What if, however, men and women in the corporation no longer see success as necessarily connected to hard work? What becomes of the social morality of the corporation— the everyday rules- in- use that people play by— when there is thought to be no fixed or, one might say, objective standard of excellence to explain how and why winners are separated from also- rans, how and why some people succeed and others fail? What rules do people fashion to interact with one another when they feel that, instead of ability, talent, and dedicated service to an organization, politics, adroit talk, luck, connections, and self- promotion are the real sorters of people into sheep and goats?
Introduction: Business as a Social and Moral Terrain
What if, however, men and women in the corporation no longer see success as necessarily connected to hard work? What becomes of the social morality of the corporation— the everyday rules- in- use that people play by— when there is thought to be no fixed or, one might say, objective standard of excellence to explain how and why winners are separated from also- rans, how and why some people succeed and others fail? What rules do people fashion to interact with one another when they feel that, instead of ability, talent, and dedicated service to an organization, politics, adroit talk, luck, connections, and self- promotion are the real sorters of people into sheep and goats?
As a former vice- president of a large firm says: “What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That’s what morality is in the corporation.”*
Managers do not generally discuss ethics, morality, or moral rules- in- use in a direct way with each other, except perhaps in seminars organized by ethicists. Such seminars, however, are unusual and, when they do occur, are often strained, artificial, and often confusing even to managers since they frequently become occasions for the solemn public invocation, particularly by high- ranking managers, of conventional moralities and traditional shibboleths. What matters on a day- to- day basis are the moral rules- in- use fashioned within the personal and structural constraints of one’s organization. As it happens, these rules may vary sharply depending on various factors, such as proximity to the market, line or staff responsibilities, or one’s position in a hierarchy. Actual organizational moralities are thus contextual, situational, highly specific, and, most often, unarticulated.
1. Moral Probations, Old and New
No major occupation or profession in our society has escaped the process of bureaucratization. They are all— from assembly- line workers to physicians— specialized, standardized, certified, arranged in a hierarchy, and coordinated by higher authorities. Moreover, bureaucracy is never simply a technical system of organization. It is also always a system of power, privilege, and domination. The bureaucratization of the occupational structure therefore profoundly affects the whole class and status structure, the whole tone and tempo of our society.
The millions of immigrants who later flooded into the nation’s expanding cities were mostly of peasant origins; with the possible exception of the Irish, they were not attracted to the formalities of the bureaucratic milieu. Moreover, big city bosses based their quasi- feudal regimes on personal loyalty and on the delivery of personal services. By the time American corporations began to bureaucratize, they instituted as a matter of course many of the features of personal loyalty, favoritism, informality, and nonlegality that marked crucial aspects of the American historical experience. The kind of bureaucracy that developed in America, especially in the corporations but even in the higher reaches of government, was a hybrid; it incorporated many structural features of the pure form of bureaucracy but it also resembled patrimonial bureaucracy.
Although managers only constitute 9.9 percent of the labor force (in 1980), they are nonetheless the quintessential bureaucratic work group in our society. Until and unless they reach the pinnacles of their administrative hierarchies, managers not only fashion bureaucratic rules but they are also bound by them. They not only implement rational procedures and plans, often in an attempt to control irrational forces, but they are also affected by the methodical rationality that they, their peers, and their superiors put into place. Often, too, they are affected by the irrationalities that rational efforts generate. They are not only bosses, but bossed; they are not only the beneficiaries of the privileges and power that authority in bureaucracies bestows, but in most cases they are also subordinates who want to climb higher. If they do struggle to the top of their organizations, they become not just the stuff of legend and the models for the ambitious below them, but also the objects of gossip, rumor, envy, resentment, and fear. Whether they stay at the middle or reach the top, managers typically are not only in the big organization but, because their administrative expertise and knowledge of bureaucratic intricacies constitute their livelihood, they are also of the organization. Unlike public servants, they need not avow allegiance to civil service codes or to any ethic of public service. Their sole allegiances are to the very principle of organization, to the market which itself is bureaucratically organized, to the groups and individuals in their world who can demand and command their loyalties, and to themselves and their own careers.
Thirty- six corporations on both coasts refused permission for the study during a search for access from January to October, 1980. This was an instructive experience in itself. About half of these refusals came after extended and complicated negotiations with various levels of management, indeed all the way to the top of some firms. Most of these refusals were based, of course, on wholly practical rationales, although, as I later recognized, these often contained clues to themes that proved important in my subsequent work. The most common rationales, often given in concert, were: that there were no tangible organizational benefits to be gained from a study of managerial ethics because the project lacked a specific practical focus, or that the timing for the study was inappropriate because of “transitions” in a particular organization. Taken together and translated in light of later understanding, these mean that managers can afford to give approbation only to studies that officially are on a short leash and that can be publicly defended with the vocabularies of justification normally at hand in the corporation. I came to understand that such wariness is warranted because corporate hierarchies are almost always in political turmoil. The endless search for an organizational handle on the market— that is, rational structures to deal with the irrational— coupled with managers’ ambitions and what I shall call their mobility panic, fuel a never- ending succession of personnel changes, marked by intense personal rivalries, in virtually all big corporations. Nosy outsiders can only complicate already troublesome, or potentially troublesome, situations.
