Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers Updated Edition, Kindle Edition

by Robert Jackall (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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ISBN-13: 978-0199729883

ISBN-10: 0199729883

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Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes offers an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness.
Based on extensive interviews with managers at every level of two industrial firms and of a large public relations agency, Moral Mazes takes the reader inside the intricate world of the corporation. Jackall reveals a world where hard work does not necessarily lead to success, but where sharp talk, self-promotion, powerful patrons, and sheer luck might. Cheerfully-bland public faces mask intense competition in this world where people hide their intentions, and accountability often depends on the ability to outrun mistakes.
In this topsy-turvy world, managers must bring often unforgiving technology and always difficult people together to make money, an uncompromising task demanding continual compromises with conventional truths. Moral questions become merely practical concerns and issues of public relations. Sooner or later, managers find themselves wondering how to act in such a world and still maintain a sense of personal integrity.
This brilliant, sometimes disturbing, often wildly funny study of corporate thinking, decision-making, and morality presents compelling real life stories of the men and women charged with running the businesses of America. It will interest anyone concerned with how big organizations actually function, or with the current moral malaise in our public life.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Some books have the rare fortune to become ever more relevant, more useful, and more interesting twenty years after they were written. This books fortune involves a kind of misfortune, because the phenomena that Moral Mazes analyzes are deplorable, and we would wish that the book were no longer relevant. Originally published in 1989, Moral Mazes has been supplemented for this second edition with a long analysis of how the 'organized irresponsibility' Jackall analyzed in the 1980s has become the key to understanding our current Great Recession. ... I can think of no single book that has more opened up my sense of how to do philosophy in the last year."--Philosophical Practice

"An interesting, unorthodox, and provocative book.... Better than any other I have seen, [Jackall's] study reveals the normative reality of the manager's world."-Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., Yale Journal on Regulation

"Reformers who want to change the corporation, first must understand it. Robert Jackall's carefully researched analysis of the 'bureaucratic ethos' is one place to
begin."--Ethikos

"A finely honed tour of an odyssey of moral transformation, in which the actors themselves remain largely unaware of the nature of their journey. It is a brilliant work."--Troy Duster, New York University

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

About the Author:
Robert Jackall is Professor of Sociology and Chairman of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College. He is the author of Workers in a Labyrinth: Jobs and Survival in a Bank Bureaucracy, and of many essays and reviews in publications such as Harvard Business Review, Commonweal, Science, and Contemporary Sociology. In addition, he co-edited Worker Cooperatives in America with Harry M. Levin.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN : B00FF7IG0Y
Publisher : Oxford University Press; Updated edition (December 8, 2009)
Publication date : December 8, 2009
Language : English
File size : 1390 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 300 pages
Lending : Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #441,448 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #294 in Business Ethics (Kindle Store)
- #468 in Workplace Behavior
- #752 in Ethics & Morality

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Guide through organizational ethics and politics

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2019

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Moral Mazes is a depressing book. It shares the hard reality of many organizations but manages to do in such a way that doesn't really give hope that it can be better, that it doesn't have to be like that. It is very good though at analyzing why people in organizations behave the way they behave and therefore I found it an exceptionally valuable book.

The main theme of the book is that the ethics and morals inside an organization often are not the same as society as a whole. The way organizations are set-up, they create their own norms and people within organizations often are in conflict with the norms expected of them in society and that within in organization. The longer a person spends in the organization the more likely it is they'll start following the organizational norms and ethics. In a way, organizations are set up to award the ones who do and punish the ones who don't.

The book explores relationships in organizations, the organizational ethics and the behavior that happens within these relationships. Different chapters have a slightly different focus. Relationships between subordinates and their superior. Peer relationships. And then relationships with society then the ethics of an organization is contradicting that of society (and people in the organization do something about that). Additionally the role of consultants and agencies within corporates.

The book consists of eight chapters. The first and the last are provide a bit of sociology-historical context of ethics and norms. The other chapters mostly focus on different perspectives of relationships, morality and politics. The chapters are not well structures, they are just loads of text. The text is mostly stories and interpretations of these stories. It contains some sections, but these are simple numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. If I could propose one improvement in the future, it would be a better structure that makes it easier to browse and find things in the book.

But even without the structure in the chapters, I would still rate this book as 5 stars. I cannot remember the last time I enjoyed a book as much as I enjoyed this book. The stories were so vivid that I think I'll remember them forever. The conclusions scary yet insightful. I found it very useful and it changes the way I look at behavior in organizations. Very much recommended for people who try to make sense of organizations. If you are not one of these, then this book is probably not for you though. Still, for me, five stars.

