1

Managers as Moral Subjects? Decision Making,

Undecidability and the Organizational Ego

Stewart Clegg, Carl Rhodes and Martin Kornberger

University of Technology, Sydney

Paper presented at the Asia-Pacific Researchers in Organization Studies (APROS)

10th International Colloquium, Oaxaca, Mexico, 7-10 December 2003.

Abstract

In this paper we develop a conceptualisation of organizational decision making

as a necessarily ethical practice. The paper starts with a discussion of the
notion of decision making as it relates to organizational rationality and the
relationship between management and control. Drawing on Derrida’s
discussions of undecidability and responsibility, we suggest that rather than
being instances of (albeit bounded) rationality or calculability, decision making
can be regarded as a process of choice amongst a heterogeneity of possibilities.
On that basis, we follow Derrida in arguing that for a decision to be responsible
it must be made without recourse to the knowledge of its outcome or the
application of pre-ordained rules. Illustrating our argument with a discussion
of Eichmann’s ‘I was just following orders’ defence, we suggest that rules for
decision making, rather than ensuring ethical outcomes, can work to insulate
organizations from moral responsibility. We conclude with a call for ethical
democracy and responsibility as a condition for responsible decision making.

Introduction

Management and organization theory has long been driven by a dominant and ego-
centred conception of rationality. Inspired by the transliteration of a Cartesian logic
(Descartes, 1954) from the thinking subject (I think, therefore I am) to the acting
organization (It thinks, plans, does and reviews, therefore it is) there is a taken for
granted assumption of ‘the organization as super-person, as a single powerful decision
maker’ (Czarniawska 1997: 42). Nowhere is this more readily observed than in the
study of organizational decision-making. Decision-making is a process compounded
from analysing, comparing, deciding, doing and finally controlling (see Fulop et al,
1999). Put briefly, from this perspective organization is the incorporation of
rationality into the routinization of habit (March, 1988): that place where the French
philosophical tradition unleashed by Rene Descartes meets American pragmatism,
informed by William James. With the concept of decision-making under uncertainty
and ambiguity (March, 1988), management and organization theory acknowledged
the limits of the rational in this process as they sought to ward off the unknown
through the familiar habits of organizational routines – whether they be constituted in
 2

the form of rules, policies, values, or simply understandings of ‘the way we do things
around here’. However, while decision-making under uncertainty reflects the
complexity of the environment and the bounded rationality of the actor, it still builds
on the same principles as its predecessor: the omnipotence of the ego-logical subject
as actor. What is innovative is that it tempers egoism with the habits of organizations:
the stress on routines and their recurrent review as the egoists think, plan, do and
review (Weick 1969; 1979; 1995).

Building on two alternative philosophical streams – those of power/knowledge

(Foucault 1977; 1980; Nietzsche 1968) and undecidability (Derrida 1992; 1995) – we
criticize the rational underpinnings of the decision-making process in terms of its
neutrality in regards to politics and ethics. On this basis we explore the role of power
and knowledge in decision-making (Foucault, 1977; Nietzsche, 1968; Tsivacou, 1996)
and challenge the rationality and ethics of decision with Derrida’s notion of
undecidability (Derrida 1992, 1995; Chia, 1996). In doing so, we create the necessary
openings for new, more democratic and creative conceptualisations of decision
making.

Instead of just criticising existing understandings of decision-making in contemporary

management and organization theory, we seek to develop a more positive image of
decision-making under the fundamentally different condition of undecidability – a
condition where decision is not about the application of a calculable rationality but
about political and ethical responsibility (Derrida 1996). Drawing on several
theoretical and empirical studies that emphasise the importance of diversity and
heterogeneity in the process of decision-making (Hamel, 1996; Fenwick and Neal,
2001; Glover et al, 2002) and integrate it with a philosophy of decision-making we
stress that ethical decision-making must be considered beyond ‘the programmable
application or unfolding of a calculable process’ (Derrida 1992: 24). Thus, we suggest
management’s task is one of enhancing and maintaining structures that understand
undecidability as opportunities and responsibilities (rather than as threats and fears)
and that actively foster a collective and democratic decision-making process (Charan,
2001). Thus, we are critical of the design of organization structures that raise
egotistical command and control to an art form we demur: instead, we see skills of
acknowledging and negotiating with multiple stakeholders (i.e. others) as crucial to
the constitution of the responsible organization. We conclude with a reflection on the
implication of our analysis for further empirical and theoretical work, in philosophy
as well as management and organization theory, with particular reference to the ethics
of decision-making.

Rationality, decision-making and organizations

While the importance of the division of labour is a folk-tale that stretc hes back at least
to Adam Smith (1723–1790), with his praise for the rationally divided pin-factory and
its labours in The Wealth of Nations (1976), the stress on the importance of division in
execution has usually coexisted with an even more classical conception than Smith’s.
In the history of management and organization theory belief in the division of labour
as a necessary principle of management for the 'hands' sits alongside the classical
concept of rationality, formulated by Descartes (1596-1650), as appropriate for the
'head'. Take Descartes’ reflections on architecture as a sample:
 3

