Module 1=250 words
It is a module of 250 words. I have attached 3 pdf files and you have to read through them and make the assignment from those sources. No other sources just those pdf sources.
Apa6th edition for referencing only.
also I have attached the module topic and my agency’s website as you have to make the module based on that agency.
Thanks
Word Limit= 250 words
TOPIC:
With reference to Janicijevic (2013) and Padaki (2010), explain the concepts of organisational culture and organisational structure. Based on the author’s theories, describe the organisational culture and organisational structure of the agency you are completing your placement with.
Note: Please do not identify your host agency by name in the module post. Instead, you can use ‘my host agency’ or ‘the agency where I am undertaking my placement’ or similar.
My placement Agency Website=
https://www.foodbank.org.au/?state=nt Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
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Development in Practice
ISSN: 0961-4524 (Print) 1364-9213 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cdip20
Humanitarian principles and organisational
culture: Everyday practice in Medecins Sans
Fronti res-Holland
Dorothea Hilhorst & Nadja Schmiemann
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Development in Practice, Volume 12, Numbers 3 & 4, August 2002
Humanitarian principles and
organisational culture: everyday
practice in Medecins Sans
Frontieres-Holland
Dorothea Hilhorst and Nadja Schmiemann
Organisational principles or value standards are considered crucial for maintaining quality in
humanitarian assistance. Research among staff members of Medecins Sans Frontieres–
Holland (MSF-H) showed that fieldworkers construct their own interpretations of principles
and priorities in response to demands placed on them in the field. Organisational principles
are important for the performance and the well-being of volunteers: they serve as beacons,
identity markers, and interpersonal glue. It also becomes apparent that while in practice staff
members renegotiate the formal principles of their organisation, they also adhere to patterns
of organisational culture resulting in a number of ordering principles they deem typical of their
organisation.
Introduction
Until recently, it would have been nonsensical, or at least counter-intuitive, to write a paper on
humanitarian principles for a publication devoted to learning organisations. Principles of
humanity, neutrality, and impartiality were considered universal, not evolving or contextual.
These principles were thought to be enshrined in international humanitarian law and embodied
in the practices of the Red Cross movement. But in the last decade, this has changed
dramatically. Changes in the nature of conflict, the complex contexts in which humanitarian
work is undertaken, and the proliferation of humanitarian organisations have contributed to a
situation in which humanitarian principles are being debated and negotiated. One of the
signalling events that set these changes in motion was the formation of Medecins Sans
Frontieres (MSF) in 1971. This offshoot of the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) came about in response to experiences during the war in Biafra. It was a deliberate
challenge to the perceived rigidity of some of the principles and hierarchical workstyle of the
ICRC. The founders of MSF considered temoignage (the witnessing and shaming of
humanitarian law abuses) an important complement to providing relief, but nonetheless
compatible with the principles of impartiality and neutrality. MSF also stands for a different
workstyle. By employing volunteers for humanitarian work, the organisation provides people
who are motivated by the humanitarian spirit with the opportunity to contribute to worthwhile
action, and it thus maintains a strong embeddedness in society.
490 ISSN 0961-4524 print/ISSN 1364-9213 online 030490- 11 2002 Oxfam GB
DOI: 10.1080/096145022014983 4 Carfax Publishing
Dorothea Hilhorst and Nadja Schmiemann
While in the last few years there have been a number of conferences and publications
on humanitarian principles in response to changing political contexts, this paper focuses on
the meaning of principles for humanitarian workers in their everyday practice. Principles
are declared and are formally negotiated in codes of conduct and in working arrangements
between the parties involved in situations of complex crisis. However, what difference
these make in practice depends on how they are translated by the people who put them
to use. How they are implemented in the running of a field hospital or in responding to
numerous small events encountered in providing assistance depends on staff members
interpretation of the situation and the principles. To understand how principles work in
practice, it is therefore important to take into account that these operate through patterns
of organisational culture.