Some managers seemed sympathetic to the study, although they encouraged me to recast it as a technical issue, such as the “problem of executive succession in multinationals.” They objected in particular to those aspects of my brief written proposal that discussed the ethical dilemmas of managerial work. They urged me to avoid any mention of ethics or values altogether and concentrate instead on the “decision- making process” where I could talk about “trade- offs” and focus on the “hard decisions between competing interests” that mark managerial work. Taking these cues, I rewrote and rewrote the proposal couching my problem in the bland, euphemistic language that I was rapidly learning is the lingua franca of the corporate world.
The process centered on the written proposal that I had been circulating and consisted essentially of a furthering of my linguistic education in the art of indirect rather than pointed statement and, more particularly, a reformulation of my inquiry that recast the moral issues of managerial work as issues of public relations. When, after several rewritings, the proposal satisfied him, he approached a well- placed executive in a large textile firm that I have given the pseudonym of Weft Corporation and vouched for me. At that point, the proposal itself became meaningless since, to my knowledge, no one except the two executives who arranged access ever saw it. The personal vouching, however, was crucial. This was based on what both men took to be a demonstrated willingness and ability to be “flexible” and especially on their perception that I already grasped the most salient aspect of managerial morality as managers themselves see it— that is, how their values and ethics appear in the public eye.
Given the problems that I had in gaining access to these corporate worlds, I cannot claim strictly scientific procedures, like random selection, in choosing the organizations that I studied.
My search for access involved me in some of the crucial bureaucratic intricacies that shape managers’ experiences. These include organizational upheavals, political rivalries, linguistic ambiguity, the supremacy of chance and tangled personal connections over any notion of intrinsic merit, the central significance of public relations, and, perhaps especially, the ceaseless moral probations for inclusion in a managerial circle.
2. The Social Structure of Managerial Work
This “management- by- objective” system, as it is usually called, creates a chain of commitments from the CEO down to the lowliest product manager or account executive. In practice, it also shapes a patrimonial authority arrangement that is crucial to defining both the immediate experiences and the long- run career chances of individual managers. In this world, a subordinate owes fealty principally to his immediate boss. This means that a subordinate must not overcommit his boss, lest his boss “get on the hook” for promises that cannot be kept. He must keep his boss from making mistakes, particularly public ones; he must keep his boss informed, lest his boss get “blindsided.” If one has a mistake- prone boss, there is, of course, always the temptation to let him make a fool of himself, but the wise subordinate knows that this carries two dangers— he himself may get done in by his boss’s errors, and, perhaps more important, other managers will view with the gravest suspicion a subordinate who withholds crucial information from his boss even if they think the boss is a nincompoop. A subordinate must also not circumvent his boss nor ever give the appearance of doing so. He must never contradict his boss’s judgment in public. To violate the last admonition is thought to constitute a kind of death wish in business, and one who does so should practice what one executive calls “flexibility drills,” an exercise “where you put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good- bye.” On a social level, even though an easy, breezy, first- name informality is the prevalent style of American business, a concession perhaps to our democratic heritage and egalitarian rhetoric, the subordinate must extend to the boss a certain ritual deference. For instance, he must follow the boss’s lead in conversation, must not speak out of turn at meetings, must laugh at his boss’s jokes while not making jokes of his own that upstage his boss, must not rib the boss for his foibles. The shrewd subordinate learns to efface himself, so that his boss’s face might shine more clearly.
It is characteristic of this authority system that details are pushed down and credit is pulled up. Superiors do not like to give detailed instructions to subordinates. The official reason for this is to maximize subordinates’ autonomy. The underlying reason is, first, to get rid of tedious details. Most hierarchically organized occupations follow this pattern; one of the privileges of authority is the divestment of humdrum intricacies. This also insulates higher bosses from the peculiar pressures that accompany managerial work at the middle levels and below: the lack of economy over one’s time because of continual interruption from one’s subordinates, telephone calls from customers and clients, and necessary meetings with colleagues; the piecemeal fragmentation of issues both because of the discontinuity of events and because of the way subordinates filter news; and the difficulty of minding the store while sorting out sometimes unpleasant personnel issues. Perhaps more important, pushing details down protects the privilege of authority to declare that a mistake has been made. A high- level executive in Alchemy Inc. explains:
If I tell someone what to do— like do A, B, or C— the inference and implication is that he will succeed in accomplishing the objective. Now, if he doesn’t succeed, that means that I have invested part of myself in his work and I lose any right I have to chew his ass out if he doesn’t succeed. If I tell you what to do, I can’t bawl you out if things don’t work. And this is why a lot of bosses don’t give explicit directions. They just give a statement of objectives, and then they can criticize subordinates who fail to make their goals.
Moreover, pushing down details relieves superiors of the burden of too much knowledge, particularly guilty knowledge.
Credit flows up in this structure and is usually appropriated by the highest- ranking officer involved in a successful decision or resolution of a problem. There is, for instance, a tremendous competition for ideas in the corporate world; authority provides a license to steal ideas, even in front of those who originated them.
