the emotional aridity caused by continually honing one’s self to make hard choices with ambiguous outcomes. — 9: 100-101
Bureaucratic work shapes people’s consciousness in decisive ways. Among other things, it regularizes people’s experiences of time and indeed routinizes their lives by engaging them on a daily basis in rational, socially approved, purposive action; it brings them into daily proximity with and subordination to authority, creating in the process upward-looking stances that have decisive social and psychological consequences; it places a premium on a functionally rational, pragmatic habit of mind that seeks specific goals; and it creates subtle measures of prestige and an elaborate status hierarchy that, in addition to fostering an intense competition for status, also makes the rules, procedures, social contexts, and protocol of an organization paramount psychological and behavioral guides. In fact, bureaucratic contexts typically bring together men and women who initially have little in common with each other except the impersonal frameworks of their organizations. Indeed, the enduring genius of the organizational form is that it allows individuals to retain bewilderingly diverse private motives and meanings for action as long as they adhere publicly to agreed-upon rules. Even the personal relationships that men and women in bureaucracies do subsequently fashion together are, for the most part, governed by explicit or implicit organizational rules, procedures, and protocol. As a result, bureaucratic work causes people to bracket, while at work, the moralities that they might hold outside the workplace or that they might adhere to privately and to follow instead the prevailing morality of their particular organizational situation. As a former vice-president of a large firm says: “What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That’s what morality is in the corporation.”* Of course, since public legitimacy and respectability depend, in part, on perceptions of one’s moral probity, one cannot admit to such a bracketing of one’s conventional moralities except, usually indirectly, within one’s managerial circles where such verities are widely recognized to be inapplicable except as public relations stances. In fact, though managers usually think of it as separate from decision making, public relations is an extremely important facet of managerial work, one that often requires the employment of practitioners with special expertise. Managers do not generally discuss ethics, morality, or moral rules-in-use in a direct way with each other, except perhaps in seminars organized by ethicists. Such seminars, however, are unusual and, when they do occur, are often strained, artificial, and often confusing even to managers since they frequently become occasions for the solemn public invocation, particularly by high-ranking managers, of conventional moralities and traditional shibboleths. What matters on a day-to-day basis are the moral rules-in-use fashioned within the personal and structural constraints of one’s organization. As it happens, these rules may vary sharply depending on various factors, such as proximity to the market, line or staff responsibilities, or one’s position in a hierarchy. Actual organizational moralities are thus contextual, situational, highly specific, and, most often, unarticulated. — 12: 137-161
bureaucracy is never simply a technical system of organization. It is also always a system of power, privilege, and domination. The bureaucratization of the occupational structure therefore profoundly affects the whole class and status structure, the whole tone and tempo of our society. — 19: 240-242
Whether they stay at the middle or reach the top, managers typically are not only in the big organization but, because their administrative expertise and knowledge of bureaucratic intricacies constitute their livelihood, they are also of the organization. Unlike public servants, they need not avow allegiance to civil service codes or to any ethic of public service. Their sole allegiances are to the very principle of organization, to the market which itself is bureaucratically organized, to the groups and individuals in their world who can demand and command their loyalties, and to themselves and their own careers. Managers are thus the paradigm of the white-collar salaried employee.12 Their conservative public style and conventional demeanor hide their transforming role in our society. In my view, they are the principal carriers of the bureaucratic ethic in our era. — 22: 286-292
The moral dilemmas posed by bureaucratic work are, in fact, pervasive, taken for granted, and, at the same time, regularly denied. Managers do, however, continually assess their decisions, their organizational milieux, and especially each other to ascertain which moral rules-in-use apply in given situations. Such assessments are always complex and most often intuitive. Essentially, managers try to gauge whether they feel “comfortable” with proposed resolutions to specific problems, a task that always involves an assessment of others’ organizational morality and a reckoning of the practical organizational and market exigencies at hand. The notion of comfort has many meanings. When applied to other persons, the idea of comfort is an intuitive measure of trustworthiness, reliability, and predictability in a polycentric world that managers often find troubling, ambiguous, and anxiety-laden. Such assessment of others’ organizational morality is a crucial aspect of a more general set of probations that are intrinsic to managerial work. Getting into the corporations presented me with much of what I eventually learned, although I realized this only in retrospect.* When I approached my field study of managers, I had, for example, no firm grasp of the subtle, ambiguous process by which managers assess their colleagues’ moral fitness, so to speak, for managerial life. Moreover, I did not know, or at least did not consciously understand, that managers would subject me, an outsider desiring to study their occupational morality, to the same searching assessment that they continuously make of each other. — 23: 299-311
Most of these refusals were based, of course, on wholly practical rationales, although, as I later recognized, these often contained clues to themes that proved important in my subsequent work. The most common rationales, often given in concert, were: that there were no tangible organizational benefits to be gained from a study of managerial ethics because the project lacked a specific practical focus, or that the timing for the study was inappropriate because of “transitions” in a particular organization. Taken together and translated in light of later understanding, these mean that managers can afford to give approbation only to studies that officially are on a short leash and that can be publicly defended with the vocabularies of justification normally at hand in the corporation. I came to understand that such wariness is warranted because corporate hierarchies are almost always in political turmoil. The endless search for an organizational handle on the market—that is, rational structures to deal with the irrational—coupled with managers’ ambitions and what I shall call their mobility panic, fuel a never-ending succession of personnel changes, marked by intense personal rivalries, in virtually all big corporations. Nosy outsiders can only complicate already troublesome, or potentially troublesome, situations. Some managers seemed sympathetic to the study, although they encouraged me to recast it as a technical issue, such as the “problem of executive