Management and evil, a fragment
There is something intellectually stimulating about the question of evil, and not just because it denotes an ethics. My dear friends professors René ten Bos and Ruud Kaulingfreks arranged a lovely conference on evil just this summer, and having talked to them both before and during the conference about evil made me realize that I probably haven’t thought about evil enough. And for someone who is occasionally accused of doing management studies, this should clearly be an area of great importance and potential.
Management, and managers, are often perceived as fundamentally tainted by the specter of evil. Even though no-one would claim that all managers are inherently bad people – the sheer amount of managers in contemporary society would make such a supposition statistically problematic – there is still exist a shared belief that management is continuously running the risk of being compromised. In a very real sense, we tend to see a kernel of evil in management, a shadow of moral failure just behind it.
Well, obviously this is not something everyone agrees on. Many of my brethren in the field of management studies would be shocked by such an assertion, as would most managers. Still, when we look at things like popular culture – an acutely sensitive device for analyzing our shared cultural psyche – it is obvious that management carries with it notions of failed humanity, insensitivity and cruelty. Whether we watch the hapless David Brent in “The Office” or creepy self-management guru and pedophile Jim Cunningham in “Donnie Darko”, there is almost always a hint of malice to any person being presented primarily as a manager in popular culture. Similarly, although the role of faceless and organized Big Evil in movies has been overtaken by terrorism, management or The Corporation still exists as a powerful symbol of incarnate if somewhat banal evil. Particularly poignant is the fact that the perennial favorite form of unorganized evil, the psychopath, is increasingly being co-branded with management – even though the iconic version obviously is Patrick Bateman, Joel Bakan’s book (and the subsequent filmatization) turns the corporation itself into a psychotic being. Stating that there is a undercurrent of evil in our general thinking of management might thus not be that much of a stretch.
The thing to consider is whether this is the result of how culture creates polarized notions, imbuing things with moral judgement, or whether this in fact might show us something more interesting. Obviously, this more interesting thing would be that management is in fact connected to evil, and the challenge would be to find out in what way. Note that I am not trying to claim that managers are evil, as I vehemently disagree with people who assume that greed and soullessness comes with the managerial territory. I’m quite assured of the fact that most managers are normal human beings, with normal human foibles and the normal capacity for human kindness. While it is undoubtedly so that there are assholes in management, this can never stand as a generalizable fact. However, one might pose the question whether management, as a cultural field, makes managers more susceptible to evil behavior, i.e. whether they might be tainted by it. This might sound slightly esoteric, as if one would argue that “management” was something akin to a demonic presence, but I would argue that this might be something far more mundane.
In any field where issues of great moral importance are routinely handled, there will exist the possibility of malfeasance as well as the necessity of handling matters “at a distance”. This is simply a structural issue, as any ongoing handling of complex matters will by necessity engender structures where distancing effects come into play. However, such distancing effects are at the same time the wellspring of much of what we’d call evil. It is at the moment we no longer are ethically connected to our world or our fellow wo/man evil enters into our life, and as management seems to require a certain kind of disconnection, it also seems to contain this “seed of evil”.
The subject of management and evil could thus be understood as the study of how normal and necessary processes in the planning, organizing, leading, co-ordinating and controlling intentional organized action contains the potential for ethical corruption. More specifically, we might say that the study of evil in management is the study of how normal processes are extremized into something beyond the social, i.e. the study of how the social and the anti-social might be analyzed not as antithetical but as intimately connected.