One of the first things I thought it well to consider was that as a rule
there is not such great perfection in works composed of several parts,
and proceeding from the hands of various artists, as in those on which
one man has worked alone. Thus we see buildings undertaken and
carried out by a single architect are generally more seemly and better
arranged than those that several hands have sought to adept, making
use of old walls that were built for other purposes. Again, those ancient
cities which were originally mere boroughs, and have become large
towns in process of time, are as a rule badly laid out, as compared with
those towns of regular pattern that are laid out by a designer on an
open plain to suit his fancy; while the buildings severally considered
are often equal or superior artistically to those in planned towns, yet, in
view of their arrangement – here a large one, there a small – and the
way they make the streets twisted and irregular, one would say that it
was chance that placed them so, not the will of men who had the use of
reason (Descartes 1954: 15)

The architect ideally sits down in a chamber and starts his work ‘from scratch’,
planning every mark carefully. Historically pre-existing elements are perceived as
disturbing as they might not serve the function in the architect’s mind. Clearly we can
see the res cogitans-res extensa division at work: the mind plans, whereas the body,
the merely extended, passive and inert material, is to be formed according to this plan.
Its many hands are at their most consequential only when subordinated to one head.
Indeed, the dominance of structure as an organizing metaphor for organizations,
places architecture (as the designing and building of structures) in a direct relationship
with how we understand organizations.

Decartes’ architect is the rational planner of buildings and cities while the manager
became the rational planner of work processes and organizations. By corollary the
modern manager is a ‘man who has the use of reason’, who leaves little to chance in
structuring the optimal arrangements for work. As if foreshadowing the modern
management consultant, Descartes developed a method to implement this philosophy
appropriately: in his Discourse de la methode (1637/1977) he defines four steps that
the human mind has to follow carefully in order to produce proper solutions – or, as
he puts it: ‘the Method of rightly conducting one’s reason and reaching the truth’. His
precise instructions for analysing and decision-making provide (consciously or not)
the template for mainstream management models.

Thus for early modern management theorists such as Fayol (1949: 181) ‘the
soundness and good working order of the body corporate depend on a certain number
of conditions termed indiscriminately, principles, laws, rules’. Such principles relate
to that unity of direction and command centrally promulgated by management to and
for a subordinated, divided, and disciplined workforce. This centralised management
and its principles are not authoritarian but authoritative in source. They derive not
from managerial fiat or the social fact of capital ownership but they belong ‘to the
natural order; this turns of the fact that in every organism, animal or social, sensations
converge towards the brain or directive part, and from the brain or directive part
orders are sent out which set parts of the organism in movement’ (Fayol 1949: 193).
An organic metaphor serves to legitimate a new organon.
 4

Fayol’s ‘body corporate’ – the members of the organization – is conceived as if it

were a body of limbs and organs controlled and directed by the managerial brain. In
practice, however, the metaphoricality of such language becomes troublingly literal,
as, for example, a desperate Henry Ford once asked why he always got stuck with the
whole person rather than with a pair of hands? Hands were what he hired but
troublesome bodies with querulous minds were what he so often got, despite the best
work of Pinkerton’s and other agencies that sought to screen out troublemakers and
those morally unit and insufficiently temperate in their habits for the five dollars a day
regime on Ford’s line. The metaphorical body corporate easily reduces to the literal
body of the worker only regarded as exemplary if s/he behaves as a puppet to the
commands issued through the managerial pulling of strings (Ten Bos and Rhodes
2003).

Fayol and Ford were not singularly unusual. Their sentiment were shared by that
father of modern management, Frederick Winslow Taylor, when he insisted that ‘all
of the planning which under the old system was done by the workman, as a result of
his personal experience, must out of necessity under the new system be done by
management’ (Taylor 1967/1911: 38). Here decision-making is taken to be the
domain of the superior intellect of the manager such that he (usually) can deploy a
scientific rationality in order to find the infamous ‘one best way’ proposed by
Taylor’s approach. Management makes such decisions in such a way that the
managerial brain, in a mixed metaphor, is both at the centre and the top of the
organization. Managerial identity is this defined in terms of a prowess for rational
decision-making against the alterity of the stupid worker. Management did not have
greater authority because they were in a more powerful organizational position so
much as they were in a more powerful position because they had greater authority,
where their authority was meretricious, due to their superior intelligence. As Taylor
(1967/1911: 59) so famously wrote of one of his favourite workers:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig
iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so
phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox
than any other type … the workman who is best suited to handling pig
iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work.
He is so stupid that the word 'percentage' has no meaning to him, and he
must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into
the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before
he can be successful.

Indeed, by defining workers as brainless and unthinking hands following orders

determined elsewhere the notion of decision-making became both elitist and rational.
Rational in that it must lead to optimum decisions because it is based, in every sense
of the word, on superior intelligence and rational also in that it applies scientific
method , the hallmark of superior intelligence, in order to result in the optimal
achievement of desired organizational ends. Summarizing, this Cartesian inspired
concept of management can be illustrated with the image of organizations as
hierarchies: the more or less inert body (the structure) of the organization has to have
its 'hands' informed and directed (and if necessary, corrected) by its 'head', the top-
management. Management develops the vision that tells the organization where to go,
 5

the strategic intent that gives organization its direction. Maybe it is just an irony or
perhaps the truth of etymology that lurks in language: it is the headquarters that makes
decisions that the organization is supposed to follow. Structure follows strategy; form
follows function (Chandler, 1962). Like a healthy body with a sharp mind, its organs
move in response to the application of rational decision-making processes. Such
rationality is the hallmark of the modern organization