Principles do not only work in regulating actions and relations with external stakeholders
of humanitarian organisations, they also have a bearing upon organisational life and
motivation. It was this latter aspect in particular that triggered the research informing this
paper, which examines the way organisational principles are experienced by MSF
volunteers in the field, and how this influences their decision to stay with or leave the
organisation. 1 This question was identified by the MSF management who wanted to find
out the extent to which MSFs specific principles make a difference for the people working
for the organisation. The core of the research consisted of in-depth interviews with 14
volunteers who had just returned after one to three missions lasting anywhere between six
months and two years. Half of the interviewees were medical personnel and the others were
logistics experts.
The first part of this paper introduces humanitarian principles and the recent discussions
that have evolved around them, followed by some theoretical notes on the meaning of
principles in organisational practice and culture. Everyday field experience will be
illustrated by a fictional account of a day in the life of a volunteer, which was constructed
on the basis of interview material. We then elaborate how volunteers redefine and
renegotiate principles in practice. As we shall argue, the implementation of principles in
humanitarian action is patterned by organisational culture where all actors use their own
agency to learn, redefine, and negotiate what happens.
Humanitarian principles
Humanitarian action finds its essential motivation in the principle of humanity, defined by the
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) as the desire to
prevent and alleviate human suffering wherever it may be found . . . to protect life and health
and to ensure respect for the human being (IFRC 2001). Humanitarian action addresses
human suffering, whether resulting from disasters caused by natural hazards or by situations
of conflict. Humanitarian principles that guide assistance, such as the principles of impartiality
and neutrality, find their rationale in international humanitarian law and stem specifically from
experiences in war situations. Henry Dunant initiated the formal regulation of warfare after the
Battle of Solferino in 1859. Wars in those days were typically between competing nation-state
armies, and the idea of reducing suffering was appealing as a means of legitimising warfare in
increasingly democratising societies. Humanitarianism started with the Geneva Convention of
1864 and the recognition of the ICRC, which was given space to operate on the condition of
neutrality and impartiality (Leader 2000:12) After the massive abuse of humanitarian ideals in
the Second World War, four more Geneva Conventions elaborated the rules of war. It is
important to note that the term humanitarian principles refers to moral principles to mitigate
the destructive impact of war, but it is also used to refer to principles of humanitarian action.
Development in Practice, Volume 12, Numbers 3 & 4, August 2002 491
Humanitarian principles and organisational culture
This paper is concerned with the latter. Principles of humanitarian action are derived from
international humanitarian law but are not integral to the conventions that regulate warfare
among belligerents (Leader 1998).
In the last two decades, humanitarian principles have generated extensive debate and
undergone much change. This development is related to several factors. First, the nature of
conflict has increasingly moved away from the wars between nations that inspired
international humanitarian law. Todays conflicts are mostly intra-state in nature. They occur
in societies where the legitimacy and representational capacity of the state is low or even non-
existent, at least in the eyes of certain sectors of society. Civilians are often the direct targets
of violence and account for 90 per cent of all victims. Warfare is spread over a large area and
fragmented in nature. In the battlefield, use is made of light weaponry and small arms, while
common techniques include methods such as rape, ethnic cleansing, and starvation, which
are specifically directed against the civilian population. International conventions and rules for
warfare in these cases hardly apply, and humanitarian organisations have had likewise to
reconsider their working principles. In particular, the principle of neutrality has come to be
renegotiated in humanitarian politics, varying across both situations and organisations. Leader
(2000) identifies three different positions in this respect: neutrality elevated, neutrality
abandoned, and third-way humanitarianism seeking a middle way.
