Chemical Industry Culture: Piercing the Veil

Scholar-journalist Wil Lepkowski once said, “The chemical industry culture has…not been studied to any extent.” (1-3) For example, Lepkowski wrote in 1994, “[o]nly one book,  A Killing Wind by Dan Kurzman, attempted with an empathetic eye to go ‘inside’ [Union] Carbide in the days and months following the [Bhopal, India, pesticide explosion, December 2/3, 1984] disaster. Covering events through late 1986, Kurzman provided valuable portrayals of how some Carbide executives reacted in an atmosphere of unrelenting crisis. But because his account ended in 1986, he had no opportunity to describe any deeper changes within Carbide in Bhopal’s more extended aftermath. ” (4)

“Three musicians” by Pablo Picasso, an example of cubism. Source: http://www.artquotes.net/masters/picasso/picasso_3musicians.jpg; accessed May 2, 2009.		Aerial view of Bayer CropScience headquarters in Monheim, Germany. Source: http://www.routeplan.bayer.com/de/images/public/bild_monheim.jpg; accessed May 2, 2009.

The paucity of knowledge about the chemical industry organization culture is surprising and troubling, given the frequency with which undesirable events occur at chemical plants, e.g., most recently, the Bayer CropScience carbamate pesticide plant explosion at Institute, WV, as described elsewhere. (5) This plant is the sister facility to the Bhopal plant that leaked in 1986.

While trumpeting the acute need for research on culture of the chemical industry, Lepkowski provides valuable insights as a master’s degree-educated chemist and decades-long observer of, and writer about, the chemical industry in the US and abroad. (3)

1. Seemingly Disconnected Internal Worlds of Chemical Corporations

At least four worlds intersect within the closed organizational system of all corporations, “each painting its own canvas,” declares Lepkowski. “First is the financial realm, demarcated by the company’s performance on Wall Street; second, the complex managerial world of covert strategies, veiled motives, and risky decisions; third, the human world of the…work force; and, fourth, the symbolic world—the sturdy and reliable image that the corporation seeks to present to its customers, its shareholders, and the public.” (1)

This tremendous complexity inherent in corporations such as the Bayer Group makes an “anatomically correct rendering” impossible; a better metaphor is a “shifting cubist mélange,” that is, “(t)he parts are recognizable but they frequently seem oddly disconnected,” comments Lepkowski. (6) For example, the legal aspect of a corporation may not fit an outside observer’s expectation of an ethical corporation. Consider the evasive actions taken by Bayer CropScience in the aftermath of the explosion at its carbamate plant in Institute, WV, on August 28, 2008. (5)

In addition, corporations such as the Bayer Group have corporate structures whose parts seem like “separate, unrelated fiefdoms,” says Lepkowski. The Bayer Group, for example, has three major parts, which circle the planet. The first produces pharmaceuticals for humans and veterinary health care; the second, insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides for “crop protection;” and the third, coatings, adhesives, polycarbonates, and polyurethanes for material sciences’ applications. (7)   

When Lepkowski studied Union Carbide Corporation, he noted, “To Wall Street, the pre-Bhopal Carbide seemed a benign, inbred, poorly managed, under-performing, company that never could quite ‘get its act together,’ an image that dogged the company from the mid-1960s until its systematic dismemberment into the monolithic ethylene-based petrochemical company it returned by 1993.” (6) Today, Union Carbide Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Corporation.