This concept of rationality, with its antecedents in Descartes, is expressed most

precisely in the concept of decision-making. Decision-making is understood as
management’s task par excellence – the bureaucratic cogito whose decisions the
corporate body should follow. Management should make decisions on the following:
strategic directions, action plans to implement them, and forms of control to evaluate
their effect. Here the divorce between decision and execution is a central tenet of
management science, such that employees are best regarded as being reflexive
automata whose routines are attuned to following rules and processes decided on by
others (Ten Bos and Rhodes 2003) Usually, the model of decision-making is
described as a perfectly well organized, rational and logical process. First, the
problem is defined. Second, all the relevant information that leads to an optimal
solution is collected. Reviewing the data, management (perhaps with the help of
technocratic ‘experts’) develops several possible solutions. Fourth, evaluating the
possible solutions carefully, management makes a decision regarding the optimal
solution. Fifth, this solution is implemented in a top-down approach and evaluated by
management constantly. Quality management, for example as embodied in Deming’s
‘plan-do-check-act’ (PDCA) cycle is an excellent example of this that is explicitly
adopted in many contemporary organizations. Such approaches define specific
processes to be followed by those ordained to use them in order to act as presumed
guarantors of the best decisions. Such constant processes of rational decision-making,
supported by the latest IT-equipment and an army of analysts and consultants, are
meant to refine and improve an organization’s processes and products constantly and
incrementally. The problem of recalcitrant hands is solved by turning them into
disciplined and reflexive extensions of the corporate body, able to exercise discretion,
but in corporately prescribed ways.

Decision-making and uncertainty

Although still in powerful circulation in today’s organizations, the model of

managerial decision-making discussed above, together with Cartesian rationality and
the managerial urge for order and control, has been challenged from various sides in
management and organization theory. Almost half a century ago, James March and
Herbert Simon (1958) doubted whether decision makers really look for optimal
solutions; rather, they suggested, they look for 'satisficing' solutions. Because of the
limited capacity of human information processing no one could really consider all
solutions and then decide which one was the best one – not even a top manager. But
top managers, because of their wide experiences, have a raft of comparable cases to
draw on for most decision-situations, and on the basis of that limited search are able
to be rational within the bounds of their own experiences. However, having more
experience than non-top managers, these bounds are less constraining than would be
the case were lower-order members to do the deciding. In organizational life a careful
analysis of all available information would be impossibly time-consuming given that
 6

time (and motivation for such use of time) are scare resources: it is for this reason that
satisfactory decisions will be made rather than optimal ones. Facing the 'bounded
rationality' of human beings, Simon and March found decision-makers working under
constraints that make optimal decisions impossible.

Cohen, March and Olsen (1972) pushed March and Simon’s critique one step further
announcing that the decision-making process in organizations is organized according
to the logic of what they call the garbage can. As they argue provocatively, decisions
are made when solutions, problems, participants and choices flow around and
coincide at a certain point. Like garbage in a can these adjacencies are often purely
random: yesterday’s papers end up stuck to today’s dirty diapers just as downsizing
attaches itself to profit-forecasts. William Starbuck (1983), to mention a third critical
spirit, turned this logic completely upside down and argued that organizations are not
so much problem solvers as action generators: instead of analysing and deciding
rationally how to solve problems organizations spend most of their time generating
problems to which they already have the solutions. It’s much more economical that
way: they know how to do what they will to do so all they have to do is work out why
they will do it. Or, rather, as Weick (1979) suggests, why they have done it – for,
taking a cue from Schutz (1967), how is it possible for organizations to know what
they are doing until they have decided what they have done by making a reflective
glance back at what they were just doing? Finally, putting Weick together with
Lindblom (1959), we can argue that organizational decision-making processes are not
really rational but follow the concept of 'muddling through' as organizations follow
the sense of things that they made in the past as they try and make sense of the here-
and-now while they construct their future.

As valuable and thought provoking as the critique of the rational decision-making

process is, it still remains captured by the logic of rationality. The critics turn the logic
of rational decision-making upside down but still use, rather than disrupt, its logic,
which is obvious in the case of Starbuck’s critique. Further, it still takes the rational
model as its point of departure but changes the parameters in its periphery. For
instance, March and Simon’s critique still hang on the idea of an optimal decision,
but, due to human inabilities and incapacities, this ideal model remains unreachable –
a holy grail – for which a more immediate substitute is found. What we suggest in this
paper, instead, is the possibility of changing the underlying concept of decisio n-
making through introducing two closely linked, yet unrelated concepts that shed new
light on the phenomenon of decision making: power and undecidability. Put simply,
the point we want to make is that the old critiques do not go far enough.

