THE MECHANICS OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVIANCE: CLANDESTINE ROUTINES IN THE ODEBRECHT CASE

In 2016, Odebrecht, a Brazilian-based multinational company, pleaded guilty to paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to government officials around the world. This dissertation examines Odebrecht as an instance of institutionalized organizational deviance. Whereas much of the existing literature focuses on the drivers of organizational misconduct or on the allocation of responsibility for wrongdoing, this study shifts attention to the mechanics of execution. It analyzes the workings of the Division of Structured Operations (DSO), the business unit responsible for coordinating illicit payments. By drawing on a corpus of court data, comprising over 683 deposition statements and 11 trial testimonies from 64 Odebrecht-related defendants, I reconstruct the organizational architecture, decision processes, and information systems that enabled and concealed the payment system. In chapters 1 and 2, drawing on organizational routine theory, I conceptualize the DSO as operating through what I term clandestine routines: patterned, multi-actor processes designed not only to produce deviant outputs but also to conceal both the behavior and the existence of the routine itself. In Odebrecht, concealment was architecturally embedded through two design principles. First, compartmentalization fragmented information so that no individual possessed a complete picture of the system. Second, untraceability ensured that payments left no formal connection to the firm, by using cash transactions and layered offshore accounts. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on what I call the Odebrecht paradox: the very systems designed to promote secrecy generated an unprecedented volume of evidence. Building on the idea of routines as compromises among competing organizational demands, I argue that clandestine routines had to balance concealment with cost-effectiveness and organizational control. Structured records and written communication systems solved coordination and memory problems but created durable traces. At the same time, concealment undermined oversight, allowing the payment system to drift beyond effective control. The effort to optimize secrecy produced structural fragility. The dissertation contributes to organization theory by introducing the construct of clandestine routines and by foregrounding execution architectures in the analysis of deviance. It also has implications for social control, suggesting that accountability mechanisms must address organizational structures, not only individual actors, when deviance becomes institutionalized.

Author dc:creator

• Siqueira de Carvalho, Guilherme

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Nichols, Philip, M.
• Feinstein, Brian, D.

• Organizational Behavior and Theory
• Business
• Philosophy

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62696

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/62696