A business ethics for post liberal capitalism

Abstract

Robert Jackall's "Moral Mazes: Bureaucracy and Managerial Work" proffers a trenchant critique of modern bureaucracy, and in so far as bureaucratization is the inundating wave of the future, it also presents an immanent critique of modern society. One can see "Moral Mazes" as a portent for the realization of Weber's darkest predictions for the future of the Occident: a civilization imprisoned in the fully bureaucratized "house of bondage." Against this theoretical backdrop Jackall's account of the ethical bankruptcy of the managerial elite unfolds, not only as the tragedy of a troubled subculture, but also as the precursor of a civilizational crisis. A premonition that the microcosmic world of managers may eventually overshadow the future of humanity underlies the sympathetic, and at times lyrical, tone with which Jackall describes his subjects. They are not seen only as the mere harbingers of the new order; they are its first victims as well. If I may invoke what might be an unconventional comparison, both the super-affluent subjects of Jackall's "Moral Mazes," and the starving natives described in Colin M. Turnball's "Mountain People,"1 appear to teeter on the edges of human civility as their cultures fail to meet the challenges of their social and natural environments. The waning of social mores in the face of starvation and anomie amidst managerial abundance similarly erodes cultural restraint until anticipations of a Hobbsian state of nature appear on the seams of a threadbare culture. A Durkheimain insight sheds light on a possible solution to this cultural impoverishment: As long as a collective response is not devised, the natives are bound to ward off the Hobbsian problem through creating clandestine subcultures which at once address and conceal the crisis. Jackall's main project is to examine one such cultural mutation from the point of view of the natives, the managers he studied. But he also provides data, incentive and general direction for further theoretical reflection. Despite the general agreement between Jackall's findings and Weberian futurology, Weber's ideal type of rational bureaucracy even if it had not been reduced by pop social science to an alloy