Customarily, people who had nothing to do with the success of a project can be allocated credit for their exemplary efforts. At the middle levels, therefore, credit for a particular idea or success is always a type of refracted social honor; one cannot claim credit even if it is earned. Credit has to be given, and acceptance of the gift implicitly involves a reaffirmation and strengthening of fealty. A superior may share some credit with subordinates in order to deepen fealty relationships and induce greater efforts on his behalf. Of course, a different system obtains in the allocation of blame.
Great efforts are made to please the CEO.
By the same token, all of this leads to an intense interest in everything the CEO does and says. In all the companies that I studied, the most common topic of conversation among managers up and down the line is speculation about their respective CEO’s plans, intentions, strategies, actions, style, public image, and ideological leanings of the moment. Even the metaphorical temper of a CEO’s language finds its way down the hierarchy to the lower reaches of an organization.
It’s a feeling about the guy’s perceived ability to run a business— like he’s not a good people man, or he’s not a good numbers man. This is not a quantitative thing. It’s a gut feeling that a guy can’t be put in one spot, but he might be put in another spot. These kinds of informal opinions about others are the lifeblood of an organization’s advancement system. Oh, for the record, we’ve got the formal evaluations; but the real opinions— the ones that really count in determining people’s fates— are those which are traded back and forth in meetings, private conferences, chance encounters, and so on.
Managers trade estimates of others’ chances within their circles and often color them to suit their own purposes. This is one reason why it is crucial for the aspiring young manager to project the right image to the right people who can influence others’ sketches of him. Whatever the accuracy of these vocabularies of description, managers’ penchant for biographical detail and personal histories contrasts sharply with their disinclination for details in general or for other kinds of history. Details, as I have mentioned, get pushed down the ladder; and a concern with history, even of the short- run, let alone long- term, structural shifts in one’s own organization, constrains the forward orientation and cheerful optimism highly valued in most corporations.
One must appreciate the simultaneously monocratic and patrimonial character of business bureaucracies in order to grasp the personal and organizational significance of political struggles in managerial work. As it happens, political struggles are a constant and recurring feature in business, shaping managers’ experience and outlooks in fundamental ways. Of course, such conflicts are usually cloaked by typically elaborate organizational rhetorics of harmony and teamwork. However, one can observe the multiple dimensions of these conflicts during periods of organizational upheaval, a regular feature of American business where mergers, buyouts, divestitures, and especially “organizational restructuring” have become commonplace occurrences. 2 As Karl Mannheim, among others, has pointed out, it is precisely when a social order begins to fall apart that one can discern what has held it together in the first place.
The first action of most new CEOs is some form of organizational change. On the one hand, this prevents the inheritance of blame for past mistakes; on the other, it projects an image of bare- knuckled aggressiveness much appreciated on Wall Street. Perhaps most important, a shake- up rearranges the fealty structure of the corporation, placing in power those barons whose style and public image mesh closely with that of the new CEO and whose principal loyalties belong to him.
See, the problem with any change of CEO is that any credibility you have built up with the previous guy all goes by the board and you have to begin from scratch. This CEO thinks that everybody associated with the company before him is a dummy. And so you have to prove yourself over and over again. You can’t just win some and lose some. You have to keep your winning record at least at 75 percent if not better. You’re expected to take risks. At least the CEO says that, but the reality is that people are afraid to make mistakes.
Have I ever told you my definition of an auditor? An auditor is someone who situates himself up on a hill overlooking a battle, far from the noise of the guns and the smoke of the explosions. And he watches the battle from afar, and when it is over and the smoke is cleared, he goes down onto the battlefield and walks among the wounded. And he shoots them.
In the early fall, faced with unremitting pressure because of the company’s declining fortunes, internal warring factions, and, worse, the prospect of public capitulation to the CEO on the structure of his supposedly autonomous company, Smith chose to resign to “pursue other interests,” pulling the cord on his “golden parachute” (a fail- safe plan ensuring comfortable financial landing) as he left.
His parting letter to the company typifies the peculiar combination of in- house humor, personal jauntiness in the face of adversity, and appeals to some of the classical legitimations of managerial work that one may observe among high- ranking managers.
The official rationale was as follows. The company had gone through an extraordinary learning experience on environmental issues and had benefited greatly from the expertise of the environmental staff. It had, however, by this point fully integrated and institutionalized that knowledge into its normal operations. Moreover, since there were no longer any environmental problems facing the company, a modest reduction in this area made good business sense. Privately, of course, the assessments were different.
It is, for instance, an axiom of corporate life that the greatest satisfaction of production people is to see products go out the door; of salesmen, to make a deal regardless of price; of marketers, to control salesmen and squeeze profits out of their deals; and of financial specialists, to make sure that everybody meets budget.
The only firm rule seems to be that articulated by a middle- level Covenant manager: “Every big organization is set up for the benefit of those who control it; the boss gets what he wants.”
But wise and ambitious managers resist the lulling platitudes of unity, though they invoke them with fervor, and look for the inevitable clash of interests beneath the bouncy, cheerful surface of corporate life.
