Abstract: This paper takes as its starting point the premise that the conduct of people in organisations should not be understood simply in terms of externally imposed rules or codes, but in terms of the ‘practices that are deeply embedded and daily enacted’ in organisational practice. Assuming that those practices are in themselves ‘ethically neutral’, it examines two of their aspects: (1) the law’s construction of the corporation as having a legal personality in many respects similar to that of a natural person and (2) the social constitution of forms of organisational subjectivity displaying their own particular ethical character within long-term social processes, as well as (3) the ways in which they intersect.
The introduction defines ‘managerial ethics’ and engages with the problems accompanying the idea of ‘unethical’ behaviour, given that it is possible to see all human action as guided by at least some set of moral principles. A distinction is then made between two dimensions to the contradictions or conflicts between managerial conduct and widely-shared ethical principles. The first is based on a ‘thin’ conception of human conduct, presuming that what people do is largely situationally-defined, focusing on questions of institutional design, so that one would engage with the legal framework of organisational action, issues like the concept of the corporate legal personality, everyday organisational practices, etc. The other derives from a ‘thick’ conception of human psychology, in which human beings are understood as having a relatively stable set of habits and dispositions (habitus) which has emerged in the course of their biography and which drives the individual’s conduct as much, if not more so, than the demands and requirements of their immediate organisational context. Such an understanding of human psychology requires a discussion of the theorizations of processes of civilization and decivilization, the emergence of particular psychic structures which have changed over time, and which can only be understood in connection with changes in the forms taken by broader social relationships (van Krieken, 1998; 1999).
The paper will outline and develop the work done on corporate regulation and accountability, together with the studies of long-term processes of civilization and their application to management practices. The particular problem I will draw all these points together with is that of the internal contradictions which cut across both these dimensions of managerial ethics, the tensions between explicit normative standards and implicitly constituted practical forms of behaviour (the problem of “hypocrisy”), the ways in which otherwise ‘good’ men and women can still end up doing ‘bad’ things.
The concluding section examines the ways in which these two dimensions of the conflict between broader ethical principles and actual managerial behaviour are related to each other, how legal and institutional design and socially-constituted habitus interweave to generate the managerial conduct we see today. What I will be particularly interested in is the way in which we can avoid seeing whatever we find problematic about managerial conduct in terms of normative ‘failure’ or the failure of ‘virtue’ and instead be able to locate the bases of that conduct in contradictions between explicit ethical and implicit structural and cultural expectations, between the normative and the structural, between organisational and extra-organisational subjectivity, and to identify the overall long-term trends in the civilization of management.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-09-03
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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