Managers are thus the paradigm of the white-collar salaried employee.12 Their conservative public style and conventional demeanor hide their trans­ forming role in our society. In my view, they are the principal carriers of the bureaucratic ethic in our era. Their pivotal institutional position as a group not only gives their decisions great reach, but also links them to other impor­ tant elites. As a result, their occupational ethics and the way they come to see the world set both the frameworks and the vocabularies for a great many pub­ lic issues in our society. Moreover, managers’ experiences are by no means unique; indeed, they have a deep resonance with those of a great many other white-collar occupational groups, including men and women who work in the academy, in medicine, in science, and in politics. Work—bureaucratic work in particular—poses a series of intractable dilemmas that often demand com­ promises with traditional moral beliefs. Men and women in positions of authority, like managers, face these dilemmas and compromises in particularly pointed ways. By analyzing the kind of ethic bureaucracy produces in man­ agers, one can begin to understand how bureaucracy shapes actual morality in our society as a whole.

Robert Jackall, Moral mazes: The world of corporate managers, Oxford, 1988, p. 27