Making an alliance may mean, for instance, joining or, more exactly, being included in one or several of the many networks of managerial associates that crisscross an organization. Conceptually, networks are usually thought of as open- ended webs of association with a low degree of formal organization and no distinct criteria of membership. 3 One becomes known, for instance, as a trusted friend of a friend; thought of as a person to whom one can safely refer a thorny problem; considered a “sensible” or “reasonable” or, especially, a “flexible” person, not a “renegade” or a “loose cannon rolling around the lawn”; known to be a discreet person attuned to the nuances of corporate etiquette, one who can keep one’s mouth shut or who can look away and pretend to notice nothing; or considered a person with sharp ideas that break deadlocks but who does not object to the ideas being appropriated by superiors.
3. The Main Chance
Managers rarely speak of objective criteria for achieving success because once certain crucial points in one’s career are passed, success and failure seem to have little to do with one’s accomplishments.
A weeding- out process takes place among the lower ranks of managers during the first several years of their experience. The early careers of promising young managers are highly variegated; the more promise managers show, the more probations they must undergo.
By the time managers reach such a numbered grade in an ordered hierarchy— and the grade is socially defined and varies from company to company— managerial competence as such is taken for granted and assumed not to differ greatly from one manager to the next. One continues, of course, in a state of probation, and one’s competence is always subject to review and to redefinition. One must, therefore, always avoid being associated with big mistakes since a reputation carefully wrought over a number of years can be twisted out of shape in a day by a major blunder. As it happens, the nature of managerial work itself is to oversee others’ work and therefore to depend on others. The higher one rises in a management hierarchy, however, the more layers accrue between oneself and actual work tasks where crucial mistakes can be made; therefore, the more one’s continued assertion of competence becomes hostage to others’ efforts as well as to others’ interpretations. It goes without saying that one must always make sure that significant others higher in the organization recognize and appreciate one’s continuing efforts. Unless he attends to this basic rule, even the best “can- do guy” runs the risk of getting stuck with work without recognition.
Once I thought I wanted to be president. I thought I had to be president to do what I wanted with my life. But now my personal life is more important than my business life. I look at [Smith, the president of Alchemy] and I ask what his motivations are. [The CEO] shits on [Smith] all the time. Is this what you struggle for all your life? To be shit on in public? Is that what $ 326,000 a year buys you? It must be what you have to put up with.
You always need a core of people who will do the work in an organization whether it’s creative or not. You just can’t have all superstars. Potential is important but you need some people who are, well, drones. You don’t want them to move. You need people who will stay in a job for year after year and do the necessary work that is essential to an organization’s survival.
Proper management of one’s external appearances simply signals to one’s peers and to one’s superiors that one is prepared to undertake other kinds of self- adaptation.
One must appear to be interchangeable with other managers near one’s level. Corporations discourage narrow specialization more strongly as one goes higher. They also discourage the expression of moral or political qualms. One might object, for example, to working with chemicals used in nuclear power, or working on weapons systems, and most corporations today would honor such objections. Publicly stating them, however, would end any realistic aspirations for higher posts because one’s usefulness to the organization depends on versatility.
These kinds of readily observable rituals forge the social bonds— what might be called the professional intimacy— that make real managerial work, that is, group work of various sorts, possible. One must participate in the rituals to be considered effective in the work. Managers who do not put in the time at the office or who do not engage in the endless round of face- to- face encounters that make up daily managerial life and that provide the opportunity to prove one’s trustworthiness will find themselves “sidelined” or off the team altogether. For this reason, executives do not like to take extended business trips and many break up their vacations into one- week segments rather than risk being away from the office for too long. The public reason for such attentiveness to one’s duties is, of course, one’s devotion to the organization. The real reason is a fear that prolonged absence from one’s everyday interactional milieux will cause or tempt others to forget that one exists.
Striking, distinctive characteristics of any sort, in fact, are dangerous in the corporate world. One of the most damaging things, for instance, that can be said about a manager is that he is brilliant. This almost invariably signals a judgment that the person has publicly asserted his intelligence and is perceived as a threat to others.
Equally damaging is the judgment that a person cannot get along with others— he is “too pushy,” that is, he exhibits too much “persistence in getting to the right answers,” is “always asking why,” and does not know “when to back off.” Or he is “too abrasive,” or “too opinionated,” unable “to bend with the group.” Or he is a “wildman” or a “maverick,” that is, someone who is “outspoken.” Or he may be too aloof, too distant, “too professional.”
Now what it really means is going with the flow and not making waves. If you disagree with something, bowing to the majority without voicing your disagreement. You can indict a person by saying that he’s not a team player. That doesn’t mean he won’t follow directions. It’s because he voices an objection, because he argues with you before doing something, especially if he’s right. That’s when we really get mad— when the other guy is right. If he’s wrong, we can be condescending and adopt the “you poor stupid bastard” tone….
Someone who is talking about team play is out to squash dissent. It’s the most effective way to tell people who have different perspectives to shut up.
People who are comers— the fair- haired boys— all exhibit the same traits. They are all fast on their feet, well- spoken. They all send visibility memos. You know, get your name out, let people know you’re managing. Cultivate pseudo- leadership. Develop a habit of calling somebody back in a hurry. Wearing your [Covenant] tie.
