Understanding Wrongdoing in Large Organisations

Introduction

In his book, The Organisation Man, Whyte writes that those who join organisations upon finishing their college, are trained to become part of bureaucratic systems and as such become conservative, respect status quo, and involve a spirit of acquiscence in their attitude. It has also been noted that such ‘organisation men’ do not question the system, but rather “get in there and lubricate and make them run better”. When historians try to understand the past events that involve wrongdoing or error in large bureaucratic and technological organisations such as the Nazi Party, or the NASA, or some other major organisations, one of the factors that can help them understand these events is the role of the individuals who were the decision makers within the organisation, but who made these decisions as part of the larger organisation without questioning the status quo and also by a spirit of acquiscence that allowed them to make decisions that were demanded within the organisational culture but were ethically unsupportable. The genocide of the Jews or the Holocaust as it is called, is one such decision. This essay will discuss this and other events in the 20th century that mark the errors or decision making in the 20th century involving large bureaucratic and technological organisations with a view to identifying some of the lessons that can be learnt by historians. The question that this essay addresses is what can historians learn from accusation of wrongdoing or error in large bureaucratic and technological organisations in the 20th century and the explanations produced by the accused and by social science. The major lessons that can be gleaned from the examples discussed in this essay are that in some organisational decisions can be made by the application of the cost benefit approaches, which does not adequately address the issues of human health and environment; lack of ethical decision making in organisations; ceding of responsibility by the individuals by arguing that they were following arguments; and the possibility of even science to make mistakes or scientists making wrong decisions.

Application of the Cost Benefit Approaches by organisations

One of the lessons that historians can learn from some of the important events that have involved bureaucratic and large technological organisations is that they are often driven by a cost-benefit approach in their decision making, which may lead to some important ethical questions also being raised about their decision making process. Kelman and Hamilton have raised this issue that at times organisations tend to justify their decisions on the basis of the cost benefit analysis, which is simply inappropriate in cases where such decisions can have implications in human rights, environment or health of people. Some business decisions and even bureaucratic decisions can have significant impacts on the environment, or safety or health of people but the organisational decision making may try to justify this on the basis of the cost benefit analysis. This is demonstrated by the controversy related to the Ford Motors decision related to the ‘Pinto’ cars. The Ford Pinto case involved a decision made by the Ford related to the design of the car, where the car’s gas tank was susceptible to damage during the rear end collisions and the possibility of the cars catching fire in such cases. The design could have been made safer with a simple $12 fix, which the company was aware of but still the company chose not to include this design fix due to the cost of the fix being very high. Based on a cost benefit analysis on how many cars could possibly end up catching fire in a rear end collision case, the company determined that such cases would be few and therefore, it was not required to fix all cars. The cost benefit analysis involves a utilitarian approach, but the only values that the company could base this decision on was not necessarily the economic value but the company failed to factor in the cost of human life in its analysis. Kelman and Hamilton have argued that the cost benefit analysis can be harmful where the decision maker seeks to factor in the economic factors as values at par with other values like environmental protection, human health, and human life and well being. Nevertheless, what historians can learn from the Ford Pinto case is that corporations do apply such cost benefit approaches by treating economic costs at par with environmental or human health costs, when the latter two are not the same as financial costs and cannot be marketable as they have intrinsic value.

1. William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), 68.
2. Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of obedience: Toward a social psychology of authority and responsibility (Yale University Press, 1989).
3. Ibid.

Lack of ethical approach to decision making

Another lesson that can be taken by historians from past events involving bureaucratic and technological organisations is that at times certain decisions can be made which are prima facie unethical and involve no consideration by the decision maker to ethical principles. An example can be taken from the 1986 U.S. space shuttle Challenger explosion. The Challenger exploded on take off from Cape Canaveral. This case is also interesting because it involves both government as well as the corporation. In this case, the Morton-Thiokol engineers were aware of the fault in the O-rings of the space shuttle and were aware that the O-Rings would not seal properly and may lead to gas leaks as well as explosion. The engineers of the corporation were aware of this possibility of explosion of the space shuttle, but barring Chief engineer Boisjoly, who protested against the launch, there was no protest against it from the individual engineers as well as Morton-Thiokol and NASA. Today, it is believed that the Challenger disaster was preventable and if the engineers or the organisations had an ethical approach to the problem or even if the NASA and the Morton-Thiokol Corporation had responded to the warnings of Chief Engineer Boisjoly, then the Challenger disaster would have been avoided. The question for historians is what prevented these organisations from taking the right and ethical steps to preventing this disaster.

