OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Symbolic Frame Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the symbolic frame
2. Apply the symbolic frame to your personal case situation

Erin LaFollette

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

Starbucks Coffee Company has been long associated with caring about people. It has
been said they are a people company, that happens to sell coffee. I have worked for
Starbucks for six years, two of those I was a barista and for the last four I have been a
Shift Supervisor. In 2015, Starbucks launched a campaign called “Race Together” which
asked baristas to start conversations about racial inequality in the United States, with their
customers. Both partners (employees) and customers alike were uncomfortable with this
campaign and it quickly failed. I was a barista in my first year of working for Starbucks
during this campaign.

2) Describe how the symbols of the organization influenced the situation.

Starbucks is a status symbol. The white cup with the green siren logo have been a major
status symbol for years, not only in the United States, but around the world. It is a
company known for setting the tone of what a coffee shop should be like in the US. They
are also associated with providing great benefits to emplioyees, and really caring about
the communities their stores are in. “most of our organizational life is carefully scripted”
and Stabucks is very mindful of this fact (Bolman, 2017, p.283) It is the culture of caring
that helps to set Starbucks apart from its competition.

Because Starbcuks is known for being caring and being vocal about the causes it
supports, it is not very surpisong that his particular organization would want to take on
the issue of racial inequality. However, the leadership of the company was primarialy
white people, who did not understand the complexities of the issue they were trying to
take on. One of the buiggest failures is that this campaign itself actually felt very
symbolic. There was not a clear goal that this campaign was trying to achieve, rather they

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 just wanted to start a conversation. Because there was no way to actually measure the
success of the campaign, it was purely symbolic in nature and has cursed to fail from the
beginning.

3) Recommend how you would use organizational symbols for an alternative course of
action regarding your case.

I think that Starbucks itself figured out how to better take on this issue, follwoiung an
incident in Philidalphia where a man of color was asked ot leave the café, while he was
waiting for a friend to join him. After this incident Starbucks was forced to once again
address the issue of racial inequality, because it now had affected their business. I would
say that the unfortuanate incident did make it so Starbuck had more ground to stand on,
and it made their response more believable.

What Starbucks did was shut down stores so that all partners could go through bias
training. This bias training did more than just help with partners being able to better
understand not only baises related to rae, but also to disability and gender. It allowed very
real converstions to happen in neighborhood store about the collective challenges the
artners were facing, and allowed them to be really honest. This training also went hand in
hand with updated policies about who was allowed in stores and what behaviors would
and would not be tolerated. This training actually started the conversatiosn that Starbucks
wanted to see during Race Together. Only with this way of approaching it, there was
education provided and a comfortable place for employees to discuss it. And once
customers heard about the training those who felt comfortable talking about race actually
did start those conversatiosn with partners.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about this frame.

I was a young barista in the first year of my first job when this campaign launched. I felt
that I had no choice but to participate in Race Together, even through it made me and my
team uncomfortable. I now know that Starbucks does care about the partner experience,
and in hindsight I would be more vocal about my discomfort right away. Especially now
that I am a supervisor, I would be in a position of looking out for my partners’ best
interests.

I am on nearly the lowest level of the company hierarchy, and it puts me in the position
of not being able to do a whole lot about things like Race Together that are choices that
upper management decides on. But, participating in the bias training that we regularly
partake in has helped me be a better leader in my store. I am better at addressing concerns
form my partners when they are uncomfortable. I also feel much more confident in my
ability to make choices to better support those who come into our store. Just in the last

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 week I noticed myself taking care to check my baises and get all of the information
before making choices that affected other people. While I think race together was a
terrible failure, how Starbucks has made up for it with bais training and a focus on
ensuring the company culture is consistent and welcoming in every store has truly helped
to benefit me as a leader and an individual.

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 Reference
Bolman, L. G. (2017). REFRAMING ORGANIZATIONS. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.