“I have what I think is a sociology question for you,” a friend of mine in the administration recently said. Turned out to be a good one: “Why do organizations act so stupidly sometimes?”

“What prompted this question,” my friend went on, “is an email discussion with a friend [who lives in NC] about the controversy over the UNC rape allegation and the response of UNC [declaring the woman may have violated the school’s honor code]. On its face—and one must acknowledge that we don’t know all the facts—it appears that UNC is acting really stupidly. Really: accuse a possible rape victim of violating the honor code? What century do they live in?”

And the UNC case is hardly unique, he observed. “We don’t have to look long or far to find plenty of instances where organizations act in ways that to outsiders appear amazingly dumb or contrary to their own interests. Have sociologists looked at that phenomenon at all?”

I assured my friend that the apparent irrationality of organizations is a big topic of study for sociologists, a classic, in fact, with examples ranging from media relations to the home mortgage/subprime lending scandals. Among the most famous of these is Diane Vaughan‘s study of the reasons why NASA made the mistakes that led to the Challenger disaster.

For those of you interested in debacles like those at UNC specifically, I learned that the media relations side of things is often encapsulated under phrases such as “crisis communication” or “crisis response strategy.” For example, Brooke Fisher Liu has a chapter on how Duke University “handled” the lacrosse rape case a few years ago called “Effective Public Relations in Racially Charged Crises: Not Black or White” (Handbook of Crisis Communication, pp. 335-358). Indeed, there is a whole journal called Corporate Communications. And, perhaps even more to the point, there is a substantial literature on corporate snafus and extrication efforts. Just search Google Scholar with keywords “organizational mistakes” and you’ll be in the middle of it. Here’s an exemplary 1995 reference by the aptly named Keith Michael Hearit, “‘Mistakes Were Made’: Organizations, Apologia, and Crises of Social Legitimacy” (Communication Studies, 46:1-17).