One of the reasons that makes the Challenger disaster important identified in literature is that of the cultural icon status of the NASA space programme in American culture, which made NASA and its space programme very important to the American people, and therefore, the investigation of what went wrong took centrestage. The investigation implicated NASA. At the same time, the pressures associated with the space programme were also blamed for the wrong decision making by the managers of the programme, both within the NASA and the Morton-Thiokol Corporation.

Ultimately, the problem that can be identified here for the benefit of the historians is also that there is a politics of blame that can mask the real blameworthiness attached to certain individuals, in this case, the elites within NASA and even government, and instead lay the blame on those who may not be entirely to blame for the decision making. Vaughan writes that there was an existing culture within NASA which had overtime given in to the pressures of the space programme, and which evolved around the need to keep routinely undertaking programmes to ensure funding from public, which was also to blame for the decision making that led to Challenger disaster.

Another example can be taken from the Nazi government officials’ actions that amounted to violation of human rights in Germany and occupied territories; such decisions were taken at different levels and involved the lack of consideration to ethical principles. The interesting aspect is that when the officials finally came to be tried at the Nuremberg Tribunal for their war crimes and crimes against humanity, they often repudiated their responsibility on the ground that they were acting under superior orders and there were only a few officials who were willing to take responsibility for their decisions. While officials were carrying out the orders of the Third Reich government, there was no examination or questioning of these orders by the officials. This can be related back to the argument made by Whyte where he wrote about the organisation man being a creature who is unable to question the organisation or disturb the status; history teaches a lesson that in the case of large bureaucratic organisations, there is a possibility that the individuals who work in these organisations may not question the wrong policy of the organisation and blindly follow the diktat of the organisation. When it comes to accountability, the individual can argue that the responsibility lies with the organisation because the individual was following the orders of the organisation. Another interesting aspect that is noted in the literature is that of the civil servants staying within an organisation to mitigate the damage done by the organisation; in the context of the Nazi Party there are testimonies of the civil servants that suggest that the civil servants stayed in the Nazi government to prevent the real ‘Nazis’ from taking over.

1. Ibid.
2. C. E. Harris Jr., Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases (Boston: Cengage, 2014).
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
6. Ibid
7. Ibid

In the case of Adolf Eichmann, who was accused of some of the gravest crimes against humanity, in that he was involved with the decision making leading to the genocide of a great number of Jews, the question of why he took these decisions and whether he ceded responsibility of these decisions. It may be mentioned here that there are differing perceptions as to the extent to which Eichmann was personally responsible for the decisions; Arendt argued that Eichmann was a goal oriented person who worked for advancement within the Nazi Party and followed the policy of genocide and other immorally suspect decisions without considering the morality of these decisions; this is the ‘banality of evil’ as described by Arendt. The banality of evil explanation seeks to present the idea of individuals like Eichmann as ‘desk killers’ who take these decisions sitting at their desks without any actual engagement with the decision that they are making. This viewpoint is challenged by Eley (2015) who argues that Eichmann was a stanch Nazi and an anti-Semitic whose own views of anti-Semitism aligned with that of the Nazi Party. This would argue Eichmann was as invested in these decisions as was the government that he was representing. However, the defence taken by Eichmann at his trial in Israel was that of superior orders in that he was arguing that he was merely following orders of the organisation and he had no power to challenge or question these orders. This takes the emphasis back to the argument that individuals within the organisation are able to cede responsibility for their decisions or execution of organisation’s immoral decisions.

