Moral mazes: The world of corporate managers

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.

Moreover, pushing down details relieves superiors of the burden of too much knowledge, particularly guilty knowledge. A superior will say to a subordi­ nate, for instance: “Give me your best thinking on the problem with [X].” When the subordinate makes his report, he is often told: “I think you can do better than that,” until the subordinate has worked out all the details of the boss’s predetermined solution, without the boss being specifically aware of “all the eggs that have to be broken.”

loss was closer to $50 million. O f course, nobody wishes to be associated with such a catastrophe and, predictably enough, a circle of blame developed. The research and develop­ ment people who had made the static subprocess work on an experimental scale said that there was no good reason why the process should not function and that the fault lay with the practical implementation of their ideas. The engineering people in turn castigated R & D for obviously ill-conceived research.

lready assigned duties, bribes are really the grease that makes the world work. Moreover, as managers see it, playing sleight of hand with the mone­ tary value of inventories, postor predating memoranda or invoices, tucking or squirreling large sums of money away to pull them out of one’s hat at an opportune moment are all part and parcel of managing in a large corporation where interpretations of performance, not necessarily performance itself, decide one’s fate. Furthermore, the whole point of the corporation is pre­ cisely to put other people’s money, rather than one’s own resources, at risk. Finally, the managers I interviewed feel that Brady’s biggest error was in