Moral Responsibility in the Age of Bureaucracy

Luban, David; Strudler, Alan; Wasserman, David H.

doi:10.2307/1289575

Cited by 50 publications

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“…An individual is generally said to be responsible for an outcome insofar as the individual's actions or omissions are a cause of the outcome, and the actions or omissions are not done under compulsion or in ignorance. 8 An individualist approach that adopts these criteria is more robust in organizational settings than usually assumed, provided the criteria are properly specified (Bovens, 1998(Bovens, , 2007(Bovens, , 2010Luban, Strudler, & Wasserman, 1992;Thompson, 1980Thompson, , 2005. How they are interpreted and applied matters.…”

Section: Individual Responsibility and Its Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsibility for Failures of Government

Thompson

2014

The American Review of Public Administration

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The problem of many hands-the difficulty of assigning responsibility in organizations in which many different individuals contribute to decisions and policies-stands in the way of investigating and correcting the failures of government. The problem can be mitigated by giving greater attention to the design of processes of organizational responsibility. An independent investigation can identify both the individual actions and the structural defects that contributed to an organizational failure. Then, specific individuals can be designated as overseers, who are held responsible for monitoring the structure and making changes as necessary. Three cases-the official responses to terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, and the financial crisis that began in 2007-illustrate how this prospective approach of designing responsibility could work in practice.

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Section: Individual Responsibility and Its Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsibility for Failures of Government

Thompson

2014

The American Review of Public Administration

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“…In this field, perhaps unsurprisingly, the almost exclusive focus has been on exploring how Kafka might help us understand the dysfunctions of ''bureaucracy, power and authority, rationality and […] alienation'' (Warner 2007, p. 1019; e.g. Luban et al 1992;McDaniel 1979;Parker 2006;Warner 2007). Studies of Kafka and organizations also include Pelzer's (2002) discussion of disgust, Wasserman's (2001) interpretation of Kafka as an industrial reformer and Munro and Huber's (2012) reflection on the mythology of bureaucracy.…”

Section: Approaching Kafkamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Limits of Generosity: Lessons on Ethics, Economy, and Reciprocity in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

Rhodes

Westwood

2014

J Bus Ethics

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This paper interrogates the relation between reciprocity and ethics as it concerns participation in the world of work and organizations. Tracing discussions of business and organizational ethics that concern themselves, respectively, with the ethics of self-interest, the ethics of reciprocity, and the ethics of generosity, we explore the possibility of ethical relations with those who are seen as radically different, and who are divested of anything worth exchanging. To address this we provide a reading of Franz Kafka's famous novella The Metamorphosis and relate to it as a means to extend our understanding of business and organizational ethics. This story, we demonstrate, yields insight into the unbearable demands of ethics as they relate to reciprocity and generosity. On this basis, we draw conclusions concerning the mutually constitutive ethical limitations of reciprocity and generosity as ethical touchstones for organizational life while simultaneously accepting the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of exceeding those limits. In such a condition, we argue, ethics is not best served by adopting idealistic or moralizing positions regarding generosity but rather by working in the indissoluble tensions between self and other.

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“…They include altering internal corporate structure and culture, including reducing levels of hierarchy; encouraging whistle-blowing; increasing criminal penalties for corporate crime; easing efforts to pierce the corporate veil and extending liability; changing the burden of proof and persuasion in cases of corporate harms; increasing the influence of shareholders, workers, and the public on corporate decisions; removing the legally required goal of shareholder profit maximization; requiring corporations to consider the interests of nonshareholders; providing tax cuts and regulatory relief to corporations that meet standards of social responsibility; limiting corporate influence in the political process; and a host of others (see Amoroso, 1995;Bender, 1990Bender, , 1993Coates, 1989;Coleman, 1982;Gabaldon, 1992;Fisse & Braithwaite, 1994;Grossman & Adams, 1993;Hawken, 1993;Houseman, 1993;Kutmer, 1995;Laufer, 1994;Luban et al, 1992;Millon, 1993;Parkinson, 1994;Simon & Eitzen, 1990;Stone, 1986;Thompson, 1994;Tomkins et al, 1992). Despite occasional advances, however, reforms generally go no further than necessary to dampen short-term public protests (Miller, 1987).…”

Section: Regulatory and Organizational Reformmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Law Says Corporations are Persons, but Psychology Knows Better

Fox

1996

Behav. Sci. Law

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Psychologists interested in law and public policy have begun to examine the nature of corporations in American society and the serious consequences of corporate irresponsibility. The dominant trend identifies areas where corporate behavior falls short of ethical standards or leads to unacceptably risky decisions and suggests ways to reform corporations or the laws that regulate them. This well‐intentioned approach is consistent with psychology's liberal reformist tendency. Unfortunately, it neither challenges the flawed psychological underpinnings of the legal fiction that corporations are legal persons nor compensates sufficiently for the dynamics of individual behavior in corporate settings. Instead, psychologists should advocate fundamental restructuring of our corporate society.

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Moral Responsibility in the Age of Bureaucracy

Cited by 50 publications

References 0 publications

Responsibility for Failures of Government

Responsibility for Failures of Government

The Limits of Generosity: Lessons on Ethics, Economy, and Reciprocity in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

The Law Says Corporations are Persons, but Psychology Knows Better

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