Ceding of responsiblity

Of more interest is the idea of obedience to organisation and in this context, the idea of ethical decision making is left to the organisation as argued by Kelman and Hamilton, and the individual remains merely the executer of the decisions without reference to the ethical content of these decisions. Kelman and Hamilton also take reference of the Milgram obedience studies and on the basis of the studies, they argue that the subjects of the studies regarded the decisions and the responsibility for those decisions as being entirely in the hands of the experimenter and that they ceded responsibility for these decisions to the experimenter. Kelman and Hamilton also defined crimes of obedience and described the dynamics of challenging organisational authority where the individual who wants to challenge the organisational authority must redefine the authority relationship as illegitimate and this can happen when the decision of the organisation is regarded as contrary to the individual morality and the individual rebels against this imposing of the immoral decisions. For the historians, the lesson to be drawn from the example of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the defence taken by the Nazi officials is that when it comes to decision making within the organisation, even when these decisions are prima facie immoral (as in the case of the crimes against humanity by the Nazi government) the individuals within the organisation may continue to execute these decisions even when these are immoral and cede responsibility of the decisions to the organisation.

1. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970).
2. Ibid.
3. Whyte, The Organization Man.
4. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
5. Geoff Eley, 'Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth (Review)', Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 33, no 4 (2015): 197–99.
6. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
7. Ibid.
8. Eley, 'Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth (Review)'.
9. Kelman and Hamilton, Crimes of obedience: Toward a social psychology of authority and responsibility.
10. Ibid.

Science can make mistakes

In their book, The Golem at Large, Collins and Pinch write about assigning blame for the Challenger disaster. The conventional wisdom as identified in this book is that the NASA managers gave in to the production pressures associated with the space programme and this led them to make a risky decision allowing the take off when they had been warned about the possibility of the explosion due to low temperatures the day before. In the context of this essay and the lessons for historians, the book also notes that the disaster gives a moral lesson on the uncaring bureaucracy and how it can override noble aspirations. However, another lesson that can be learnt here by historians is that sometimes the best science and the best scientists can also make mistakes and these mistakes can be costly in terms of human life. In the context of the Challenger disaster, the two sets of scientists at the Thiokol and Marshall centres could not agree on the specifics of the O-Rings, which suggests how even scientists can have different viewpoints on the same subject. Due to this, it is argued that it is not correct to set up absolute standards for criticising engineers who are involved in such decisions and that space programme was always meant to involve a degree of risk and uncertainty.

Conclusion

To conclude this essay, there are various explanations that can be given for understanding why and how individuals within large bureaucratic organisations respond to issues of authority, mistakes, and accountability. The examples taken in this essay related to some of the important historical events in the 20th century. These examples, like the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Challenger disaster, and the Ford Pinto controversy, all elucidate important lessons for the historians. These lessons relate to how individuals within an organisation fail to challenge the immoral decisions of the organisation and instead become the executers of such decisions in a way that suggests that either they are not applying their own morality or not challenging immoral actions of the organisation, or how individuals cede the responsibility of the decision making to the organisation and simply follow these decisions irrespective of the moral context of such decisions, or how organisations themselves make decisions that are based on cost and benefit analysis where the value to human life, health, and environment may be put in monetary terms without reference to the intrinsic value of these concepts. What can be said in conclusion is that as Whyte noted, when individuals become part of the organisation, they may follow the organisational culture and refuse to challenge the status quo.

1. Ibid
2. Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
3. Ibid, 42.
4. Ibid
5. Ibid
6. Ibid, 55.

Looking for further insights on Understanding Vulnerable Consumers? Click here.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . New York: Penguin Books.

Collins, Harry, and Trevor Pinch. 2002. The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

Eley, Geoff. 2015. "Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth (Review)." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (4): 197–99.

Harris, C. E., Jr. 2014. Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases. 5. Boston: Cengage.

Kelman, Herbert C., and V. Lee Hamilton. 1989. Crimes of obedience: Toward a social psychology of authority and responsibility. Yale University Press.

Speer, Albert. 1970. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston . London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Vaughan, Diane. 1996. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA . Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

Whyte, William. 1957. The Organization Man. New York : Doubleday Anchor Books.