I don’t have the responsibility for a salesman’s job in this company, but I sell everybody every day. What I sell is me— myself.
To advance, a manager must, as suggested earlier, have a patron, also called a mentor, a sponsor, a rabbi, or a godfather. A patron provides his client with opportunities to get “visibility,” to “showcase” his abilities, to step out of the crowd at the middle levels, to make connections with others of high status. A patron cues his client to crucial political developments in the corporation, helps arrange lateral moves if the client’s upward progress is thwarted by a particular job or a particular boss, applauds his presentations or suggestions at meetings, introduces his client to the right people at the right times, and promotes his client during an organizational shake- up, usually to posts where the patron needs someone of unswerving loyalty. The signs of favor from a patron and, of course, a client’s reciprocal obligations, vary widely.
In Covenant Corporation, criticism of merit pay focuses on the CEO’s insistence on a rigid bell curve distribution of performance ratings that determines salary increases. The official rationale is that such a distribution forces supervisors to make the hard judgments necessary to maintain performance standards. In actuality, the judgments that are made are seen to reflect other interests.
And they have to balance these out. It means that somebody’s gain is somebody else’s loss. If they give me a 2.5, they have to give somebody else a 3 to even out the curve. It also means that I’m competing for limited spots with people who have high grades.
You have a bell curve system and it’s got to be a normal curve and nobody breaks that curve…. So [people] don’t see what they do, or don’t do, as related to their situation in the corporation. Because they are all rated by their bosses as typical. And they know that they don’t all perform typically. So the under- achievers get satisfaction because they are rated the same as hard workers, even though they are coasting. And the overachievers get bent out of shape because they see that their work is not recognized. 8
Finally, except at the lower levels of management that directly oversee actual production of goods, managers see the intrinsic ambiguity of their work as impossible to evaluate with any objectivity. The very categories of management evaluation in the companies I have studied— judgment and decision- making ability, creativeness, leadership, communication, working with others, and so on— lend themselves to multiple, subjective, and extremely divergent interpretations. Of course, to the extent that measures of performance are vague, to that extent are standards of accountability vague.
There’s not enough objective information about people. When you really want to do somebody in, you just say, well, he can’t get along with people. That’s a big one. And we do that constantly. What that means, by the way, is that he pissed me off; he gave evidence of his frustration with some situation. Another big one is that he can’t manage— he doesn’t delegate or he doesn’t make his subordinates keep his commitments. So in this sort of way, a consensus does build up about a person and a guy can be dead and not even know it.
There are people who go through life thinking they can do a lot more than they really can do. And the reason is that losing or changing jobs is a very high stress situation and most people prefer to hang on to what they’ve got— to their routine. They’re not happy but they go through life like prisoners of war not recognizing their true situation.
Our motives are purely selfish. We’re not concerned about old Joe failing, but we’re worried about how his failure will reflect on us. When you pick somebody, say, you invest part of yourself in him. So his failure and what it means to his kids and so on mean nothing. What you’re worried about is your own ass with your superiors for having picked him in the first place…. What we do essentially when somebody fails is to put him in a little boat, tow him out to sea, and cut the rope. And we never think about him again.
See, the important thing in managing is not to show your authority too much. You’ve got to get people to think an idea is theirs; you’ve got to get them to accept “hints” so that they perform the way you want them to.
Because of such uncertainties, managers continually speak of the great importance of being in the right place at the right time.
You can also end up at the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve seen some very capable guys destroyed. They get caught in some situation, things go on for awhile and then somebody in power decides to do something about it. And they get sacrificed to the virgin gods. Or the market can suddenly go sour. But the typical case is that something has been going on for thirty to forty years and someone decides to do something about it.
4. Looking Up and Looking Around
Such impulsiveness and indeed, one might say from a certain perspective, irrationality, is, of course, always justified in rational and reasonable terms. It is so commonplace in the corporate world that many managers expect whatever ordered processes they do erect to be subverted or overturned by executive fiat, masquerading as an established bureaucratic procedure or considered judgment.
But decision making is not an individual process. We have training programs to teach people how to manage, we have courses, and all the guys know the rhetoric and they know they have to repeat it. But all these things have no relationship to the way they actually manage or make decisions. The basic principles of decision making in this organization and probably any organization are: (1) avoid making any decision if at all possible; (2) if a decision has to be made, involve as many people as you can so that, if things go south, you’re able to point in as many directions as possible.
Decision- making paralysis is, predictably enough, most common at the middle levels.
describes how even very high- ranking managers look up and look around:
People try to cover themselves. They avoid putting things clearly in writing. They try to make group decisions so that responsibility is not always clearly defined.
There’s a lot of it [fear and anxiety]. To a large degree it’s because people are more honest with themselves than you might believe. People know their own shortcomings. They know when they’re over their heads. A lot of people are sitting in jobs that they know are bigger than they should be in. But they can’t admit that in public and, at still another level, to themselves. The organizational push for advancement produces many people who get in over their heads and don’t know what they are doing. And they are very fearful of making a mistake and this leads to all sorts of personal disloyalty. But people know their capabilities and know that they are on thin ice. And they know that if they make mistakes, it will cost them dearly. So there’s no honesty in our daily interaction and there’s doubt about our abilities. The two go together.