Decision-making and power

Management in general and decision-making as one of management’s major tasks is

closely linked to the exercise of power. As critical management scholars have
demonstrated, management is about reducing the complexity, variety and thus
unpredictability of the organization and its environment through means such as
planning, decision-making and analysing. Tsivacou (1996) for instance has shown
how planning and decision-making is inextricably linked to exercising power and
control.
 7

Drawing strongly on Nietzsche, the French philosopher Michel Foucault analysed the
interface of power and knowledge. Knowledge accumulation is the first step in the
decision-making process. Without information leading to knowledge – as a result of
ratiocination – about specific local circumstances there will be no sound decision.
However, the process of knowledge creation is far from being a neutral, scientific or
objective process. Rather, the generation of knowledge is inextricably linked to and
with exercising power:

'Perhaps … we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to

imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are
suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions,
its demands and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that
power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of
power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather …
that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no
power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of
knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute
at the same time power relations.' (Foucault, 1977: 27)

This challenges the dominant model in at least two respects: first, knowledge that
management needs to make informed decision is often found at the bottom, the edges
or the far periphery of the organizational hierarchy. In order to get access to this
knowledge, management has to exercise power, such as formalising tasks, collecting
experiences, and insisting that data be recorded as means for getting the necessary
knowledge out of employees, customers, and suppliers and making it available for
managerial scrutiny. Second, the process often evokes resistance as those in far-off
places are brought increasingly into focus and management is more and more forced
to adapt its strategy the better known they become. As the strategy guru Gary Hamel
(1996) suggests, strategy-making needs to become a bottom up process, driven by
outsiders, newcomers and underdogs. Only these people, normally pushed to and kept
at the margins or those who rarely and infrequently cross them, have different
perspectives to inform decision-making processes. As Hamel (1996) puts it, the
hierarchy of power and experience needs to be supplemented with a 'hierarchy of
imagination' – and this hierarchy of imagination turns the order of the organization
upside down. Thus, rethinking the fundamentals of decision-making in organizations
will necessarily effect organizational power relations. We will come back to this point
in our concluding remarks.

Decision-making under undecidability

As we argued earlier the (albeit bounded) rationality of the ways that decision-making
is commonly understood rests on the presumption that their exists an approximation to
an ideal type of decision based on a thorough knowledge of the facts and the
application of rationality. Our concerns with this are twofold. First, we are
concerned that this fails to account for the non-rationality of decision. Thus
rationality as the guiding principle for understanding decision-making implies that
there exist decisions that can ultimately be judged as being better than others,
provided the appropriate technologies are applied to the appropriate data. Second,
rationality of decision implies a notion of the decision maker (e.g. a manager, or an
 8

organization) as being a self-contained subject capable of taking independent action in

the world. In this section we address both of these concerns and suggest an
alternative understanding of decision and responsibility based on the notion of
’undecidability’.

It was Jacques Derrida who drew our attention to these issues of decision,
undecidability and responsibility when we read some of his recent philosophical
work. Once up on a time, it is clear, management scientists such as Simon, Weick and
March were well-informed readers of the current philosophies of their day. However,
over fifty years have elapsed since March and Simon (1952) first published
Administrative Behaviour, and over thirty years since Weick (1969) first published
The Social Psychology of Organizing. In that time new philosophies and philosophers
have emerged on the scene whose thinking has implications for management and
organization theory: however, there is little evidence that the vast majority of
management academics have any passing knowledge of the philosophy of recent
times – indeed, we are tempted to say that there is little evidence in citations to
suggest that the vast majority have much knowledge of any philosophers –even those
long dead ones whose writings buttress some of their fundamental views about
phenomena such as causality, ontology and epistemology. Of course, there are
honourable exceptions (see the debates contained in Westwood and Clegg 2003).

For Derrida, the philosophical possibility of there being such a thing as a decision
relies on a prior condition, which he refers to as ‘undecidability’. He suggests that in
order for a decision to be named as such it must involve some form of choice: a real
decision can be made only if one encounters different possibilities for courses of
action. Thus, decisions are not about the application of a heuristic formula or
calculation (e.g. Taylor’s scientific management methods) in order to assert or predict
the outcome of a course of action – to do this would be to make no decision at all as it
would entail following a pre-determined logic rather than choosing amongst
competing possibilities. Thus, the application of a heuristic process to define what to
do is not really a process of decision-making – it is rather better defined as the
application of a calculable program. Conversely,

'The instant of decision must remain heterogeneous to all

knowledge as such, to all theoretical or reportive determination,
even if it may or must be preceded by all science and conscience.
The latter are unable to determine the leap of decision without
transforming it into the irresponsible application of a program,
hence without depriving it of what makes it a sovereign and free
decision' (Derrida 1997: 219)

Derrida does not deny rationality in decision-making: however, the application of

rationality alone is not enough for a course of action to be considered as one that has
been decided. If a decision is made simply by applying a system of rules to a set of
data, then there is no real decision – only the following of a particular program (see
Jones 2003). Thus, regardless of rationality the instant that a decision is made ‘must
be heterogeneous to the accumulation of knowledge … not only must the person
taking the decision not know everything … the decision, if there is to be one, must
advance towards a future which is not known, which cannot be anticipated’ (Derrida
1994: 37).
 9

Decisions may occur within the context of rules but cannot be reduced to their
application. A ‘decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would
not be a free decision, it would only be the application or unfolding of a calculable
process’ (Derrida 1992: 24). Such a calculable process of rationality is thus placed in
opposition to what Derrida wants to privilege as the real notion of decision, tying
decision-making closely to democratic notions of choice and freedom, where each
case in which a decision is to be made ‘is other, each decision is different and requires
an absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to
guarantee absolutely’ (Derrida 1992: 23). Indeed, the rationality of their being ‘only
one possible choice would make a joke of the very notion of choice’ (Laclau 1996:
59). A person who knows everything does not make decisions. Decisions involve the
person being moved, temporally, into the ‘unknowability of the future’ (Derrida
1994). In summary, Derrida’s position is that if a decision were based on the
application of rationality to an unbounded knowledge, it would not be a real decision
– merely the application of a rule.

