What is a macro contingency?

A company is a changing entity that is growing, modifying and adapting to the conditions of the environment and those of its own components.

Within these conditions appear different contingencies and also what is known as macrocontingency. We are going to inquire about this question to better understand the concept, know how it is generated and what are the repercussions it has on the organization.

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What is macro contingency?

In order to talk about the definition of macro-contingency, it is necessary to previously clarify a series of concepts related to it. To begin with, we must place ourselves in the context to which we are referring, which is that of the cultural practices of a company, or what is the same, corporate culture.

Corporate culture refers to the accumulation of behaviors, ways of thinking, beliefs, values, norms, etc., that they have in common all the components of the company in question and that make up a general line and, therefore, the culture of this organization.

On this basis, it is easy to understand that the culture of the company is going to be unique to each company. There may be some that are more or less similar, but the peculiarities of each organization will ultimately always have differentiating elements. The same will happen with the macro contingency, as we will see later.

Therefore, within each of these cultural practices (or company culture), we will find habitual forms of behavior within the organization. Each of these ways of behaving is what is known as macrobehavior. When all the individuals in the company act according to these patterns, they lead to concrete results, that is where the macro contingency arises.

The macro contingency is therefore the relationship that is generated between the elements that make up the corporate culture and the set of all the results to which these macro-behaviors give rise. At this point, it is important to bear in mind that this set, that is, the sum of all the effects of the behaviors, is greater than their accumulation.

In other words, the total is greater than the sum of the parts, since this final result also takes into account the interactions that occur between the different components. All these factors are what, consequently, give rise to each company having a specific macro-contingency, unique and different from that of all other corporations.

Difference between macrocontingency and metacontingency

There is a concept associated with all these procedures, which is that of meta-contingency. It is also important to know it in order to distinguish it from macro-contingency and to know what the characteristics of one and the other are, which will allow us to better understand this issue.

Metacontingency comes into play on an earlier level. We saw that all the behaviors involved in the corporate culture generate an interaction between them that adds to the overall result. Each of these behaviors, in relation to the effects it has on the effect of the business culture and, in turn, on the probabilities that the behavior in question is repeated over time, is what is called meta-contingency.

Therefore, important differences are observed between this phenomenon and that of macro-contingency. To get started, the macro-contingency would be referring to the global image of all those behavioral elements that we have seen that made up the company culture, in addition to the interactions themselves and added effects that arise from the combination of several of them.

In contrast, the meta-contingency would refer to one of these behaviors in particular, not to their group. In addition, he would be taking into account not only the possible interactions that he could be carrying out with other behaviors that were part of the corporate culture, but also how likely it would be that, depending on this interaction, it would be repeated in the future.

However, macro-contingency does not refer to such probabilistic predictions, but rather, as we have seen, takes a general photo of all the elements and their relationships, to explain the final result that we found. These are questions that allow us to place these two elements on different levels, which, although they are related, are independent.

In addition, when we talk about the probability that a behavior of the corporate culture is repeated, depending on the results generated, within the context of the meta-contingency, we can introduce a new element that would be the selection cultural. As with natural selection processes with living organisms, this phenomenon would have a similar operation.

In that sense, those behaviors that are adapted to the company environment and therefore promote satisfactory results will be more likely to "survive" and be repeated later in the face of others whose consequences are not so positive for the functioning of the organization. Let us remember that the concept of cultural selection is associated with meta-contingency and not with macro-contingency.

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Criticisms of the macro-contingency model

The concepts that we have seen so far come from a proposal made by the author Sigrid S. Glenn, especially in his 2004 study. However, although this model has enjoyed a certain popularity, other models have also emerged. alternative proposals that try to explain the phenomena associated with macro-contingency from another way.

This is the case of the work of Diana Delgado, from the Konrad Lorenz University Foundation, in 2012. This author affirms that the models generally used to deal with corporate behavior and culture, such as Glenn's, they put too much weight on what she calls selectionism. For Delgado, this selectionism would be limiting the evolution of this theory and therefore a review of different components would be necessary.

One of the concepts that this author reviews in her study is precisely that of macro-contingency. Delgado's objective is to simplify all this theory about corporate culture so that, even with a less complexity, allow you to continue making valid predictions on this issue in reference to the behaviors organizational.

One of the criticisms that Delgado makes regarding Glenn's model is precisely the use of the simile of natural selection to talk about cultural selection. For her, this comparison does not fully conform to the reality that it intends to describe, and they make it difficult to definition of the concept of unit of cultural selection and unit of analysis, which are not totally clear in the model original.

In order to eliminate these inconsistencies, and thus clarify both the macro contingency and the rest of elements, Delgado proposes a series of questions that delve into the problem and are reflected in several proposals. One of them is precisely to give a concrete definition to that unit of cultural selection of which we spoke, which is necessary to eliminate ambiguities in this regard.

She also talks about the importance of make it clear whether, when raising the relationships between the behaviors that form the culture of the company, It is a problem that belongs to the science of behavior or, on the contrary, it should be studied from another prism. On the other hand, she sees the need to rethink all the concepts used in Glenn's study, including that of macrocontingency.

The objective would be to analyze all these elements in order to draw conclusions about the need for all of them and have a definition specific of those that are essential for the new proposed model to study business culture from a perspective updated. The last of the points that Delgado tries to study is that of the relationships established between all these elements.

Focusing now only on the observations that said author makes about the concept of macrocontingency, the author doubts that this overall result of the behaviors and their relationships to which this term refers, in reality could not be differentiated from the set of contingencies.

For this reason, he prefers to simplify the model and not use, on the one hand, the concept of the group of contingencies and, on the other, that of macro-contingency, since through the data provided in The study affirms that there are no palpable differences between the two to be used separately, since they unnecessarily hinder the structure of the model, and may be more easy.