Abstract
The essay is a descriptive, analytical account of morality in organizations based on fieldwork studying occupational and professional groups in private and public bureaucracies. It focuses on authority and morality; the bureaucratic ethos; and self-rationalization, the social psychological process through which individuals internalize organizational moralities.
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This includes intensive fieldwork with: office workers in a large bank (Jackall 1978); corporate managers in several major corporations (Jackall 1988); whistleblowers in thirteen different organizations, both private and public (Jackall 2007); account executives, art directors, and copywriters in more than two dozen advertising agencies, as well as with public relations practitioners in a few large agencies (Jackall and Hirota 2000); uniformed police and police detectives in two big-city police departments (Jackall 1997, 2005); both state and federal prosecutors (Jackall 1997, 2005); faculty, staff, and administrators in big universities and small colleges; congressional staff; and federal counterterrorism officials. I draw as well on fieldwork with men and women in financial industries (Jackall 2009). In this essay, I focus on the higher echelons of big organizations because men and women in these strata decisively shape the ethos of their occupational worlds. I wish to thank Duffy Graham and Janice M. Hirota for their careful readings and critiques of this essay.
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“Walk back” is a neologism for denying or modifying what one or one’s aides have stated in public. The British equivalent is “row back.”
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Take, for example, the Department of Defense’s report (2010) on the terrorist atrocity at Fort Hood that killed 13 people on 5th November 2009. The report does not even mention by name Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the sole suspect in the shooting, nor does it mention Hasan’s increasingly aggressive public espousal of Islamist doctrine and rhetoric before the attack. Such sanitization marks most bureaucratic documents. In this regard, the mainstream press closely resembles government bureaucracies on many issues. For instance, one finds exactly one article in the New York Times, years after the event, and none at all in the Washington Post about the horrific rapes and murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom in Knoxville, Tennessee [see the extensive reporting on this crime by Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel], though similarly heinous crimes, with the race of victims and perpetrators reversed, are always widely reported. Compare these major newspapers’ non-treatment of the Christian/Newsom rape-murders to their nearly obsessive coverage of the accusations against members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team, charges that proved to be wholly fabricated by the purported victim and pursued recklessly by a rogue district attorney. Newspaper editors, like government bureaucrats, see American society through certain templates. Facts that do not fit inside those frameworks are regularly ignored.
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Much more empirical research needs to be done on the bracketing of general moralities in order to conform to the rules of specific occupational milieux. In observing and interviewing professional criminals, for instance, one sees the phenomenon in sharp terms. Armed robbers, drug dealers who use violence as a business tool, and drug-trade hit men are often good husbands, lovers, fathers, and friends. They talk about their work and the moral rules-in-use that govern it with objective dispassion, reflecting their view of its separate place in their life-worlds. For instance, Francisco Medina, known on New York City streets as Freddy Kreuger, pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York federal court to 14 assassinations of drug-gang rivals. Medina, a brujo in the santería religion, calmly told the judge at his sentencing that he wanted it clearly understood that he had never killed an innocent person, that is, someone outside his line of business. (Jackall 1997:268)
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The business ethics industry, which has long historical antecedents in the preaching of many of the US Protestant sects, but only reached its fully institutionalized form in various centers, institutes, consulting firms, and business school curricula in the late 1980 s, still advocates variants of the Golden Rule, specifically the notion that “doing good” will lead to “doing well.” Although corporate managers often publicly embrace this comforting doctrine, many deride it privately as irrelevant to their worlds because those who “do evil” often do quite well indeed.
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See, for instance, the history of the Harlem Political Club, known in New York City as Tammany Hall Uptown, for a paradigmatic case of how black Americans behave in municipal politics. At the national level, the workings of the Congressional Black Caucus provide rich materials for students of the relentless pursuit of racially-defined self-interests.
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Jackall, R. (2010). Morality in Organizations. In: Hitlin, S., Vaisey, S. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Morality. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6896-8_11
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