Allys Dierker's Reviews > Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers

For a sociological study that's 30 years old, Jackall's investigation of middle-management moral framework is still fairly, and demoralizingly, spot on. He begins with Max Weber's concept of the Protestant Ethic and maintains that America's management structure is related, but a different kind of hybrid organization that contains markers of the patrimonial bureaucracy of kings and princes, but that is also overlaid with a "personalism" that demands fealty to the CEO and elected/appointed officials.

In American management, credit gets pushed up and details get pushed down: this is nothing new, and it's probably been nothing new for as long as there have been hierarchies. What Jackall elucidated for me was that the difference among middle managers is not in technical skills (everyone who gets to that level is approximately equally talented), but in the ability to control one's image and to make others comfortable--the attention to image and doublespeak and playing by whatever rules are in force at the time become far more profitable characteristics than actual production of technical ability. In middle management, Jackall maintains, acting ability is perhaps even more critical than the technical ability of whatever industry you find yourself in. So this makes me confront my optimistic naivete once again. You'd think I'd be prepared for this. You'd think I'd read these passages and not feel disappointment or frustration. And yet, Jackall drops a particularly deflating analysis into every chapter or after every vignette. It's a sociological account, and not intended to be a call for reform or a handbook to success, and he makes this point quite clear in the final paragraph of his introducton. It speaks more to my own optimism, I suppose, that he warned me right up front, and yet I can't help but read Jackall's interpretation of managerial life as there being no there there--an eternal struggle of on-the-job survival and hoping to eke out a vacation or two every year and a long weekend every now and again to find some meaning and "truth" in what you do for a living.

Again, this book is 30 years old. We've been through economic meltdowns, burst housing bubbles, scientific disappointments. But I suppose the larger message here is that people are people, and that as long as people, with their jockeying for position if not basic survival, are involved, you can expect the interpersonal and disingenuous politics that are inseparable from business and profit motives and, well, human interaction in whatever sort of exchange economy you pick.

I particularly appreciated Chapter 6, "Dexterity with Symbols," which articulates the growth of management consulting as an appendage to the growing professionalization of the management class. Jackall's takeaway here is the pervasive notion of "doublespeak," which is also wrapped up with who the actual audience for management consultants and (in a later chapter) public relations experts are. Spoiler alert: it's the managers and executives--they're the audience. Management consultants and consulting firms appeal, skillfully, to executive/managerial anxiety. For anyone who has experienced the outcomes of management consulting, Jackall's evaluation rings terribly true. The challenge is often not the putative reason that consultants are called in, but rather when the consultant(s) uncover the "real issue" with which organizations are struggling. In that case, the consultant faces the same challenge as managers in confronting the "truth" of the problem: what does the consultant stand to gain or lose in terms of her own credibility and legitimacy? "[M]anagers need and desire the mask of objectivity to cover the capriciousness and arbitrariness of corporate life; consultants want to maintain their occupational self-image as experts. Each group fills the other's needs and self-images in an occupational drama where the needs of organizations get subordinated to the maintenance of professional identities" (153). More than introducing better efficiency or communication or profit, consultants serve to legitimate unpleasant decisions that have already been made, to throw rival executives off the scent of real strategy, to undercut rival consultants, and to advance the image of the company's or the executive's relevance: don't want to appear stodgy or behind the times among your other executive colleagues at industry conferences? Bring in a consulting firm to throw around trendy management terms, put out a glossy report, and then gradually mothball the resultant plan of action.

Chapter 7, "The Magic Lantern," similarly sends up public relations, equating it with the hype men of early circus days. "Creating the impression of truth displaces the search for truth" (184).

Jackall includes a postscript, updated in 2010, to include details from the banking crisis and crash of the housing market. He includes a load of eye-glazing details about which banks went belly up, in debt by how many billions of dollars, with what kind of government maneuvering, with executives who were awarded how many millions of dollars of bonuses even as they knew their financial legerdemain was producing paper-only profits. The postscript left me a little cold, until I compared it to the other companies he was using: one of his companies is a textile company, in which environmental and health concerns ran rampant. Much work was done in the industry by PR folks to diminish or dismiss byssinosis ("brown lung," a respiratory disease connected to breathing in cotton and other fiber dust, a problem widespread among textile workers and often only fixable with costly renovations of factories and processes), because profits depended on taking raw materials and turning them in to finished product as cheaply as possible. In contrast, the banking industry pushed around numbers and paper and notions of financial instruments that confused even experts in the field. Those profits were based not on making stuff (which is often a messy and dangerous business) but on making "stuff" out of nothing (messy and dangerous in a whole different way), and created mind-boggling debt and impenetrable financial problems.

Jackall ultimately concludes that middle management is not for the faint of heart. That it generates self-doubt and self-deception. That it challenges who you are to your core, because there is no moral compass, but rather an ever-shifting framework based on cognitive maps (who is aligned with whom, who stands to benefit, whom can I trust), an adroit understanding and employment of rules-in-use (read: whatever is in favor at the time), and an arbitrariness to expediency (what gets me out of trouble or makes me look good or moves me up the ladder as fast as possible, with an exclusive focus on the short term).

My takeaway? Things haven't changed much, whether it's a 30-year-old sociological study of chemical companies and textile plant management, or an 8-year-old summary of the how the crap hit the fan in the banking industry, or whatever field you find yourself working in in 2018. According to Jackall, "In a world of cheerfully bland public faces, where words are always provisional, intentions always cloaked, and frankness simply one of many guises, wily discernment, being able, as managers say 'to separate the honey from the horseshit,' becomes an indispensible skill" (172). Perhaps the ability to publicly react to horseshit as though it were honey is just as indispensible, and just as timeless, a managerial skill.