Capable Management

Interview with Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum is one of the most prolific and distinguished philosophers in the English-speaking world. Since 1995 she has been Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago appointed in the Law School, Philosophy Department and Divinity School. She is an Associate in the Classics Department and the Political Science Department, an Affiliate of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, a Board Member of the Human Rights Program and founder and Coordinator of a new Center for Comparative Constitutionalism.

In a wide-ranging interview Martha Nussbaum sets out some of the core ideas from her philosophy and their implications for managers.

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It is already proving to be a powerful teaching resource introducing management students to ethical issues.

Editorial: Capable Management

Einstein was said to have urged that ‘things should be made as simple as possible’ but to have added in the same breath ‘and no simpler’. Most capable managers will seek the basics in any issue, ‘cut to the chase’ and spell out just what is at stake when they decide. Hence the demand ‘KISS’, sometimes even when the heart of a matter is not simple but complex. One of the ‘simple truths’ that may seduce managers is that their job is done when - within the law - they satisfy the proper contracted or expressed interests of stakeholders such as staff, shareholders, customers and the like. This leaves open the question whether managers can rightly ignore what justice requires if for any reason stakeholders or law fail to demand it. If employees lack an informed sense of how they could grow as persons, are managers who know more licensed to exploit this stunted awareness and asymmetry of knowledge and satisfy merely the needs expressed? Such an approach surely aligns with the pursuit in consumer societies of ‘feelgood’, our threadbare version of the good life. Instead of a way of life which promotes human flourishing in all its richness we are offered access to a mood John Dunn once called ‘facile eudaemonism’. Strikingly, managers talk of a psychological contract and Enron’s whistleblower referred to one of Ken Lay’s staff surveys as ‘a marketing survey of his employees’.

Most of us know that many efforts to bring about ethical conduct at work have yet to succeed. Sometimes more time is called for. In other cases it may be that the approach is mistaken. Enron had its Vision, four values of Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence and a code of ethics.  In Not Nice, Not in Control Andrew Bartlett and David Seth Preston suggest the problem arises from self-deception about the effectiveness, neutrality and true role of management. Arguing that conventional approaches to business ethics fail to address these issues, they describe how self-deceiving employees and managers come to identify the ‘ethical’ with the ‘effective’ and thus ‘merely support the status quo’.

In our Reviews section, John Edwards discusses the final statement of Justice as Fairness by the late John Rawls, a thinker who figures in Erik Eriksen’s paper. Ron Beadle welcomes Martin Parker’s Against Management as ‘the most enjoyable management text I have read’ and Bob Brecher recommends Ethics, Management and Mythology as ‘a rarity, a philosophical argument explicitly and genuinely aimed at improving health service practitioners’ and others’ thinking, and thus a moral as well as an intellectual undertaking’. Those of you who heard the book’s author, Michael Loughlin, at our LSE conference in June 2001 will already know how much his insights have to offer managers and others in all sectors.

Nelarine Cornelius and Nigel Laurie

Capable Management: An Interview with Martha Nussbaum

It seems to us that many of the themes and questions addressed in your work are relevant to management in theory and practice. What are your major concerns ?

He was recently invited to Japan to lecture on philosophy of management and facilitate a Socratic Dialogue in the Graduate Faculty of Letters at Osaka University.

Robin Attfield

Global Warming, Justice and Future Generations

The phenomenon of global warming, the anthropogenic theory of its genesis and some of the implications of that theory are introduced as a case-study of a global environmental problem involving issues of equity between peoples, generations and species. In particular, recognition of the view that the absorptive capacities of the atmosphere comprise an instance of the Common Heritage of Humankind would have a key bearing on negotiations downstream from the Kyoto Protocol, suggesting the proportioning of emission quotas to population, and also limits to the inter-state trading of quotas. This view and these possible implications are discussed; international regimes with such a basis are argued to have a firmer foundation than ones based on historical emission levels (such as the Kyoto agreement), and to escape the charge of anthropocentrism to which stress on the Common Heritage of Humankind appears to expose them. The anthropogenic theory might be held, instead, to favour tying emissions quotas to aggregate historical emissions of the last two centuries. But intergenerational equity requires a sustainable international regime, based on universal principles rather than history.

Robin Attfield

Robin Attfield is Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University, where he has taught since 1968 and has served as Chair of the Philosophy Board of Studies, Assistant Dean of the Cardiff School of Theology and Chair of the Academic Assembly. He is an elected member of the National Committee for Philosophy and of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He has published many articles and his books include God and the Secular: a Philosophical Assessment of Secular Reasoning from Bacon to Kant (1978 and 1993), The Ethics of Environmental Concern (1983 and 1991), A Theory of Value and Obligation (1987), Environmental Philosophy: Principles and Prospects (1994), Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics (1995), The Ethics of the Global Environment (1999), and Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century (2003).