2. Corporate Workforce of Chemical Corporations

Inside the Union Carbide Corporation, notes Lepkowski, “what all Carbiders have always held in common, was pride in technology and the feeling of being treated fairly and humanely by the company. Carbide’s top managers, in [Lepkowski’s] judgment, displayed the once stereotypical mentalities of the engineer: regimented, narrowly focused, business-first, hostile to the social and political values of the environmental community, but paragons of dedicated citizenship. (6) Lepkowski further notes, “Corporations are careful to remain ‘off the record’ in their honest attitudes toward the environmental community. This judgment, however, is based on my own years of reporting on the environmental movement, including involvement in several off-the-cuff conversations with industrialists over the years.” (1)

“In the Kanawha Valley [West Virginia], many Carbide families [now Bayer CropScience families?] reach back to the company’s beginnings in 1917. Bonds are powerful among Carbiders, as well as between Carbiders and the various social and commercial institutions in the Valley. To be a Carbider—at least to be one still remaining with the company—is to wear a badge of reliability, responsibility, and stability. When reminded of the Bhopal disaster, a Carbider always replies that the cause was sabotage at a plant operated by Third World foreigners. The American company could not possibly have been responsible.” (8)

Lepkowski continues, “In my own visits to the Kanawha Valley and through conversations there, I repeatedly was struck by the strong sense of honesty and integrity of Carbide employees, along with a thin-skinned readiness to defend the vulnerable record of the company. Carbide, after all, was also responsible for the worst industrial disaster in American history—the infamous mass silicosis tragedy during the construction of the Gawley tunnel during the 1930s by Carbide’s metals division.” (1)

“Before Bhopal, ‘the whole chemical industry operated on the basic assumption that what we did within our fences was none of anyone’s business,’ commented one Carbide community relations official in Charleston [interviewed by Lepkowski] in 1991. ‘And the people outside the fences didn’t think it was any business of theirs, either. Bhopal changed all that, and for the better.’ Yet ironically, what really brought new consciousness to Carbide, he added, was not so much Bhopal as the serious leak of a mixture of aldicarb oxime that took place nine months later [1985] at its plant in Institute, West Virginia. ‘That one really shook us,’ he said. ‘We said it couldn’t happen here and it did.” (8)

Another explosion occurred at an ethylene oxide unit at a Union Carbide unit in Seadrift, Texas, killing one person and injuring thirty-two. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Carbide $2.8 million, reprimanded Carbide for ignoring several internal safety audits that urged preventive measures in the explosion area, and withdrew a safety award the agency had given Carbide months before.

Lepkowski believes that attitudes at Union Carbide Corporation are “representative, even stereotypical of traditional chemical industry attitudes in America before and after Bhopal.” (9) After Bhopal, for example, Carbide “decided to play hardball with the disaster. While it claimed moral responsibility, it seemed to shun any deeper spirit of reparation or of understanding Indian culture. How can one explain that? There is a form of dishonesty, or perhaps more properly structural self-deception, built into the process of corporate reparation in an industrial disaster. Such a posture (based on the implicit proposition that ‘we do everything well, carefully, caringly, and safely’) may be unavoidable, because liability is always just around the corner in any chemical operation.” (10)

Lepkowski continues, “But it exists nevertheless, supported by two kinds of institutional pressure. The first is the need to put only the best face forward to shareholders, present and future. The second is the unavoidably litigation-resisting character of the modern U.S. corporation, which translates into the position: ‘We can make no mistakes that can be admitted to.” (11)

“In the Bhopal case, the first imperative led to Carbide’s attitudinal ‘atonement’ through its establishment of new safety and environmental practices within the company. Bhopal drove Carbide to do good for its own workers, as it also led to the still deficient community right-to-know law in whose promotion Carbide played a leading role. At the same time, the second imperative pushed Carbide to distance itself from the disaster victims in Bhopal. While it ‘atoned,’ it also detached.’” (11)

Lepkowski learned from a Carbide executive in 1989 that the executive believed the company bore no long-term responsibility to atone for Bhopal, because “atonement implied guilt, which Carbide never intended to admit.” Lepkowski intones, “The idea of atonement in the Christian tradition is not primarily about the atoner’s guilt; it is about sacrifice as an act of reparation for the sins of others. By its silence, its self-righteousness, its lack of scientific integrity in failing to pursue the toxicology of methyl isocyanate, and its refusal to bring to justice and Bhopal plant ‘saboteur,’ Carbide shunned the ideal of corporate moral responsibility, while publicly embracing the concept.” (11)