6 people found this helpful

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The leitmotif is that of organized irresponsibility...

Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2013

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Robert Jackall is a sociologist by profession, currently teaching at Williams College. His book was originally published in the late ‘80’s, based on his research of corporate life which was conducted earlier in the decade. It has recently been reissued, most fittingly so, as a “twentieth anniversary edition,” with an additional 20 page chapter entitled “Moral Mazes and the Great Recession.” In this chapter Jackall demonstrates how many of the characteristics of corporate life, in particular, the expedient and contextual value systems, that he identified in the early ‘80’s were operative in both causing the “financial meltdown” of 2008, as well as in the reaction to it. He credits a noble predecessor, C. Wright Mills, for originating the phrase “organized irresponsibility” in describing corporate life, which certainly was most operative in the explanations for the financial disaster: no one was responsible, it was a “Tsunami,” and we had no idea it was coming.

In the introduction to his original book, Jackall states that his objective is to answer the following question: “What rules do people fashion to interact with one another when they feel that, instead of ability, talent, and dedicated service to an organization, politics, adroit talk, luck, connections, and self-promotion are the real sorters of people into sheep and goats?” For a work by a sociologist, his is a bit of an outlier: no tables or graphs to bolster a “scientific, quantitative approach.” And I think it is all the better for it. He lays out his methodology at the beginning, and admits that the vast majority of corporations that he approached refused to let him conduct his research. In the end, it was the “old boy network” which he describes so accurately which is operative within the corporation that worked in permitting him to enter the corporate world: known friends from school. He is granted access to the managers at two firms, both of which he describes using pseudonyms, one being a large chemical conglomerate, the other being a textile manufacturing company.

Jackall commences with a an overall depiction of the rise of the bureaucracy, stating that what has evolved in most cases is a hybrid model between Max Weber’s paradigm of a functional organization with interchangeable people and a “patrimonial” bureaucracy operative from despotism to the “ward heeler,” where personal loyalty is paramount. The author must have presented an empathic ear that allowed managers to let down their normal reserve, and describe in pithy phrases how the individuals in an organization actually see their roles. After a certain level, “technical expertise” counts for little; the main goal is to achieve a favorable rating from one’s peers and superiors. I found myself underlining a passage of virtually every page. Jackall not only captures the essence of the situation with a manager’s own lingo, he is excellent at formulating his own. Consider: “Managers also stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to have the ability to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling and agreeable public faces....some managers don masks of Easter-Island-statuelike immobility; others a deadpan fish-eye; and the most adroit, a disarming ingenuousness.” Jackall understands so well the gamesmanship operative in the corporate world. He never mentions that the same gamesmanship, or worse (!), is operative in the academic world.

Morality and the corporate world simply do not mix. The author describes the fate of several “whistleblowers” who try to do the “right thing”, from Brady who is a chartered accountant from England who realizes that financial irregularities are occurring, and thinks surely the CEO would want to be informed... Hum... of course to learn that they originate at the top; and “White,” an audiologist who realizes that the textile workers are losing their hearing, yet sees (and hears!) the rationalization of the “Big Boys” that deny this reality. The author also relates an incident concerning the clean-up of the nuclear disaster at Three-Mile Island, and another “whistle-blower,” who wasn’t “practical enough” being shown the door.

There is much, much else, from examining the world of Public Relations in the chapter “The Magic Lateran” to describing how “good managers” seem to have the knack for “milking” their plants by delaying maintenance and needed capital expenditures, and then using the “fast track” of promotion to outrun their mistakes, and ideally be in a position to fire their replacement as plant manager for those delayed maintenance problems. It doesn’t get much more cynical than that. And always, to ensure that there is no system for tracking responsibility for a decision.

Relevant as today’s headlines concerning the website failure of healthcare.gov, designed to implement the Affordable Care Act. Once again, there is the lack of clearly defined responsibility coupled with “who knew what and when.” Robert Jackall has produced an excellent analysis of the operative factors relevant to decision -making in the corporate world. If there was one thing missing, it was a follow-up on how many of those “corporate skills” and “masks” became obsolete as so many of these manufacturing plants were moved overseas, and I think in particular of US Steel’s Homestead Works, where I saw so much of what Jackall described in operation, and closed in 1986. Overall, 5-stars plus for Jackall’s work.

8 people found this helpful

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InritWritten

Academic and impenetrable

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2020

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For the right audience this book might be great: if you're in academia (or spent a lot of time there), or are especially immersed in this specific subject area. But as someone who was hoping to read case studies of management beauracracies as a way to identify patterns and pitfalls, this book used language and very dense writing that I found unapproachable.

One person found this helpful

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