Second, there has been a proliferation of organisations which are active in humanitarian
operations. Even when they nominally embrace the same principles, the way these principles
are translated into practice may differ substantially. Among others, organisations have different
positions in the status they accord to principles, varying between the view that they are
universal and imperative (people have the universal right to humanitarian assistance) to the
view that they are relative (Macrae 1996 :34). These different meanings come to the surface
and clash when organisations want to define a coordinated response to a particular crisis, as for
instance in South Sudan and Liberia (Atkinson and Leader 2000; Bradbury et al. 2000). Third,
humanitarian principles have been further elaborated, thus creating more potential for
diversity. On the basis of a survey among humanitarian organisations, Minear and Weiss
(1993) found that eight principles were included by most agencies in the package of
humanitarian principles. Apart from the so-called classic principles, humanitarian organisa-
tions, partly affected by notions from development but mainly learning from their own
experiences, had come to adopt a new generation of principles including accountability and the
need for appropriateness and contextualisation. Fourth, humanitarian organisations to different
degrees have taken on additional, but not always equally compatible, sets of principles, such
as human rights, justice (directed at fair and equal relationships), development and peace
building, and staff protection. Finally, humanitarian principles have come to be debated as a
result of increasing doubts about the effectiveness and impact of humanitarian aid. Some
consider humanitarian action liable to be part of the problem rather than the solution by
actually feeding into the economies of war, acting as diversion for political solutions, or
undermining peoples coping and livelihood capacities (see, for instance, Anderson 1996;
Prendergast 1996; de Waal 1997).
Changing political and military contexts of conflict and the proliferation of organisations
and principles have all contributed to revealing the negotiated nature of principles.
Humanitarian principles have lost their universality and their aura as radiant beacons in the
storms of humanitarian crises. This has led to what some have labelled an ethical crisis in
humanitarianism. We do not wish to add to this debate on ethics, but would rather approach
the problem in a more empirical way. Having realised that principles are relative rather than
absolute, one then has to ask: What do principles do for organisations? What constitutes the
relation between principles and practice? Are humanitarians simply drifting around? How can
492 Development in Practice, Volume 12, Numbers 3 & 4, August 2002
Dorothea Hilhorst and Nadja Schmiemann
humanitarian workers distinguish right from wrong in the minutiae of their everyday work?
These questions direct attention to the importance of organisational culture for understanding
humanitarian work in practice.
Organisational principles and culture
Principles, in classic organisational thinking, precede policy, which in turn precedes
implementation. Principles, in this view, are defined or declared by the founders or trustees of
an organisation; management translates them into policies; and staff deal with their
implementation. Recent thinking about organisations, on the other hand, views principles and
policy as processes rather than entities. Colebatch (1998:111 ), for instance, sees policy and
principles as continuing patterns of events and understanding. Indeed, as the above
discussion illustrates, principles find expression in historically specific ways and evolve in
response to organisational experience. The relation between principle and practice ceases to be
sequential and becomes mutually informing: principles shape practice but at the same time
only become alive through everyday practice where they are interpreted and reshaped. The
translation of principles into practice is not the prerogative of management but happens
through the combined actions of all staff members and other involved actors. It is, therefore,
not enough to follow formal declarations of principles and policy. Rather to understand the
working of principles we must look at the actions of fieldworkers (Long 1989).
The processes by which principles are assessed in order to identify which are the more
appropriate ones for a given situation and then applying them are not rational. How actors
understand principles and the situations in which they apply is mediated by their institutional
experiences, expectations, and lifeworld. (The concept of lifeworld denotes the world as
immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life.) The interpretation of
principles is, furthermore, a social process: it is through interaction that individuals make sense
of principles and practice. Much of this happens implicitly and routinely: in the course of time,
patterns evolve from which fieldworkers derive their decisions. These can be called patterns
of organisational culture.
Such cultural patterns evolve in the first place in the field teams of humanitarian
organisations. MSF volunteers on mission experience conditions that are very different from
normal work situations. The volunteers have to make sense of a new environment, in tense
security situations, where they face unprecedented experiences that often take place in the
context of, or have, emotional impact. Family and friends are left behind and life on mission
is so extraordinary that volunteers often think that people at home cannot relate to them. In the
field there is hardly any space or time separating work from non-work. The team frequently
forms the volunteers only social network: they do not go home and cannot reflect on their
work with outsiders. This situation has a strong resemblance to what Erving Goffman (1961)
called closed communities. Much importance is attached to a local team that largely
coincides with the lifeworld of volunteers at that moment. Social interaction with immediate
colleagues becomes a major reference point for making sense of the situation and of
experiences at work.
