The Interpretative Crisis Of Corporate Ethics: From 'Family' Values To Job Terminations

Abstract

Abhijeet Bafna

Contemporary technology organisations exemplify a profound disconnect between espoused values and enacted practices, creating interpretative crises that fundamentally reshape how employees understand work, worth, and organisational belonging. Through Burrell and Morgan's (1979) Interpretative Paradigm, unethical workplace practices emerge not merely as procedural failures but as meaning-making events that corrode organisational culture from within. Mass layoffs affecting over 150,000 tech workers globally, coupled with CEO compensation packages reaching €188 million, generate symbolic hierarchies where employees interpret their disposability against executive indispensability. In India's IT sector, entry-level salaries of €4,100 juxtaposed with Western counterparts earning €40,000-60,000 for identical roles create narratives of geographic and racial devaluation that extend beyond economics into identity and dignity. Ghost job postings affecting 40% of advertised positions and systematic candidate ghosting transform recruitment from professional interaction into symbolic manipulation, where silence becomes a language of institutional contempt. Euphemistic corporate discourse - "workforce optimisation," "strategic realignment" - attempts to sanitise human suffering but instead amplifies the sensemaking burden on employees who must reconcile "family" rhetoric with sudden terminations. Through phenomenological analysis of how individuals construct meaning from these contradictions, the interpretative framework reveals workplace practices as sites of ontological rupture where professional identities fragment and organisational legitimacy dissolves. Survivors of layoffs experience moral injury and existential uncertainty, reconstructing organisational narratives through informal channels that resist corporate messaging. These collective interpretations crystallise into reputational narratives that expose the ethical bankruptcy beneath polished employer branding, demonstrating how subjective meaning-making ultimately determines organisational culture more powerfully than any managerial intervention.

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