other species.

Nadal is showing that things humans classify as waste, disgusting or useless can actually be resources for other species.

Vultures as part of Indian society

• Vultures historically played an important role in Indian environments because they consumed dead animals and other decomposing organic material.

• They were therefore important scavengers.

• Some Zoroastrian communities also traditionally use Towers of Silence, where corpses are exposed to scavenging birds. Vultures therefore became part of a larger cultural and ecological system surrounding death and the disposal of bodies.

• The important point is that vultures were not simply “wild animals.” They were actually part of human society and its systems of dealing with death and waste.

The collapse of vulture populations

• A major ecological change occurred when vulture populations in India experienced a dramatic collapse.

• The main cause discussed by Nadal is the veterinary anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac.

• Diclofenac was used to treat livestock. When vultures fed on the carcasses of animals that had been treated with the drug, they could suffer kidney failure and die.

• The result was an enormous decline in vulture populations.

Why the decline of vultures matters for rabies

• With fewer vultures available to consume carcasses, dogs became more important scavengers.

• But dogs are different from vultures.

• Dogs:

  • are less efficient at rapidly disposing of carcasses

  • can reproduce much faster

  • live very close to humans

  • can bite humans

  • can carry and transmit rabies

• Therefore, the decline of vultures potentially contributed to conditions that supported larger populations of free-roaming dogs and increased human-dog contact.

• Changes in an ecological food web can indirectly affect human health.

Religion, animals and food

• Nadal also connects food and animals to Hindu culture and religion.

• As discussed in Chapter 1, Hindu ideas can create a moral responsibility to care for living beings.

• This can influence practices such as:

  • feeding animals

  • protecting certain animals

  • avoiding harm to animals

  • attitudes towards cattle

  • attitudes towards meat

• However, Nadal does not suggest that all Hindus have exactly the same attitudes towards animals.

• There are contradictions and differences between religious ideals, everyday practices, class, politics and individual beliefs.

Cattle and meat

• The relationship between humans, cattle and food is therefore complicated.

• Cows can be:

  • economically useful

  • religiously significant

  • protected by law in many places

  • sources of food/resources for other species after death

• This creates an interesting connection to the food web.

• A cow may have a very different meaning while alive compared with what happens to its body after death.

• Its carcass can become food for vultures, dogs and other scavengers.

• So even death does not remove an animal from the social and ecological network.

The important contradiction

• Humans may consider some things sacred, while also producing large amounts of waste and dead organic material.

• At the same time, what humans consider disgusting or impure can be an important source of food for animals.

• Therefore, humans are partly responsible for creating the conditions that allow urban animal populations to exist.

• This is why Nadal does not see street animals as simply “invading” human cities.

• Humans and animals are producing the urban environment together.

Reading Nadal (2020) through the lens of the DFM

What organisations and organizational networks are involved?

• temples, butchers, shops, vets, public health, government, ragpickers, residents, street dogs, etc. are interconnected through flows of food, waste, animals, resources and information.

• organizations and actors do not exist independently.

Above ground what is visible and observable.

• visible: acts, talk, objects (e.g. feeding animals, garbage, food, carcasses).

Below the surface, what lies underneath these visible things.

• hidden meanings: culture, emotion, power, ideology, values, beliefs, norms, inequality.

Nadal uses ethnography (fieldwork, observation, photos, field notes, interviews) to understand the meanings behind visible actions and to understand these complicated relationships.