Similar patterns may be identified in a broader context, whether MSF-wide or across the
humanitarian sector. This sector is characterised by a rapid staff turnover. Knowledge and
experience thus travel around within it and result to some extent in shared patterns of practice.
However, culture too is a process. Organisational culture is not a piece of luggage that
humanitarian workers carry around with them. Evolving patterns are never final: they change
in response to situations. Besides, there are always competing patterns and alternative actions.
Implicitly or explicitly, fieldworkers use their agency to select and apply certain courses of
Development in Practice, Volume 12, Numbers 3 & 4, August 2002 493
Humanitarian principles and organisational culture
action over others. Yet, while such cultural patterns are not totally voluntary, they do serve to
order organisational life wherein ideas become institutionalised and practices take on habitual
or ritual properties (Hilhorst forthcoming).
Once we acknowledge that every staff member contributes to the shaping of organisational
principles through everyday practice, it becomes clear that the set of principles that an
organisation adopts may change considerably in the experience of its staff. As we shall argue
below, MSF volunteers not only reinterpret principles, but also adhere to other ordering
principles they deem typical for MSF and more determinant of their life in the field. Likewise,
staff members find their own channels for negotiating principles outside formal communica-
tions, for instance through informal interaction and gossip.
Although organisational principles are renegotiated in practice, they remain important for
the organisation. They may not dictate practice, but do help to order humanitarian action in
many, perhaps unexpected, ways. They serve as anchor points expressing what an organisation
wants to achieve and on what values its actions are based. Besides having the potential to
prescribe action, they provide fieldworkers with clues about how to accord meaning to their
interactions, the environment, and the events around them. In addition, principles are identity
markers that help organisations to distinguish themselves from others working in the same
field (Rokebach 1973:159). Furthermore, principles can serve to boost motivation. People
want to give meaning to their actions and make sense of their interactions with others.
Principles can thus add some higher meaning to otherwise tedious or tense work (Sims et al.
1993: 269). Finally, principles can work as glue when they bind members of an organisation
together (Barnard and Walker 1994 :57). Principles thus remain important in different ways.
How they work in practice depends on how actors understand and employ them in the field.
Therefore we stress the need for an ethnographic approach to the study of principles.
MSF-Holland
MSF was founded in 1971 and MSF-Holland (MSF-H) followed in 1984. MSF has five
operational centres in Europe and 13 support offices. Canada, the UK, and Germany function
as partner sections of MSF-H. MSF-H supervises about 34 missions (in 30 countries), is
responsible for sending out almost 800 people each year, and has about 2800 local staff
members. In the countries in which MSF-H has projects, country managers and their teams are
responsible for setting up and establishing the aims and functioning of the projects. Each
project has a coordinator who is responsible for the team and reports to the country
coordinator, who in turn reports to the operational manager at headquarters. With 700,000
contributors and an annual turnover of around DFL150 million (US$67 million), MSF-H has
become one of the best-known humanitarian aid organisations in the world.
The set of principles defined by MSF, as in other organisations, is a mix of old- and new-
generation humanitarian principles (MSF 1996, 1999a). MSF embraces impartiality,
independence, and neutrality. Through direct contact with the victims of crisis, MSF expresses
its compassion and guarantees proximity. Transparency and accountability stand for the belief
that all information should be available to everyone inside and outside the organisation.
What makes MSF distinct from other organisations are the principles of advocacy,
voluntarism, and association. Being neutral does not forbid MSF-H to speak out about abuses
of international humanitarian law witnessed in the field. Advocacy for MSF-H implies drawing
attention whenever possible to abuses of humanitarian law, either through silent diplomacy or
with the help of the media (MSF 1998). MSF-H director Austen Davis explained this (when
addressing an introductory course for volunteers in 1999) as a moral duty to speak out and
is the point distinguishing MSF from other organisations. MSF is committed to the principles
494 Development in Practice, Volume 12, Numbers 3 & 4, August 2002
Dorothea Hilhorst and Nadja Schmiemann
of voluntarism and association to fulfil a social mission (MSF 1999a). The organisation is an
association based on volunteer members, who make up part of the mission teams.