Of course, managers know at one level of their consciousness that today’s minor issues can quickly become tomorrow’s major crises, but the pressure for annual, quarterly, monthly, daily, and even hourly “results,” that is, measurable progress plausibly attributed to one’s own efforts, crowds out reflection about the future.
When a decision is inevitable, managers say, “The decision made itself.” Diffusion of responsibility, in the case of the coke battery by procrastinating until total crisis voided real choices, is intrinsic to organizational life because the real issue in most gut decisions is: Who is going to get blamed if things go wrong?
The fundamental rule of corporate life is to protect oneself and, if possible, one’s own.
Some managers argue that outrunning mistakes is the real meaning of “being on the fast track,” the real key to managerial success.
In fact, one way of looking at success patterns in the corporation is that the people who are in high positions have never been in one place long enough for their problems to catch up with them. They outrun their mistakes. That’s why to be successful in a business organization, you have to move quickly.
One way to hit desired numbers is by squeezing the resources under one’s control, and American corporations generally provide structural inducements to encourage and facilitate this.
We’re judged on the short- term because everybody changes their jobs so frequently. As long as we have a system where I’m told that I am not going to be in a job for the long term, you’re going to have this pressure. And you’re not tracked from one job to the next, so you can milk your present situation and never have it pinned on you in the future. If we started doing poorly in [this business], I would do everything I could to make my group look good. Now you’ve got to understand what I’m saying. A plant that is not well maintained will fail in the short term, so you have to spend money there; a plant that has poorly trained people will fail today, so you have to spend money there. But you can still milk it. If a piece of fairly large capital equipment needs to be replaced— well, almost anything can be fixed and you can just keep patching things up, just putting absolutely no money at all into the business. Or you can just make an edict that will cut supplies by 25 percent, [things like] pumps, motors, tools, and so on. You run a risk because the plant could shut down. But there are always things you can do. My favorite things are not to replace my stores inventory and that shows up as direct profit on your balance sheet; not replace people who retire, and stretch everybody else out; cut down on overtime; cut working inventories to the bone. [You can also] lower the quality standards; you can get away with this in the short term because people will accept that for awhile, though in the long term people will stop buying from you. Another thing is to give less money in the paycheck, which is a stupid thing to do. What I mean is give less raise to the salaried people— instead of 10 percent, give 8 percent. That’s small and foolish, but it will be done. You can really save a lot of money. In the chemical business, another way to do it is to let waste accumulate. Essentially, when I think of milking a business, I think of shutting off any capital expenditure and anything that is an expense. And you know what happens when you do that? The guy who comes into that mess is the one who gets blamed, not the guy who milked it.
There should be some comeuppance for that kind of thing, some penalty.
For his own part, Smith acted as if the whole affair had never happened, let alone that he had played any role in it. At the very top of organizations, one does not so much continue to outrun mistakes as tough them out with sheer brazenness. In such ways, bureaucracies may be thought of, in C. Wright Mills’s phrase, as vast systems of organized irresponsibility.
The code is this: you milk the plants; rape the businesses; use other people and discard them; fuck any woman that is available, in sight, and under your control; and exercise authoritative prerogatives at will with subordinates and other lesser mortals who are completely out of your league in money and status. But you also don’t play holier than thou. This last point is as important as all the others.
My own theory is that it was the plant itself that was let to run down- hill and that no matter what they had put in there, it wouldn’t have worked. Basically, [Noll] milked the plant and the plant would have run poorly in any event. He skimped on maintenance and concentrated on short- term profit. And he made money but he didn’t keep the plant in shape to do anything with it…. Some guys, like [Noll], go into plants and because they cut costs, tighten things up, they become heroes. But the plant is being milked. The question is, does he know he’s doing it? I’ll bet you he thinks he is a plant man who is frugal…. It’s easy to make money in the short term; you just don’t spend money. And this is what happened… if the plant had been a well- oiled machine, a new program like this would have had a greater chance of success.
And people have to concede that. A lot of people do that. Then you get the guy who takes his place and tries to run things right and he has to spend a lot of money. And people look at the guy who was there before and they say: “Well, old [Noll] ran the plant well and he didn’t have to spend any money like you’re claiming you do.”
Young tried to position his business for the future while continuing to meet short- run profit pressures. This is a difficult task since the institutional logic that the pressure for short- run results sets in motion, while lucrative for a time, undercuts the possibilities of lasting achievement, however reasonably planned. Within the institutional logic of the corporation, Young’s fatal error was pausing on the track, in the middle of the race, and thinking about the future. Instead of outrunning his mistakes, they overran him.
5. Drawing Lines
The crucial issue is that noise- induced hearing loss occurs gradually and is not felt until damage is irreversible and becomes evident late in life. Hearing aids can only amplify sounds, not clarify indistinct sounds. With heavy impairment, older people sink into isolation and incommunicability in their retirement.