Quite contrary to the notion of rational decisions, Derrida (following Kierkegaard)

proposes that ‘the instant of decision is madness’ (Derrida 1992: 26) because it must
always interrupt the cognitive and rational deliberation which precedes it. For
Derrida, such interruption occurs when the urgent and sudden moment of decision has
passed through the ‘ordeal of the undecidable’. This is not merely a dialectical choice
between pre-determined options – ‘the undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the
tension between two decisions; it is the experience of that which, though
heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged – it is
of obligation that we must speak – to give itself up to the impossible decision, while
taking account of law and rules’ (Derrida 1992: 24). This impossibility is borne out
of the radical difference between decisions and rules such that a decision must be
grounded in its own singularity rather than being derived from a universal rule – there
is a direct contrast here between the ‘universality of the rule and the singularity of the
decision’ (Laclau 1996: 53).

It is worth noting that the term ‘undecidability’ is not synonymous with indecision or
with non-decisions; instead undecidability is defined in opposition to calculability.
Undecidability is not opposed to decision, but rather there can be a non-decision
without undecidability (Derrida 1999b). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) analysed the
consequences of undecidability, and concluded that it is the very precondition of
every 'revolutionary decision'. Instead of being paralysed by undecidability and seeing
it as a negative lack of reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we understand it as a
starting point for radically new and groundbreaking action. If decisions were made
only on the basis of established frames of references, their outcome would remain
within the realm of the already known, the calculable and predictable. Undecidability
challenges these frames with revolutionary implications. Decision-making is that
which is not programmed or predictable – decisions represent a free choice where the
singularity of the decision is made in the face of the heterogeneity of possibilities. On
this basis, we now move on to consider decision-making in terms of its relationship
with responsibility and ethics.

Bennigton (2000) discusses Derrida’s notion of decision-making as irretrievably

implicated with issues of personal responsibility and ethics, echoing writers on power
 10

such as Lukes (1974) and Clegg (2002), in seeing the ethical responsibilities of power
as always involving decisions. Where they do not, or where the author of some
actions seeks to pass them off as structurally determined, then the abdication of
ethical responsibility is usually a trick to deceive just consideration of the choices that
have, in fact, implicitly been made.

'For a decision to be worthy of the name, it must be more than the simple
determinative subsumption of a case under a rule. Looking up the rule
for the case and applying the rule is a matter of administration rather
than ethics. Ethics begins where the case does not exactly correspond to
any rule, and where the decision has to be taken without subsumption.
A decision worthy of its name thus takes place in a situation of radical
indecision or of undecidability of the case in question in terms of any
rules for judging it' (Bennington 2000: 15)

Bennington suggests that decision-making is an ethical issue as much as it is a

practical one because it involves a choice that cannot be rationally justified – as
Derrida says the decision is a ‘moment of madness’. More ordinarily, we are used to
other moments of madness when looking at rational decision-making: on those
occasions when decision-makers refuse ethical responsibility, we see this refusal as
the particular madness of the rational, as the Eichmann case demonstrates all too
clearly.

The Madness of Rationality . . .

After the Second World War, Eichmann escaped capture and lived in Germany for
five years before moving to Argentina, where he lived under an alias for another ten
years. Israeli agents finally captured him in 1960. Eichmann was tried for crimes
against humanity. Eichmann’s defence was that he was just a bureaucrat who 'had to
obey' because he 'was just following orders'. (A memorable account of his trial was
written by Hannah Arendt 1963.) Although he was subsequently found guilty and
executed, his defence was important because it posed the question of the extent to
which a person who is obedient to organizationally legitimate authority can be held
accountable as an individual for what they do. In the context of an enquiry into the
nature of the holocaust, the renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1989) has
addressed an extended enquiry to such questions.

Bauman’s answer is most interesting for management scholars: essentially, he points

to many of the normal features of organization as contributing to the conditions which
make ethically dubious actions organizationally easy to produce. Irrespective of the
horror being visited, or damage done, he notes how central aspects of organizations
contribute to the ease with which organizational malfeasance can occur. At the heart
of the moral question is the interpenetration of power and ethics: why do ordinary
people in organizations do morally bad things when asked to do so – what aspects of
organization make obedience through unethical decision or non-decision-making
feasible?

One writer on the Holocaust is Kelman (1973) who suggests that three organizational
attributes, at a minimum, make it easier to deal prejudicially with other people
through obedience to routine organizational actions:
 11

1. When the organizational action is authorized

2. When the actions that enact it are routinized
3. When those who are the victims of the action are dehumanised by ideological
definitions and indoctrination.

Each one of these strategies of power involves the application of rules: of authority; of
routine, and of identity. Let us deal with authorization first, a fundamental tenet of
Weber’s (1978) definition of modern bureaucratic organizations. What does authority
mean? One version of authority would bathe it in a warm glow of legitimated,
rightful and righteous domination. For those who are subject to it, authority appears
most simply as that to which we owe obedience. We obey authority: authority is
exercised when others obey it – for if they defy it, then it ceases to be authority. So,
all the mechanisms that produce active consent on the part of the ruled are essential to
authority and obedience. Active consent is premised on the 'demand to obey
commands of the superiors to the exclu sion of all other stimuli for action, to put the
devotion to the welfare of the organization, as defined in the commands of superiors,
above all devotions and commitments' (Bauman 1989: 21). As Bauman suggests, for
some, indeed many organizations, such ded ication to organizational service is often
regarded as a moral virtue.

