Premium Essay

A Summary of Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes

In:

Submitted By burneylam
Words 2246
Pages 9
A summary of Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes
The theme of this work is that managers constantly adapt to the social environments of their organisations in order to succeed. In such contexts, they have no use for abstract ethical principles, but conform to the requirements of bureaucratic functionality. What implications follow for the ethical leader in business?
Jackall found that managers assess their decisions against contextual criteria.
Essentially, managers try to gauge whether they feel “comfortable” with proposed resolutions to specific problems, a task that always involves an assessment of others’ organisational morality and a reckoning of the practical organisational and market exigencies at hand. The notion of comfort has many meanings. When applied to other persons, the idea of comfort is an intuitive measure of trustworthiness, reliability, and predicability in a polycentric world that managers often find troubling, ambiguous, and anxiety-laden. Such assessment of others’ organisational morality is a crucial aspect of a more general set of probations that are intrinsic to managerial work. (p.13)
Jackall notes that power in corporations is centralised at the top in the person of the CEO, while ‘responsibility for decisions and profits’ is pushed down the line as far a possible (p.17) This has ethical implications. The displacement of responsibility for decisions onto subordinates takes the burden from senior managers and the person at the top. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing for a CEO. It’s much better to have a subordinate take the blame for things which go wrong and to know nothing of the details.
First, because they are unfamiliar with - indeed deliberately distance themselves from - entangling details, corporate higher echelons tend to expect successful results without messy complications. This is central to top executives’ well- known

Similar Documents

Premium Essay

Management

...Oxford University Press, New York 2010 A Capsule Summary of the Book This is the second edition of a book whose first edition was published in 1988. There has been no revision of the book; however, Jackall has added a new chapter titled “Moral Mazes and the Great Recession” to it. His description of the financial crisis brings nothing really new to the fore: it shows that nothing has changed in the aftermath of the convulsions caused by several occurrences of crisis in the financial sector or the business world in the last decade. Managers (of banks, insurance enterprises, of Enron, etc.) play(ed) high-risk games at the cost of the organization; they plunder(ed) the assets of employees and shareholders as well. If they win, they take all the gain; if they lose, they call for the taxpayer’s money because their organizations are too big to fail. They never think about stinting with their bonuses even if the taxpayers have to save the organization they work for because otherwise these same managers would leave it and so dispossess it of their skills and competence which, so they think, are badly needed to set it afloat again. Objective and Targeted Audience Jackall’s detailed sociological study of the managerial world is not written for a particular target group. As Jackall has clarified throughout a recent interview,1 his study is “part of a larger project. This is a long-term examination of the social, institutional, cultural, moral, and epistemological foundations of modern American...

Words: 3249 - Pages: 13

Premium Essay

Leadership

...Fourth Edition Reframing Organizations Artistry, Choice, and Leadership LEE G. BOLMAN TERRENCE E. DEAL B est- se l l i n g a u t h o rs of LEADING WITH SOUL FOURTH EDITION Reframing Organizations Artistry, Choice, and Leadership Lee G. Bolman • Terrence E. Deal Copyright © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741—www.josseybass.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-6468600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-7486011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Credits are on page 528. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer...

Words: 193447 - Pages: 774