Critical Management Ethics

Critical Management Ethics

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Also by Thomas Klikauer

COMMUNICATION AND MANAGEMENT AT WORK

MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION: Communicative Action and Ethics

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Critical Management

Ethics

Thomas Klikauer

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© Thomas Klikauer 2010

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted

save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence

permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,

Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this

work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2010 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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This book is dedicated to

Josef Klikauer

1st October 1895 to 20th October 1944; born in

Konstantynów, Poland; executed at the Nazi Concentration

Camp Gross Rosen, Rogoz´nicy (http://www.gross-rosen.pl).

All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to the

Gross Rosen Museum at Rogoz´nicy.

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Contents

Acknowledgements ix

List of Tables x

1 Introducing Critical Management Ethics 1

2 Critical Virtue Ethics: From Aristotle to Adorno 25

Modern virtue ethics 36

3 A Utilitarian Critique on Management Ethics 47

The utilitarian Happiness Principle 50

The ethics of pleasure, swine and marmalade 53

The ethics of friendship and aesthetic enjoyment 65

4 A Kantian Critique on Management Ethics 68

A textbook-case, categorical imperatives, and 74

means-ends

5 Hegel’s Sittlichkeit and Management Ethics 88

Freedom, the common will and Sittlichkeit 96

6 Hegel’s Slave-Morality and Management Ethics 105

To have a purpose and to serve a purpose 120

Management ethics as camera obscura 123

7 Kohlberg’s Moral Manager I: From Impulsiveness to 126

Punishment

8 Kohlberg’s Moral Manager II: From Rewards to 148

Universalism

9 Positive Management Ethics 170

The managerial ethics of intuitionism and subjectivism 171

The managerial ethics of moral egoism 172

The managerial ethics of relativism and moral solitude 174

The managerial ethics of nihilism 176

The managerial ethics of Thomas Hobbes 180

The managerial ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche 186

vii

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viii Contents

10 Conclusion: The Practical Ethics of Sittlichkeit and 193

Communicative Ethics

Ten rules for ethics councils 199

Notes 216

Bibliography 254

Index 270

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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the assistance, critique, and help on the

initial idea for this book: Peter Singer, Gary Weaver, and Robert Phillips.

I would also like to acknowledge the proofreading and editorial assist￾ance support of, firstly, my adored wife, Katja and my friend Khalida

Malik without whom this book would not have been possible. This book

has received no administrative, technical, and editorial support or fund￾ing from UWS. I am grateful for IT support by my friend Mark Evans

who assembled a computer for me out of old parts and eventually updated

it to a workable level and to Louise Ingersoll and others at UWS’ IR

teaching-group who provided a fountain of administrative knowledge to

me shielding me from the worst excesses of Managerialism.

ix

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List of Tables

1.1 A Few Examples of Unethical Corporate Behaviour 9

1.2 From Traditional Ethics to Communicative Ethics 12

2.1 Management and Employees in the Light of Aristotle’s 32

Virtue Ethics

7.1 Kohlberg’s Seven Stages of Morality: General Moral 127

Orientations

7.2 Kohlberg’s Seven Stages of Morality: Management’s 129

Moral Orientations

7.3 Kohlberg’s Morality and Its Philosophical and Ethical 130

Background

x

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1

1

Introducing Critical Management

Ethics

Many books in the area of management ethics are written under the

premise that ethics relates positively, if not affirmatively, to manage￾ment, business, and corporations. Inside this most common approach

to management ethics, ethics is subsumed under the domineering

ideas of management. Rather than outlining the relationship between

management and ethics, ethics is constructed as the management

of ethics. Rather than viewing management ethics as part of philo￾sophy or applied philosophy, management ethics is seen as part of

management. Hence, management ethics is not a branch of management

philosophy but a branch of management studies. The emphasis in man￾agement ethics is on management, not on ethics. Therefore, management

ethics is not viewed as a philosophical study of morals but a study of

management morality – minus philosophy which takes the backseat.

Management ethics has been turned into a departmental issue like opera￾tions, marketing, sales, Human Resource Management (HRM), etc. that

needs to be managed.1 This tends to set tight parameters for the role

ethics can play inside the framework of management and its ideological

outgrowth of Managerialism.

2

Anchored so deeply inside corporations and society, Managerialism

has become the all encompassing ideology of everyday life as we all

learn to think like managers and accept that society always has managers

(according to the Harvard Business Review Editor Magretta, 2002). With

the mass-acceptance of this, Managerialism can even be portrayed as

the end of ideology because it has been successfully merged with every￾day life.3 Not uncommon for any ideology, however, remains the

fact that the exact opposite is usually the case. The reality of every￾day life and management can never be converted into pure ideology.

Still, selected parts of almost any ethics from Aristotle’s virtue ethics

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(384–322 BC) to Kant’s means-ends imperatives (1724–1804) are used to

support management. This process converts ethics into pure ideology.

Ethics has been adjusted to the managerial orbit without impacting on

managerial practice. Consequently, it has been degraded from being a

philosophy to being merely knowledge in the service of power.

Under such an imperative, the role of ethics is often reduced to a

supportive function of management. It services as an auxiliary to value

creation which is the managerial codeword for shareholder values and

profit maximisation. In sharp contrast to management’s use of the

term value, philosophy applies the same term to something totally dif￾ferent.4 For ethics, values are linked to the philosophy of values. For

management only the hard values such as shareholder values count.

Only when something – marketing, sales, operations, HRM, and even

ethics – adds to shareholder value, it is of value to management.