White wrote a report detailing his analysis of the data collected and proposing the extensive and regular educational programs he felt were necessary. For White, both because of his professional training and because of his personal religious background (he had been in a seminary for some years), this was a clear moral issue and he felt that he had to act as the conscience of the company.
One might say that White suffered from a peculiar kind of disability for his particular occupation, that is, an unwillingness, perhaps an actual inability, to see the hearing issue in more pragmatic terms. But, one might ask, why should his moral stance make other managers uncomfortable? Managers are, after all, men and women with exactly the same kind of moral sensibilities that White possesses although they may express them in different arenas of their lives.
Consequently, a principal managerial virtue and, in fact, managers’ most striking actual characteristic is an essential, pervasive, and thoroughgoing pragmatism.
Brady discussed the matter with a close friend, a man who had no defined position but considerable influence in the company and access to the highest circles of the organization. He was Mr. Fixit— a lobbyist, a front man, an all- around factotum, a man who knew how to get things done. Most big corporations have such men, often stashed in their public relations division.
In their view, the issues that Brady raises are, first of all, simply practical matters. His basic failing was, first, that he violated the fundamental rules of bureaucratic life. These are usually stated briefly as a series of admonitions. (1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do what your job requires, and you keep your mouth shut.
The problem fell into other people’s areas, was their responsibility, and therefore their problem. Why, then, worry about it? Besides, Brady had a number of ways out of the situation if he found it intolerable, including resigning. Moreover, whatever action he took would be insignificant anyway so why bother to act at all and jeopardize himself? Even a fool should have known that the CEO was not likely to take whatever blame resulted from the whole affair.
Third, these managers see the violations that disturbed Brady— irregular payments, doctored invoices, shuffling numbers in accounts— as small potatoes indeed, commonplaces of corporate life. One cannot, for example, expect to do business abroad, particularly in the Third World, without recognizing that “one man’s bribe is another man’s commission.” As long as one does not try to extort an unfair market advantage but rather simply facilitates or speeds along already assigned duties, bribes are really the grease that makes the world work. Moreover, as managers see it, playing sleight of hand with the monetary value of inventories, post- or 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 precisely to put other people’s money, rather than one’s own resources, at risk.
In effect, one makes oneself alert to expediency by projecting outward the objectifying habit of mind learned in the course of self- rationalization. That is, the manager alert to expediency learns to appraise all situations and all other people as he comes to see himself— as an object, a commodity, something to be scrutinized, rearranged, tinkered with, packaged, advertised, promoted, and sold.
First, bureaucracy facilitates an abstract rather than a concrete view of problems, an essential component of the nonaccountability discussed earlier. Typically, the abstractness of one’s viewpoint increases as one ascends the hierarchy of an organization. The pushing down of details and the growing social distance from the human consequences of one’s actions enable the development of an austere, uncluttered perspective. The viewpoints that managers at different levels have on workers and, in particular, on the social dislocation caused to workers by labor real- location decisions illustrates this point.
Such a distanced viewpoint can be undercut by sudden encounters. One of the top northern officials of Weft, just returned from a tour of the firm’s southern plants, when asked what aspects of his work he finds troublesome, comments:
I think the thing that bothers me the most— well, have you ever been to a textile mill? It’s not an attractive place to work. And then I think of an eighteen- year- old girl going into the mill, and we jam earplugs into her head, and put her into a room with 200 looms with 90– 95 decibels of noise for eight hours a day. That’s a rather disappointing career start for a young lady. So it’s the work environment in our older plants that troubles me the most…. I can only imagine what that girl thinks. I’ve never taken one of them out for a cup of coffee or sat down and talked to one of them. But I can guess what she thinks from our turnover rate.
As a rule, however, the various insulations provided by both office and social status prevent such unpleasant episodes from occurring too often.
Is it worth it to spend that much money? I don’t know how to answer that question as long as I’m not one of those twenty people. As long as those people can’t be identified, as long as they are not specific people, it’s OK. Isn’t that strange? So you put a filter on your own house and try to protect yourself.
I think that I’ve got to where I am today because of this. [His boss’s boss] knows that I saved the company a lot of money and a lot of asses to boot. And he and others know that I am someone who can be trusted. I can keep my mouth shut…. And that’s the biggest thing that I have going for me— that people feel that I can be trusted. I can’t overemphasize that enough.
It is a lens, however, that enables him to bring into exact focus the rules and relationships of his immediate world. The alert manager pays whatever obeisance is required to the ideological idols of the moment, but he keeps his eye fixed on what has to be done to meet external and organizational exigencies. He wears the masks of bland genteel bonhomie with grace and humor but he comes to appreciate more fully than most people the wisdom of the old proverb “Tis an ill wind that blows nobody good,” and he learns that one man’s misfortune is another man’s opportunity. More generally, he comes to measure all relationships with others by a strict utilitarian calculus and, insofar as he dares, breaks friendships and alliances accordingly. He comes to see the secrecy at the core of managerial circles not as a suppression of dissent but an integral component of a compartmentalized world where one establishes faith with others precisely by proving that one can tolerate the ambiguities that expedient action and stone- faced silence impose. He comes to see also that the nonaccountability of the corporation is really a license to exert one’s own will and to improve one’s own fortunes by making the system work for oneself, as long as one does not overreach one’s power or station, and as long as one maintains crucial alliances and does not get caught.
