The talk Biblio Service Michaela Haase
Jackall, R., The World of Corporate Managers – Twentieth Anniversary Edition, 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 society (Interview, p. 8).” If one wants to nominate an audience as the target group of the first edition, then it is perhaps identified best by the answer to the question: “How does bureaucracy shape moral consciousness?” (Interview, p. 1). This question,