Principles, for MSF, are clearly not universal. A 1999 policy document states that there is
a challenge in principled action:
These principles are there to help us debate and structure relevant and meaningful
action but should never serve as barriers, hindering our direct action. These values and
principles are still relevant and alive and they must be nurtured and sustained and lived
through with all the compromises inherent in human social life. (MSF 1999b)
This also means that MSF emphasises the need to learn and to change its principles when
appropriate. MSF-H states in its Medium-term Policy Document (1999a,b) that the
organisation must constantly seek to bring in new members to bring in new ideas and question
old wisdom, principles and policies.
Although principles are not seen as universal, they are nonetheless regarded as important,
and are emphasised during the Preparation Primary Departure (PPD) course for volunteers.
This course lasts between one and two weeks and introduces volunteers to the MSF philosophy
as much as to the everyday life of a mission.
Annas day
To illustrate the daily work of one MSF volunteer, let us describe a day from Annas life in the
field. Anna (a pseudonym) is a 30 year-old Dutch nurse who has been on a six-month mission
in Africa. Annas day is a compilation from excerpts of the interview we had with her.
Anna knows when she wakes up that another hectic day lies ahead of her. Although the
real emergency is over, and the vaccination campaign has become routine, it is still a lot
of work. The other members of the team are out there already. When she goes to the toilet
somebody knocks on the door and asks her where she had put a particular medicine the
day before. The day starts. Still sleepy, she gets a cup of coffee. But there is no way to
drink it in peace. Local staff are running around, getting to work, looking for papers and
medicine while she tries to have breakfast. The first patients are already waiting outside.
After having been here for three months, her wish for some privacy should have
disappeared and she should know better. Instead, she gets bad tempered and wants to go
back to bed. The fact that she has had maybe three hours to herself in the last three
months does not help. And the doctor, who came some three weeks ago for a short
mission, is already working, waiting eagerly for her to start as well. She leaves her coffee
and starts the daily work.
First, she works alongside the newly arrived doctor. She has noticed that this doctor
does not want to listen to anything about how his predecessors did the job; he wants to
do it his own way and to find things out by himself. For Anna this is an inefficient
learning-by-doing approach that fails to take into consideration the experiences of
others. With the high staff turnover in this emergency project, knowledge just slips away.
After a while, Anna leaves the doctor as she has to get in touch with colleagues in the
capital. She asks another nurse to take over, ignoring her resentment, as this woman does
not get along with the doctor. While Anna observes this, she finds it again remarkable that
personal matters are so important in the team and that they cannot put these to one side
and just get on with the work. Despite having problems with each other, she knows that
the doctor and nurse will start now to talk about her. Gossip is the most common thing
in this project.
Development in Practice, Volume 12, Numbers 3 & 4, August 2002 495
Humanitarian principles and organisational culture
Anna goes to the office and contacts the capital. While waiting for the telephone to work,
she looks out of the window and sees some of her expatriate colleagues talking with the
local staff. From this distance she can see the discomfort of the local staff caused by the
nonchalant behaviour of the expats, who have obviously not been around long enough to
become sensitive to the local culture. Thinking about the last few months, Anna realises that
morale in the project has gone down. It seems that the problems never bothered them in the
beginning. Then they were all on an adrenaline high, and everybody had the same goal
and knew what to do. But now it is a matter of maintaining the project, which involves more
routine work. This seems much harder for the volunteers to deal with than an emergency.
The Country Manager calls again and tells Anna that she will come after work to meet
with the team to discuss the importance of MSF principles. Anna sits back and thinks that
it is good to talk about principles once in a while. Their team is losing perspective
regarding MSF. Although the local staff always remind her of this identity by calling her
Sister Anna from MSF, she feels increasingly distant from the values and policies of the
organisation. When she had just completed her PPD course she felt strongly connected
to the principles MSF stands for. She knows these matter, but here in the field the staff are
just busy with work and team problems.