Therefore, in the mind of a manager, ethics and morality are often

seen as ‘Oh, well, it’s all just a matter of opinion, anyway’. For many man￾agers morality is an issue of a specific situation that relates to ethics

rather than an overall, basic, and essential part of what they do. In

other cases, ethics is reduced to the ten ethical misconceptions one of

which is: some see it that way, others see it differently.

5 In sum, when the

operation of management and The Real Bottom Line is not concerned,

many managers suffer – sometimes rather conveniently – from moral

attention deficit disorder (MADD), moral silence, moral deafness, moral

blindness, and moral amnesia (Jacoby 1977; Bird 1996).

If ethics is being considered by managers at all, it has to add value to

their organisational goals, another codeword of management’s bottom

line of profits. Management always has to come first and ethics, if it is

of value to management, comes later. Ethics is simply a somewhat

distant add-on to management like milk in a coffee, if needed at all.6

Such use of ethics also appears to be the guiding imperative for almost

all textbooks in the area of management. In sum, the philosophy of

ethics is reduced to operate under the simple and thought limiting

equation of: management + ethics = management ethics (M+E=ME). This

however is nothing but The Banality of Evil (Arendt 1994).7

In contrast to this formula, one can never simply subsume ethics

under management. For one, Kant’s categorical imperative demands

that this has to be done the other way around. For perhaps the greatest

ethical philosopher ever – Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the sage of

Königsberg – ethics sets determinants, imperatives, and musts. Everything

has to measure up to ethics. Ethics cannot be used to supply legitimacy

to anything, at the least to management. Kantian ethics is the total

2 Critical Management Ethics

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negation of the standard M+E=ME approach metered out in almost all

textbooks on management ethics. Most commonly, and most wrongly,

textbook writers who follow the M+E=ME formula are part of an

entourage of affirmative writers on management ethics. They have

turned the philosophy of ethics into a pure ideology misusing ethical

knowledge to serve managerial power (Baritz 1960; Jacoby 1977). Such

uncritical, affirmative, and highly accommodating textbook writers

are left with Hirschman’s (1970) famous three options of loyalty, exit,

and voice. They can be: a) uncritically positive (loyalty); b) critically

negative (exit); or c) problematic (voice).

a. The uncritically positive

For affirmative management writers, ethics that is deemed to be pos￾itive (M+E=ME) is extended, used, applied, and highlighted through

invented cases about so-called managerial reality. Often this is done by

compiling real ethics from semi-proper philosophy books and applying

those selected versions of ethics to a made-up version of textbook-style

management. It is positive because it uses ethics as a plus (+) to

management, thus avoiding critical discussion by negating the neg￾ative. Anything that conflicts management’s idea is left out. This is

the approach of indifference. Philosopher Hegel (1770–1832) noted

that truth lies in the point of difference (+/–). One has to see both

sides instead of adding one to the other as done in the M+E=ME

approach.

Hegel thought that everything has positives and negatives. Once

these two different phenomena – one being positive and one being

negative – are brought into a relationship with each other, truth will

emerge. The core problem of positive management ethics is, however,

that it is not directed towards truth but towards the support and legit￾imacy of management in a very positive way. As a result, most manage￾ment ethics is not even Hegelian in character. Every version of ethics

that is deemed beneficial, positive, non-contradictory, and indifferent

to management is phrased as non-controversial and good. Hegelian

negatives and contradictions are framed as bad. They are to be denied

and their representatives to be isolated and marginalised.

Not surprisingly, the entourage of positive, supportive, and accom￾modating management ethics writers fulfils what 20th century German

philosopher Marcuse (1966) described as: the intellectual and emo￾tional refusal ‘to go along’ appears neurotic and impotent. In order not

to be labelled neurotic and impotent non-critical and affirmative

Introducing Critical Management Ethics 3

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management ethics writers cannot write philosophical ethics but reduce

their writing to so-called management ethics in the M+E=ME style. The

Servants of Power (Baritz 1960) do this in order to fit ethics into the pre￾vailing managerial paradigm under the formula: management ethics =

ethics that does not contradict management. But in some cases proper philo￾sophical ethics cannot be (mis)-used to support management. In those

cases, ethics is deemed to be unsupportive, contradictory, controversial,

and a negation of management.

b. The critical negative

Negatives or the negation of management through ethics occurs where

ethics and management are in conflict. This happens when there are ten￾sions and contradictions between ethics and management.8 For affirm￾ative writers on management ethics, however, this is most unproblematic.

In their version of management ethics, ethics presents an easy option

that can be diminished and rendered unmentioned. Proper philosophical

ethics is often isolated, excluded, marginalised, segregated, and detached

from management.9 This fulfils Hirschman’s (1970) exit option because

contradictory ethics which, in the eyes of affirmative management

writers, fails to support management is quietly exited through the back￾door of textbooks on management ethics. All that remains in such text￾books is a small number of cases of bad apples showcasing a few wrongs of

management to implicitly support and legitimise the majority of so-called

morally good management.10

Today’s management students are largely kept in blissful ignorance to

the enlightening potentials of critical philosophy that some have argued

started with the founder of modern ethics, Immanuel Kant. To circum￾vent Kantian critique, selected extracts of philo-sophical ethics are men￾tioned as stand alone statements without any further discussion so that

management students are disallowed to make a link between philosoph￾ical ethics and management. Simultaneously, however, the servants of

power can claim to have mentioned it. There is next to no critical appli￾cation of ethics to management.11 However, there is a middle-ground

between total positivism and the negation of critical philosophical ethics.

In the middle between total negatives (–) on the one hand and the sheer

positivism (+) on the other resides the grey area of problematic ethics.

c. The problematic

The area of problematic ethics sets the real task for affirmative

man-agement writers because here they have to twist, turn, deceive,

4 Critical Management Ethics

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