Brian Donohue

Ethical Inquiry and Organisational Pathology: Three Paradigms of Decision Making

Management studies typically focus on successful organisations. It is presumed that the lessons drawn from such studies can be applied to failing organisations. However, it is also possible to enhance our understanding of healthy organisations by examining pathological cases. I argue that a generic account of organisational pathology can be given on the basis of a tripartite model of decision making. Healthy, vibrant organisations operate with a preponderance of what I call the paradigm of integrity. Organisations in decline experience a paradigm shift to what I label the paradigm of exoneration. Finally, the paradigm of manipulation lurks in the background as a threat to the very existence of organisations. Tripartite paradigm modelling also provides a methodology to observe organisational decline in real time. Accordingly, it has both explanatory and remedial value in the examination of organisational behaviour.

Brian Donohue

Dr Brian Donohue BA, MA, PhD is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sudbury College, Laurentian University. He has previously published in moral philosophy, professional ethics and jurisprudence. Prior to his present position, he worked as the ‘Legal Loss and Claims Specialist’ in the head office of a large Property/Casualty insurance company, and he personally witnessed the paradigm shift that he writes about in this article.

Andrew Bartlett and David Seth Preston
Not Nice, Not in Control: Management, Ethics and Self-Deception in the Modern Corporation

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of self-deception in the modern corporation and its implications for current attempts to implement ethics programs in that environment. It will be proposed that self-deception arises from a systematic misinterpretation of the nature of management. Mainstream management theorists tend to suggest that their work provides a body of scientific knowledge and techniques for practical use and this is generally paralleled by the way management is conceived in the corporate world. This conception is usually adopted, either explicitly or implicitly, in the field of business ethics, as evidenced by the proliferation of managerialist prescriptions for enacting ethical programmes in organisations.

An alternative view of management would emphasise the role of the manager in maintaining social control. In this view, organisations are inherently unstable and riven with conflict and the role of the manager is to minimise the disruption this would cause through the application of manipulative modes of social interaction. It will be argued that since allegiance to the mainstream view is required for acceptance and success within the corporation, it is beneficial to the corporate employee to practise self-deception with regard to the nature of the role of the manager, ignoring any differences between the generally accepted view of management and its nature in practice.

Recognition of the importance of this self-deception is crucial to an understanding of management ethics. It is suggested that, in overlooking this phenomenon, the conventional approaches to business ethics fail to address the issues that arise from the true nature of management in the modern corporation. As a result such approaches may have only limited effectiveness or, worse, merely support existing behaviours. Managers and employees in the sway of self-deception may be unable to evaluate the ethical dimensions of their work. They may be inadvertently misled or deliberately manipulated into ignoring the unethical dimensions of situations or actions and situations. (Note that we are not implying any specific definition of ‘unethical’ in this context. We are here referring to situations or actions that individuals would themselves identify as unethical in a non-corporate context.) More specifically, managerialism may explicitly co-opt the implementation of ethical programs to align understandings of the ‘ethical’ with the ‘effective’ so as to merely support the status quo.

Andrew Bartlett

Andrew Bartlett graduated in physics from Oxford University and has had a widely varied career in Information Technology, working for companies such as Mars and Reuters. He is now Director of Knowledge Workers, a Project Management and IT consultancy company. His experiences in the workplace lead to an interest in the psychological and social effects of life in the contemporary business corporation. He is currently engaged in a post-graduate research program in Management Ethics at the East London Business School.

David Seth Preston

David Seth Preston has degrees from the universities of London, Loughborough and Sheffield. His background is in applied Information Systems, in particular within engineering firms. In a career spanning almost thirty years he has worked for organisations such as Shell Oil, Chase Manhattan Bank and Aon Insurance. He is author of over a hundred refereed papers and three books, the most recent of which Technology, Managerialism and the University (Glenrothes Publications, Glenrothes) received wide acclaim and won the Richardson Prize for its originality. His interests are in the ethical issues raised by technology. Dr. Preston is Director of the consultancy firm, BRG, specialis ing in this field.

Erik Odvar Eriksen
Decision Making by Communicative Design: Rational Argument in Organisations
 

How can free and equal people cooperate to solve conflicts and common problems in a rational and legitimate way? In this article I deduce principles for doing so from the requirements of rational communication set out in the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas. I apply them in defining a process of efficient decision making. What I call ‘communicative design’ denotes the design of a reason giving process in which the practice of proposing and assessing claims with regard to rulemaking and problem solving is undertaken on an equal and autonomous basis. Two sets of prescriptions are given: organisational principles for the composition of groups and argumentative principles for deliberation. However, any procedure aimed at achieving a rational consensus in decision making in organisations has to deal in practice with limitations of time, participation and the information available. Communicative design may not guarantee strictly rational decisions, then, but the procedure it constructs does promise relatively ‘more valid’ decisions than might be expected if another procedure had been adopted.

Erik Oddvar Eriksen

Erik Oddvar Eriksen is Professor of Political Science at ARENA - Advanced Research on the Europeanisation of the Nation State - at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is also Professor II at the Centre of Professional Studies at The University College of Oslo and has been a professor at the Universities of Tromsø and Bergen. At Bergen he was director of research at The Centre of Organisation and Management (LOS-Centre) between 1994-98. His main research fields are political theory, democratic governance, public policy and European integration. His interest in legitimate governance has led to publications on democracy in the EU, governance and leadership, functions and limits of the state, deliberative democracy, communicative leadership, regional politics, and the welfare state. He has published 10 books and more than 60 articles.