Notes:

1. Wil Lepkowski: “The culture and mind of Union Carbide.” In Bridget Hanna, Ward Morehouse, Satinath Sarangi (eds): Bhopal Reader: Remembering Twenty Years of the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster. Apex Press, 2005, p. 239.
2. Wil Lepkowski: “Chapter 2: The Restructuring of Union Carbide.” In Sheila Jasanoff (ed): Learning from Disaster. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, p. 22. Available at http://books.google.com/books?id=XaN-VkDFSWgC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=%22chemical+industry+culture%22&source=bl&ots=Wx4Aqxf9Dm&sig=uPj3twKA10vqmFRcqi5FVqQ8DG8&hl=en&ei=MzT_SbfGIJqAtgPqgLXbAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#PPA22,M1; accessed May 1, 2009.
3. “Wil Lepkowski has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a master’s degree in biochemistry from Ohio State University and was a Fellow in the Advanced Science Writing Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He began his journalism career with the Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin in the early 1960s, moving on to Johns Hopkins University as medical science writer, then to the Washington Bureau of the Newhouse Newspapers for another two, and further on to Chemical & Engineering News until 1969 when he joined the Business Week staff as its Washington science correspondent. He left Business Week to freelance and consult in 1975 and in 1977 returned to C&EN where he remained until 1999. Since then he has written for Nature; for Washington Fax, the on-line science news service; Science and Government Report; Science, Research/Technology Management, and Issues in Science and Technology. He was a contributor to the first Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. Past work involved articles for the Washington Post, Science Forum, Hastings Review, Technology Review, The Progressive, New Republic, National Review, and the Boston Globe. During his career at C&EN, he covered the Bhopal disaster [emphasis added], chemical safety issues, chemical warfare, international science and technology policy issues involving the European Community, Japan, Poland, the former Soviet Union, Latin America, and the full spectrum of domestic s&t [science and technology] issues including space, energy, biomedical research, technological innovation and competitiveness, environment, the National Science Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Congress. Throughout, his aim has been to add social, ethical, and economic perspective to science and technology in its pervasive and intricate interactions with society. In 2000, he initiated and co-chaired a Gordon Research Conference on science and technology policy. In 2001, he was named Journalist-in-Residence at Columbia University’s Center for Science, Policy, and Outcomes and wrote a column entitled Science and Policy Perspectives for the Center’s website. In 2005, he was elected as Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In addition, he has taught writing at the graduate level at Virginia Institute of Technology. He continues to write, focusing on essays involving science, technology, and society, and on independent scholarship such as a biography of the noted Bell Labs research chief and policy titan, William O. Baker.” Source: “Wil Lepkowski.” Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes. Available at http://www.cspo.org/about/people/lepkowski.htm; accessed May 1, 2009.
4. Dan Kurzman: A Killing Wind. McGraw-Hill, 1987.
5. SEMP Biot Report #619: “Bayer CropScience Pesticide Plant Disaster, 2008, West Virginia.” May 1, 2009. Available at http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=619.
6. Wil Lepkowski: “The culture and mind of Union Carbide.” In Bridget Hanna, Ward Morehouse, Satinath Sarangi (eds): Bhopal Reader: Remembering Twenty Years of the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster. Apex Press, 2005, p. 233.
7. “Bayer: Science for a Better Life.” Available at

 http://www.bayer.com/en/products-from-a-to-z.aspx; accessed May 2, 2009.

8. Wil Lepkowski: “The culture and mind of Union Carbide.” In Bridget Hanna, Ward Morehouse, Satinath Sarangi (eds): Bhopal Reader: Remembering Twenty Years of the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster. Apex Press, 2005, p. 234.
9. Ibid, p. 235.
10. Ibid, p. 236.
11. Ibid, p. 237.