Moral Mazes
Robert Jackall
The metaphor ‘‘moral mazes’’ refers simultaneously to the labyrinthine structure of large bureaucratic organizations and to the ethical quandaries that such organizations regularly create for men and women who work in them.
Bureaucracies not only rationalize work, but also behavior and attitudes. Though each organization has its own constructed ‘‘institutional logic’’ and its own ethical standards, bureaucracies, whether public or private, share certain structural features that shape the moral ethos of big organizations. Typically, bureaucracies re quire and create patterns of predictable routine, impersonal rules and procedures, and patterns of delimited authority in order to maximize organizational efficiency. In the process, bureaucracies bring together people who have little in common with each other except the impersonal rules that govern their behavior. Since these rules are not given but made, they vary widely not only be tween different organizations, but even within the same organization, depending on who has the authority and power to make the rules. Moreover, authority and power shift in organizations, depending on changes in the markets or external exigencies that determine organizational frameworks and fates.
Bureaucracies place powerful premiums on certain behavior, and reward those able to discern those premiums and behave accordingly. Both the premiums themselves and conformity to them are ambiguous because they are constantly subject to peers’ and superiors’ interpretations, making compulsive sociability in an attempt to discern and shape those interpretations an occupational virtue. Though specific premiums and requisite conformity to them vary considerably depending on the nature and purpose of particular bureaucracies and on organizational leadership, all bureaucracies require varying degrees of self rationalization of their members. Voluntary self rationalization pro duces the deepest internalization of organizational goals, creating relatively enclosed social worlds that cause people to bracket moralities to which they might adhere in their homes, churches, or other social settings. Occupational rules in use gain ascendancy over more general ethical standards. Moral choices become inextricably tied to organizational fates.
Within such a context, bureaucracies typically separate men and women from the human con sequences of their actions. For instance, top managers rarely meet workers fired because of their decisions; they rarely visit communities devastated economically because of their reallocation of resources; they rarely encounter consumers inadvertently injured by their companies’ products; they rarely meet specific men or women who have become ‘‘cases’’ under procedures they have authorized. Such insulation heightens rational decision making according to the impersonal criteria at the core of every modern bureaucracy, even as it makes notions such as the ‘‘ethics of brotherhood’’ irrelevant. Further, despite claims to the contrary, bureaucracies also separate people from internal accountability for their actions. Bureaucratic hierarchies generally encourage superiors’ usurpation of credit for the work of subordinates. Moreover, few bureaucracies have formal tracking systems to allot blame for mistakes; men and women who are upwardly mobile can outrun their mistakes, leaving others to bear blame for them. At the upper levels of organizations, among men and women of proven and relatively equal abilities, the allocation of credit and blame, and corresponding success and failure, is thus very often experienced as arbitrary, indeed capricious. In short, big organizations often seem to be vast systems of organized irresponsibility – even, perhaps especially, to those within them.
Organizational leaders can attempt to impose standards of moral evaluation and practical moral reasoning to guide their charges’ actions. But since there is no necessary connection be tween the good of a particular individual, the good of an organization, and the common good, every set of standards that leaders might assert is arbitrary to some extent and subject to constant negotiation and reinterpretation by competing organizational interests. Leaders can impose certain standards by dint of effort and authority and sometimes those standards become deeply institutionalized in a particular organization. Typic ally, however, standards last only as long as leaders themselves do. When looking up pro vides little direction, men and women in large organizations look around. They turn to each other for moral cues for behavior and come to fashion specific situational moralities for specific significant others in their world. As it happens, the guidance that they receive from each other is as profoundly ambiguous as the social structure of big organizations. Moral rules in use for all issues become indistinguishable from the rules for achieving success or avoiding failure. Ethical issues often get translated into problems of public relations. Men and women in large organizations thus often find themselves caught in an intricate set of moral mazes, unable even to discern the terms of their quandaries, let alone a way out of the thicket.
Bibliography
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Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. New York: Oxford University Press.
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