Doing routinized organization work is often tedious, boring and repetitive: filling in
forms, entering data, assembling strategies and participating in meetings, doing things
according to the rules. The outcomes of this ceaseless round of activity are frequently
quite remote from the conceptions of the people performing the mundane tasks. Most
organizational members are in the middle of organizational chains whose links are not
always clear. Their actions are mediative and mediated. They perform tasks for
others and others perform tasks for them; the tasks are just a part of endless and often
very partial gestalt round of action. People are not always aware of the consequences
of that which they do and do not do: after all, most of the time, they are just doing
what they are told – shred those files, write those cheques, despatch those troops,
maintain those train schedules.

The greater the psychic and physical distance between what a people do and their
ultimate effects, the easier it is to do it. Shooting someone dead is much harder than
cutting off their power and water for non-payment of debt, even though the effects
might ultimately be the same. There is immediacy where there is a moral code that
states 'Thou shalt not kill', while in the other circumstances one simply applies the
rule: well, it is just a job, where you monitor accounts and take appropriate – and
authoritative – action. Long chains of functional dependencies insulate you from
moral consequences – as Eichmann argued and modern functionaries in high-
technology warfare would no doubt agree. The Nazi’s realized this well: at their most
efficient they turned the concentration camps into crude killing machines where
willing victims, desiring a shower after a long journey, were serviced by sanitation
officers who simply poured in chemicals developed by scientists in laboratories
elsewhere.

Divisions of labour (as we have seen, an essential prerequisite for Smith’s conception
of efficiency) enable us to keep a distance from effects; to represent them in terms of
intermediary forms of data – kill-rates, efficiency statistics, and so on, enabling
distantiation to become normal. It reinforces the sense of the minuteness of the cogs
 12

that our labour moves and their necessary intermeshing with so many others, it makes
us just an element in an overall scheme of things such that we don’t even have to try
and understand in its totality. The system of which we are part is responsible, not us.
When we make decisions we just apply rules. Blame the rules – not the person, goes
the pleas – because the rules make the person ethically non-responsible even while
technically responsible. When we master techniques our skill has its own charm,
aesthetics and beauty, and we can take sheer delight in their practice, irrespective of
their moral effects. 'Technical responsibility differs from moral responsibility in that it
forgets that the action is a means to something other than itself . . . the result is the
irrelevance of moral standards for the technical success of the bureaucratic
operation' (Bauman 1989: 101). When technique is paramount then action becomes
purely a question of technical power – the use of means to achieve given ends. For
instance, as a master of logistics Eichmann was enormously proud of his
achievements in the complex scheduling of trains, camps and death.

The more dehumanised the objects, or the means of their representation, on which
organizational action works, the easier the application of pure technique becomes.
Distance – and distantiation – makes technical representation easier. When whatever
is being worked on can be represented quantitatively, as a bottom line calculation,
then it is so much easier to make rational decisions – cut costs, trim fat, speed
throughput, increase efficiency, defeat the competition – without concern for the
human, environmental or social effects of these decisions. If organizational power
consists of configuring social relations such that others will do what we want them to
so, perhaps even without expending any energy in the process, then making those
others technically accountable and responsible for results expressed in a purely
quantitative form has two profound effects. First, it makes them utterly transparent:
they have achieved their targets or they have not; Second, it relieves them of moral
indeterminacy – if they are authorized to do something and given targets to achieve by
superordinates working to guiding strategies and plans, then obedience surely is
appropriate and authority should be served.

. . . the Madness of Decision

Pointing to undecidability and attesting to the limits of calculability opens the field of
decision-making to ethico-political considerations, says Derrida (1988: 116) where, if
decisions where regarded as the following of a pre-established program, as we have
seen in the previous section, ‘nothing would be more irresponsible and more
totalitarian’ (Derrida cited in Raffoul 1998). Indeed, if a decision did not undergo the
ordeal of undecidability there would be no space for moral or political responsibility
(Derrida 1996). This undecidability is best regarded as a form of specificity that is
not capable of being generalised to a rule, such that following rules would mean not
passing through undecidability, and thus, as we have seen, ends up being void of
responsibility (Derrida 1995).

Suggesting that decision is related to undecidability, responsibility, freedom and

choice also begs the question of who exactly is making decisions. In terms of our
more general discussion we are considering decisions made by organizations and
made by people on behalf of organizations. As we argued in the opening of the paper,
however, we are not considering this organization in terms of an organizational cogito
that independently orchestrates decision-making in a self-contained manner. Hence,
 13

‘we would not be justified in seeing here the unfolding of an egological immanence,
the autonomic and automatic deployment of predicates or possibilities proper to a
subject’ (Derrida 1999a: 24). Decision, as responsibility, invokes the question of to
whom one is responsible when making a decision – decision thus implies subjectivity
through an I-other relationship. Thus the creativity of decision – its ‘moment of
madness’ – is the ‘moment of the subject’ (Laclau 1996: 54), such that rather than the
subject being a ‘chooser’ who makes a decision, it is the act of decision through
which the subject position of the person making the choice emerges – not as an
expression of identity but as an act of identification. Organizations do not make
decisions at all – rather, particular organizational identities emerge through the
decisions made in their name, decision for which the organization becomes
responsible. Such an identity (organizational or otherwise) is ‘no longer a self-
identity, an ego, a consciousness, even an intentional consciousness’ (Raffoul 1988:
277) but rather an ethical identity emergent from the process of decision-making –
despite whatever protestations to the contrary.