6. Dexterity with Symbols
Managers’ public language is, more than anything else, euphemistic.
Here, for example, are some typical phrases describing performance appraisals, always treacherous terrain, followed by their probable intended meaning.
Euphemistic language also plays other important roles. Within the corporation, subordinates often have to protect their bosses’ “deniability” by concealing the specific dimensions of a problem in abstract, empty terms, thus maximizing the number of possible subsequent interpretations. The rule of thumb here seems to be that the more troublesome a problem, the more desiccated and vague the public language describing it should be.
It’s the ability to play this system that determines whether you will rise.… And part of the adeptness [required] is determined by how much it bothers people. One thing you have to be able to do is to play the game, but you can’t be disturbed by the game.
Plants became a liability, rather than the source of wealth. The perception was: Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just sell chemicals without producing them? So the profession of producing things became a low profession and the good people were those who were producing services. Manufacturing people became evil. I think this is one reason that marketing people became ascendant in the competition for advancement.
By the way, in the corporate world, whenever anybody says to you: “I’m going to be completely honest with you about this,” you should immediately know that a curveball is on the way.
7. The Magic Lantern
Publicity is the nervous system of the world. Through the network of press, radio, film and lights, a thought can be flashed around the world the instant it is conceived. And through this same highly sensitive, swift and efficient mechanism it is possible for fifty people in a metropolis like New York to dictate the customs, trends, thoughts, fads and opinions of an entire nation of a hundred and twenty million people.
In this view, “the mass is always a magnified reflection of some individual.”
Take apart the average individual, dissect his mind, his manner, his attitudes and you will find that every idea, every major habit and trend in his makeup is a reflection of the fifty outstanding personalities of the day.
Paradoxically, the more artifice used in constructing social reality, the more does that reality come for many to seem commonplace, natural, and taken for granted.
By their nature, scientific data are always tentative and subject to revision. And, in fact, practical men and women who understand the pivotal role of public opinion welcome scientific ambiguity unless they themselves can claim certainty to their own benefit. Uncertainty provides the requisite space to maneuver, provided that one invokes the hallowed canons of science in a measured and respectable way and provided, of course, that one surrounds oneself with a group of experts, preferably with impeccable credentials, who will testify to the probity of one’s position. Since credentials influence credibility, they must include not only proper certification and established position but also freedom from ostensible conflict of interest that might allow others to interpret scientific judgment as biased.
“It’s called ‘interpretation.’” As long as a kind of plausibility is maintained, one perspective is as good as any other. In discounting in advance any intrinsic significance of ideas or, one might add, of moral values that flow from them, this habit of mind meshes nicely with the bureaucratic virtues of adeptness at inconsistency and alertness to expediency. Within such a framework, public relations specialists usually conclude very pragmatically that one might as well “sing whatever song the client wants to hear.”
The aphorism in the field is: “You come into this business an idealist; you leave a cynic.”
Most PR people are very cynical indeed. For them, truth is relative, completely relative. They can see relativity in any situation. They can look at truth from many different angles and switch viewpoints often and rapidly.
You know, PR is dealing with all the things that we deal with every day in our private lives, but on a much larger level. I mean, there is a certain beauty to it. It’s reflective of what we all do each day. We do something wrong and we try to explain it. We get drunk and we act badly; we have a fight and we use abusive language. Well, [Company X] got drunk, drunk with money and power and abused its employees and then covered it up. That’s a terrible thing, but it’s not all that different from what we all do. I think that what people don’t like about PR is that we remind them of themselves, on a grand scale, on a large screen where they can see all the ploys they use to manipulate others in the little dramas of their own lives. They see all the duplicity and all the storytelling of their own lives writ large. It makes them very uncomfortable because we remind them of themselves.
8. Invitations to Jeopardy
The principal goal of each group is its own survival, of each person his own advancement. As one rises in the organization, one necessarily spends more and more time maintaining networks and alliances precisely in order to survive and flourish, a skill that, when well developed, is usually called leadership.
Moreover, winning, say, on a policy dispute, carries the burden of implementation, sometimes involving those whom one has defeated.
As it happens, when it is socially difficult to extol or uphold high standards, a kind of leveling process occurs that produces a comfortable mediocrity, a willingness to settle for, say, whatever the market will bear, or to tolerate shoddiness of products or performance, provided there is no undue social disruption.
Yet attention to the material world can anchor one’s sense of self. In fact, the problem of the senselessness of managerial work increases as the work itself becomes more abstract, typically as one advances.
Moral Mazes and the Great Recession
Consider, first, the cataclysms that have shaken American economy and society in the past few decades, culminating in the Great Recession of 2008– 2009. The leitmotif is that of organized irresponsibility.
When the end came, 140 of its top managers received hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts and bonuses while the rest of the company’s employees lost everything, including their retirement nest eggs. The Enron disaster seemed singular at the time. No one guessed that it was in fact a paradigm of what the American economy had become.
Organized irresponsibility has migrated to the nooks and crannies of our society.