succession in multinationals.” They objected in particular to those aspects of my brief written proposal that discussed the ethical dilemmas of managerial work. They urged me to avoid any mention of ethics or values altogether and concentrate instead on the “decision-making process” where I could talk about “trade-offs” and focus on the “hard decisions between competing interests” that mark managerial work. Taking these cues, I rewrote and rewrote the proposal couching my problem in the bland, euphemistic language that I was rapidly learning is the lingua franca of the corporate world. But such recasting eroded whatever was distinctive about the project and some managers dismissed the study as a reinvention of the wheel. Moreover, following managers’ advice led me into ambiguous moral terrain with some of my academic colleagues. For instance, at one point, I approached a prominent academic ethicist, who had expressed a willingness to help me, with the sanitized proposal. He was “uncomfortable” with the revised version, arguing that I was not following the norms of “full disclosure.” He preferred instead the earlier proposal with the more explicit references to managerial ethics and, with the agreement that I would use this version, put me in touch with a high-ranking executive in a major corporation. Unfortunately, this executive felt “uncomfortable” with the idea of suggesting to his colleagues that an outsider, untested in the corporate world, examine their ethics. In effect, I could not get access to study managers’ moral rules-in-use because I seemed unable to articulate the appropriate stance that would convince key managers that I already understood those rules and was thus a person with whom they could “feel comfortable” enough to trust. In the end, I gained access to several corporations through fortuitous circumstances and for reasons independent of any intrinsic merit that my proposed study of managerial ethics might have had. The — 24: 313-337
This was based on what both men took to be a demonstrated willingness and ability to be “flexible” and especially on their perception that I already grasped the most salient aspect of managerial morality as managers themselves see it—that is, how their values and ethics appear in the public eye. — 27: 352-354
In any event, just as managers must continually please their boss, their boss’s boss, their patrons, their president, and their CEO, so must they prove themselves again and again to each other. Work becomes an endless round of what might be called probationary crucibles. Together with the uncertainty and sense of contingency that mark managerial work, this constant state of probation produces a profound anxiety in managers, perhaps the key experience of managerial work. It also breeds, selects, or elicits certain traits in ambitious managers that are crucial to getting ahead. — 64: 910-914
But managers both at the bank and in all the corporations I studied more recently see the matter of public faces differently. For them, the issue is not a reluctant donning of organizationally prescribed masks but rather a mastery of the social rules that prescribe which mask to wear on which occasion. — 72: 1031-1033
Despite their high positions, both men were after all still subordinates and subject to the judgments of higher-ups. The price of bureaucratic power is a relentlessly methodical subjection of one’s impulses, at least in public. To yield to one’s desires in a public setting in a way that others can use against one, whether by giving in to the wish for open sexual conquest or proprietary claim or by submitting to the temptation to show one’s anger, is seen as irrational, unbefitting men or women whose principal claim to social legitimacy is dispassionate rational calculation. — 77: 1100-1104
4. Team play also means, as one manager in the chemical company puts it, “aligning oneself with the dominant ideology of the moment” or, as another says, “bowing to whichever god currently holds sway.” Such ideologies or gods may be thought of as official definitions of reality. As I suggested earlier, bureaucracies allow their employees a diverse range of private motives for action in return for assent to common rules and official versions of reality, that is, explanations or accounts that serve or at least do not injure the organization itself. Organizations always try, of course, to mobilize employees’ belief in manufactured realities; such efforts always meet with some success particularly at the middle levels among individuals who still labor under the notion that success depends on sincerity. However, the belief of insiders in abstract goals is not a prerequisite for personal success; belief in and subordination to individuals who articulate organizational goals is. One must, however, to be successful in a bureaucratic work situation, be able to act, at a moment’s notice, as if official reality is the only reality. The contexts for understanding this meaning of team play are the complicated levels of conflict within corporations and the probationary state of mind endemic to managerial work. — 83: 1188-1197
A middle-level manager in Alchemy Inc. puts a sharp edge on the same sentiment: Someone who is talking about team play is out to squash dissent. It’s the most effective way to tell people who have different perspectives to shut up. You say that you want a team effort…. You can and you have to learn to keep your mouth shut. My boss is like that. Everyone likes him because he is like that. It’s hurt me because I have spoken out. It might be that someone has formed the opinion that I have interesting things to say, but more likely, it gives you a troublemaker label and that’s one that is truly hard to get rid of. The troublemaker is often a creative person but truly creative people don’t get ahead; to get ahead you have to be dependable and a team player. You have to be steady…. When I hear the word, I immediately think it’s an effort to crush dissent…. [Bosses] say they don’t want a yes man, but, in fact, most bosses don’t want to hear the truth. And this is particularly true if it disagrees with what they want to do. Younger managers learn quickly that, whatever the public protestations to the contrary, bosses generally want pliable and agreeable subordinates, especially during periods of crisis. Clique leaders want dependable, loyal allies. Those who regularly raise objections to what a boss or a clique leader really desires run the risk of being considered problems themselves and of being labeled “outspoken,” or “nonconstructive,” or “doomsayers,” “naysayers,” or “crepehangers.” — 85: 1232-1244
when interpretive judgments or plain desires are involved, or when an issue spills out of smaller groups into the larger political structures of an organization, or when higher authorities get involved, a new dynamic takes over. What are “frank perspectives” in a strictly collegial context can get interpreted in the political or hierarchical arenas as “down-beat negativism” or even “disloyalty.” Wise and ambitious managers know that public faces of cheerful cooperativeness, which of course they generally require from their own subordinates, put superiors and important allies at ease. And, of course, the ability to put others at ease is an important skill in a world where one must be continually on guard against the eruption of usually suppressed conflict. — 86: 1247-1252
In short, he makes other managers feel comfortable, the crucial virtue in an uncertain world, and establishes with others the easy predictable familiarity that comes from sharing taken for granted frameworks about how the world works. — 88: 1270-1271