Moral Mazes

...The subordinate] must follow the boss's lead in conversation, must laugh at his boss's jokes while not making jokes of his own....The shrewd subordinate learns to efface himself, so that his boss's face might shine more clearly...

...However, that point was not the rationale for Jackall's argument...

...To me, the incident is clearly a successful example of the danger-fraught activity of whistle-blowing...

...Jackall himself unintentionally offers a fitting epigram for his book...

...One can then sit tight and wait for things to happeji...

...respecting autonomy versus caring and protecting...

...Simply by living and working in a complex institutional society, which places multiple value demands and multiple responsibilities upon them (but is this not like life outside the corporation...

...corporations and corporate managers could walk away without respect and appreciation for the competence, the acute decision-making skills, and, yes, the moral fiber (despite many apparent moral and managerial difficulties) of most who practice the art of management...

...The richness of Jackall's data and his ability to describe complex situations concisely and with clarity do not compensate for his denial of the morality of dilem-mic situations and an almost arrogant imposition of ideological bias on the data...

...Dilemmas, by their nature, frequently pit basic moral values against each other (truth-telling versus doing no harm...

...The situationalist, which is what a responsible manager is, would say, 'Truth is a value I uphold...

...The critical-but respectful-corporate observer both cheers and despairs at the seeming contradictions in striving for the goal of ethical, effective, and profitable economic activity...

...Situational" and "relative" do not mean the same thing...

...As he says, "Above all, one must streamline oneself shamelessly, learn to wear all the right masks, learn all the proper vocabularies..., get to know all the right people, and cultivate...the art of self-promotion...

...Here the story concludes with the young manager's comment, "No one ever told me thank you...

...the better, more attractive secretaries, an [enlarged] office...and to be elevated when and if the boss is elevated...

...Jackall interprets this incident not as evidence of effective whistle-blowing in which the company protected the young man's anonymity, but as one more example of how the corporate bureaucracf reinforces expedient behavior on the part of ambitious employees...

...Simplisti-cally a relativist, which label Jackall would attach to a corporate manager, would say that sometimes truth is to be valued and sometimes it is not...

...Jackall describes the whistle-blowing process that the young manager was advised to take, which ultimately resulted in the product's being withdrawn, one executive being fired, and two R&D scientists being sanctioned...

...He sees the U.S...

...However, no one who has spent any time engaging with large U.S...

...To create these conditions for success, Jackall asserts, the corporate manager spends an inordinate amount of time engaged in the activities of blame-placing and self-protection, or, as he reports in more colorful language than is used here, in effectively covering a sensitive part of his anatomy or finding himself kissing it goodby...

...Men and women in positions of authority, like managers, face these dilemmas...

...But not in this book...

...no one said that I was a good employee....If I had pursued this issue I would have been fired, no doubt about it...

...Competitive pressures in ah increasingly deregulated environment, ambiguity in the translation of policy and strategy into effective practice, and the reality of competing and often conflicting value and stakeholder claims on individual managers make the moral route a multi-forked road in which the right path may be neither clearly marked, readily available, nor even generally agreed upon...

...By holding to a narrow, sterile and "easy" view of morality ("easy," if all one must do is choose, between right and wrong), Jackall denies the richness of the integrity inherent in wrestling with the ethics of a complex world...

...corporation rise vigorously to its defense...

...For example, Jackall offers a well-drawn description of a whistle-blowing incident in which a talented young manager discovers that a new high-durability product is, in fact, likely to fall apart under moderately heavy use...

...William P. loewe teaches theology in the Department of Religion and Religious Educa tion at The Catholic University of America in in Washington, D.C.in in Washington, D.C...

...managers are doomed to exist in a world of moral mazes with no exit...

...This practice of narrow, ideologically driven interpretation not only loses the richness of the described reality, but results in a book that is tedious and redundant, each point seeming to have been made endless times before...

...Jackall sees "managerial moralities [as] always situational, always relative," a phrase which underlines a critical flaw in his analysis...

...How, in this complex situation where 'truth' may compete with other values and outcomes, do I enact this value...

...And, as Jackall states, "work-bureaucratic work in particular-poses a series of intractable dilemmas that often demand compromises with traditional moral beliefs...

...REVIEWERS BARBARA LEY TOFFLER is a founding partner of Resources for Responsible Manage ment, a Boston-based consulting firm, the author of Tough Choices: Managers Talk Ethics (John Wiley, 1986), and a former faculty member of the Harvard Business: School...

...First, the core of Jackall's ideology is that morality demands an unswerving, preemptive adherence to traditional moral values and beliefs...

...Leaving aside the widely publicized illegal events (e.g., insider trading, manipulation of government contracts), in which wrongful action has been chosen for purposes of self-gain, unethical or ethically questionable behavior still occurs far too frequently simply as a result of decent people trying to get the job done...

...One could make an argument that public recognition of a whistle-blower would model and support desired behavior and so should occur...

...Jackall's response to him might serve as solace to managers assailed by this book: "One of the few consolations available is the hope that those who reinterpret one's work and denigrate its value might someday be seen to be captive to a kind of moral smugness...

...Barbara Ley Tofftor No one who has spent any time working in, dealing with, or studying large U.S...

...Jackall's excessively negative and cynical view of the corporate world in which managers talk like macho, sexist, B-movie thugs ("Don't get your meat where you get your bread and butter") is so breathtaking in its distortion and its disrespect for its subjects that the more serious problems are initially masked...

...In return, he can hope forthose perquisites...

...The manager describes his anguish at "changing" from hero to murderer as a result of shifting social definitions...

...Jackall takes an ideological position in his study of the institutional environment that shapes managerial behavior...

...He talks of the personal pain of a manager in a chemical company that had produced over time DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, and other chemicals, which originally were seen as life-saving products and then became known as dangerous poisons...

...The second critical problem in Moral Mazes is that Jackall offers some first-rate descriptions of managerial life and circumstances and then distorts the reality they represent by interpreting them in accordance with his ideological theme...

...corporation as a patrimonial hierarchy in which "morality is whatever your boss says it is," and in which the Protestant ethic has been so distorted that it is no longer hard work but luck, public relations, and self-promotion that lead to success...

...But it is these other problems that challenge the validity of this study and, hence, its contribution to our understanding of the corporate workplace...

...But now comes Robert Jackall who, with Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, will make many who worry deeply about the moral state of the U.S...

...So what many might see as an example of effective whistle-blowing (of which there are far too few around), becomes simply one more piece of corporation-bashing...

...corporations would hold up such institutions as models of morality...

...Since I didn't pursue it, I didn't get any credit...