Decision, Organization and Ethics: Towards a Conclusion

Decision-making makes a difference when considered under the condition of

undecidability. Making a difference, of course, is the fundamental definition of what
it is to exercise power. As we have argued, we face a condition in which decisions
concern not the application of a calculable rationality but political and ethical
responsibility (Derrida 1996). As Derrida (1999) argues, ethics and politics begin with
the process of undecidability – in Wittgenstein’s (1968) terms, in not knowing how to
go on, because one does not have a rule to follow.

The implications of Wittgenstein's idea for management practice are more tangible
than one might suspect at first glance. Several theoretical and empirical studies
emphasise the importance of diversity and heterogeneity in the process of decision-
making (Hamel, 1996; Fenwick and Neal, 2001; Glover et al, 2002) and integrate it
with a philosophy which stresses that ethical decision-making must be considered as
something existing beyond ‘the programmable application or unfolding of a
calculable process’ (Derrida 1992: 24). Thus, we suggest that management’s task is
not to do as modern conceptions of decision-making recommend, but instead should
be one of enhancing and maintaining structures within which moral agents can
understand the conditions of undecidability with which they are faced as opportunities
and responsibilities (rather than as threats and fears) and that actively foster a more
democratically responsible decision-making process (Charan 2001). Such democracy,
however, needs to take into account decision-making in terms of responsibility – that
is to ask both who gets to make the decisions and how and to whom one might be
responsible when making decisions.

Discussing Derrida has thus brought decision-making squarely into the realm of the
ethical. What, then, should be the relationship between decisions, organization and
ethics? There is a conventional view that the decisions made can be related to
variables associated with individual decision-makers (e.g., read off from gender,
class, education, occupation, etc.) and to variables which define the situation in which
decisions are made (e.g. organizational culture, governance structures and so on) (see
for example Ford and Richardson 1994; Loe, Ferrell and Mansfield 2000). Here
 14

organizational ‘rules’ for ethical conduct are seen to be located in a corporate culture
‘that explicitly promotes and encourages ethical decision making; (Chen, Sawyers and
Williams 1997: 855). In this vein, Gottlieb and Sanzgini (1996) propose three
dimensions that are important in moving organizations towards the creation of ethical
norms and assumptions – leaders with integrity and social conscience; organizational
culture that foster dialogue and dissent; and organizations that are willing to reflect on
and learn from their actions. Such approaches draw important relationships between
decision-making, organizations and ethics. While we are sympathetic to their
concerns, we are troubled by the ethics of such theories in that they seem to propose
that the ethical conduct of organizations ought to be improved by isolating and
manipulating particular ‘variables’ and that by institutionalising cultural norms this
improvement can be facilitated. Thus, the project of ethical decision-making appears
to be one that desires normative control on the basis of its own implicit moral
positioning. The call is for ethical theories that are ‘rigorous and relevant’ for
theoretical, empirical and normative agendas (Harrison and Freeman 1999). Such
normativity suggests that norms and rules ought to govern decision-making. Given
our discussion of undecidability, however, we contend that the application of such
rules would be the very revocation of the possibility of a responsible decision.

The implications of this for decision-making practice are significant, as the Eichmann
case – as an extreme version of the rule-bound positions in which many good people
find themselves, organizationally, everyday – makes clear. On our analysis, Eichmann
was guilty as charged – but so would be the train time-tablers, the drivers, switch
operators, and all the other silent witnesses, as well as the personnel in the camps.
Being in organizations and doing things according to rule should not be a sufficient
account to justify ethical irresponsibility. Rather, it is the insight that firstly the
quality of the decisions made depend on the organizational power/knowledge regime,
and secondly, that the ethics of decisions is based in the fundamental undecidability of
decision-making, that we want to put on the agenda of management and organization
theory.

Final Remarks

Facing the ivory tower that theory constantly tends to build, even a Descartes
(1954:13), godfather of scientific rationality, stated:

'It appeared to me that I could find much more truth in such reasonings
as every man makes about the affairs that concern himself, and whose
issue will very soon make him suffer if he has made a miscalculation,
than I the reasonings of a man of letters in his study, about speculations
that produce no effect and have no importance for him – except that
perhaps he will feel the more conceited about them, the more remote
they are from common sense, since he will have had to use the greater
amount of ingenuity and skill in order to make them plausible.'

Thus, as Descartes stated, reflecting on the philosophical underpinnings of

management and organization theory can be a fertile undertaking for both philosophy
and management. Sad then, that management and organization theory seem very
largely to have turned their back on such reflection, except to conjure up ghosts from
 15

positivism, realism, and other ancient isms, which our paper seeks elegantly, through
the use of Derrida, to sidestep (see the debates in Westwood and Clegg, 2003 as
warrant for these observations). There is philosophy after Popper, after philosophy of
science, and there is no reason, a priori, why maintaining their ignorance of these
discussions should lower the moral culpabilities of management and organization
theory students.