When she leaves the office to announce that evenings meeting, she sees another
volunteer arrive unexpectedly. This volunteer works in another project but was with Anna
in the emergency phase of the same project. She helped Anna a lot in her first weeks, when
there were no other experienced people around. They are happy to see each other and
Anna wants to chat immediately with her about her experiences and the dilemmas she
faces. But of course, there is no time. Finally, after work and before the Country Manager
arrives, Anna and her friend can have a beer together. Anna always knew that MSF
people work hard and in a close team, but she had not anticipated the almost total lack
of privacy. For lack of any alternative, Anna and her friend lock themselves in the toilet
to have their beer and chat. Here Anna tells her friend how difficult it was a few days ago,
when a female genital circumcision had taken place in a nearby village. Local people had
carried it out under terribly unhygienic circumstances. MSF has a strict hands off
policy on this matter. It is opposed to the practice and does not want to contribute in any
way to the procedure. Anna tells her how bad she had felt and that she had given the
woman clean tools to make the operation less dangerous. Now, some days later, she still
feels bothered, as she basically agrees with the MSF policy. But after all she has her
medical ethics too. Talking about it helps to make Anna feel better. There is much more
to discuss, but after a while they have to vacate the toilet.
Unfortunately, the discussion with the Country Manager about organisationa l
principles turns out to be perfunctory. After a 12-hour working day, the team members are
not interested and want to go to bed. Besides, the topic is remote to their experiences, as
there is no space to discuss team issues. Sometimes, Anna no longer knows why she is so
committed to MSF and her work. Often she feels she gives a lot and gets little in return
from the organisation, although she feels very rewarded by the responses of the local
people. Nonetheless, she wants to give it another try. Her loyalty to MSF is high and even
though she does not always see them put into practice, she agrees with MSFs values and
principles.
496 Development in Practice, Volume 12, Numbers 3 & 4, August 2002
Principles in everyday practice
Annas account strikingly underlines the closed character of mission teams that come to
occupy to a large extent the lifeworld of those belonging to them. A lack of privacy, extensive
Dorothea Hilhorst and Nadja Schmiemann
gossiping, and small irritations seem to dominate especially, as Anna explains, when an acute
emergency is over and the operation starts to be more dictated by routine. Other interviewees
also pointed to the relatively mundane nature of their experiences in comparison to the
principled mission they had hoped to join. As one said, We never talked about principles or
ideology, the conversations were always about things like getting stuck in the mud and the
latest local plane crash. A first comment about principles, then, is that in terms of their
importance in discussions about humanitarian assistance, they may fade away in the routines
of everyday experience of humanitarian work.
When asked how principles ordered their action, it was remarkable that volunteers more
often referred to what may be termed organisational ordering principles than to the
humanitarian values normally associated with the notion of principles. On the basis of the
interviews, four such ordering principles were identified: an unbureaucratic attitude, a focus on
emergency relief, democracy, and ownership. Democracy applies to the notion that each
person has a voice in the organisation, and ownership implies that we are all a big family.
Here, we shall elaborate the two most frequently cited, namely the unbureaucratic attitude and
the focus on emergency relief. They are both thought to distinguish MSF from other
organisations in a positive way, while also having their more negative sides.
The unbureaucratic attitude is considered to typify MSFs culture. Characteristics such as
responsibility, freedom, and flexibility have a major and positive impact on volunteers: I liked
the horizontal organisation, that fitted me; unbureaucratic and independent, that is what
attracted me; with MSF I could do what I felt was right, with another organisation that would
have been impossible; we are special: there is a kind of dynamic atmosphere that I dont see in
other organisations. While the others spend time writing reports we are out there, thinking what
else we can do. On the other hand, the positive image of an unbureaucratic organisation can be
overtaken by negative experiences. The borderline between a highly appreciated lack of
bureaucracy and a criticised lack of professionalism appears to be thin. Some volunteers
complained about managers or colleagues abusing their discretion or being unable to live up to
their obligations. Some were also frustrated by a lack of clarity about tasks and responsibilities.
The focus on emergency work very much shapes the image of MSF and the everyday
practices of fieldworkers. Would-be volunteers are most attracted by the idea of relieving
distress when they join the organisation. I