References

Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bennington, G. (2000) Interrupting Derrida, London: Routledge
Chandler, A. D. (1962) Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the
American Industrial Enterprise, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Charan, R. (2001) Conquering a culture of indecision, Harvard Business Review
April: 75-82
Chen, A.Y.S., Sawyers, R.B. and Williams, P.F. (1997) Reinforcing ethical decision
making through corporate culture, Journal of Business Ethics, 16: 855-865.
Chia, R (1996), Organizational Analysis as Deconstructive Practice. Berlin/New
York: Walter
Cohen, M.D., March J.G., and Olsen J.P. (1972) The garbage can model of
organizational choice, Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1):
Czarniawska, B. (1997) Narrating the Organization , Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1988) Afterword: Toward and ethic of discussion, in J. Derrida, Limited
Inc. (Ed. G.Graf), pp. 111-154, Evaston IL: Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, J. (1992) Force of law: The mystical foundation of authority, in D. Cornell,
M. Rosenfeld and D.G. Carlson (Eds.) Deconstruction and the Possibility of
Justice, pp. 3-67, London: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1994) Nietzsche and the machine: Interview with Jacques Derrida,
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 7, Spring 1994.
Derrida, J. (1995) The Gift of Death , Chicago University Press
Derrida, J. (1996) Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism, in C. Mouffe (Ed.)
Deconstruction and Pragmatism, pp. 77-88, London: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1997) The Politics of Friendship , London: Verso.
Derrida, J. (1999a) Adieu to Emanuel Levinas, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (1999b) Hospitality, justice and responsibility' in R. Kearney and M.
Dooley (Eds.) Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. New
York: Routledge, 1999.
 16

Descartes, R. (1949) A Discourse on Method, London: Dent.

Descartes, R. (1954), Mediations on First Philosophy. Wherein are demonstrated the
Existence of God and the Distinction of Soul from Body. Philosophical Writings.
London: Thomas Nelson and Sons
Fayol, H. (1949) General and Industrial Management. Excerpt reprinted in D.S. Pugh
(Ed. 1990) Organization Theory: Selected Readings 3rd Ed., pp. 181-202, London:
Penguin
Fenwick, G. and Neal, D. (2001), Effect of gender composition on group
performance, Gender, Work and Organization 8(2): 205-225
Ford, R.C. and Richardson, W.D. (1994) Ethical decision making: A review of the
empirical literature, Journal of Business Ethics, 13: 205-221.
Foucault, M, 1980, Power/Knowledge, C. Gordon (ed.), New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fulop, L., Linstead, S. and R. Clarke, (1999), Decision-making in organizations, in: L.
Fulop and S. Linstead (eds), Management. A Critical Text, pp. 295-334,
MacMillan: South Yarra
Glover, S., Bumpus, M., Sharp, G. and Munchus, G. (2002), Gender differences in
ethical decision making, Women in Management Review 17(5): 217-227
Gottlieb, J.Z. and Sanzgiri, J. (1996) Towards an ethical dimension of decision
making in organizations, Journal of Business Ethics, 15: 1275-1285.
Hamel, G. (1996) Strategy As Revolution, in Harvard Business Review July-August:
69-82
Harrison, J.S. and Freeman, E.E. (1999) Stakeholders, social responsibility, and
performance: Empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives, Academy of
Management Journal, 42(5): 479-485.
Jones, C. (2003) As if business ethics were possible, ‘Within Such Limits’ …,
Organization 10(2): 223-248.
Kelman, H. C. (1973) Violence without moral restraint, Journal of Social Issues,
29(4): 25-61.
Laclau, E. (1996) Deconstruction, pragmatism, hegemony, in C. Mouffe (Ed.)
Deconstruction and Pragmatism, pp. 47-68, London: Routledge.
Lindblom, E. (1959) The science of “muddling through”, Public Administration
Review 19(2):79-88.
Loe, T.W., Ferrell, L. and Mansfield, P. (2000) A review of empirical studies
assessing ethical decision making in business, Journal of Business Ethics, 25:
185-204.
March, J. (1988), The technology of foolishness, in: March, J. (ed) Decisions and
Organizations, pp. 253-265. Oxford: Blackwell.
March. J. G., and Simon, H. A. (1958) Organizations, New York: Wiley.
Nietzsche, F., (1968), The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Books
 17

Raffoul, F. (1988) On hospitality, between ethics and politics’, Research in

Phenomonology, 28: 274-284.
Schutz, A. (1967) The Phenomenology of the Social World, Evanston, Ill:
Northwestern University Press,
Smith, A. (1961) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Starbuck, W., Organizations as action generators, American Sociological Review,
1983, 48: 91-102
Taylor, F. (1967/1911) The Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Norton.
Ten Bos, R. and Rhodes, C. (2003) The game of exemplarity: Subjectivity,
Scandinavian Journal of Management, 19(4): 403-423.
Tsivacou, I. (1996), The written form of planning, Scandinavian Journal of
Management 12(1): 69-88.
Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weick, K. (1969), The Social Psychology of Organizing (First edition). Reading:
Addison Wesley.
Weick, K. (1979), The Social Psychology of Organizing. (Second edition). Reading:
Addison Wesley.
Weick, K. (1995), Sensemaking in Organizations, London: Sage.
Westwood, R. and Clegg, S. R. (eds) (2003) Debating Organizations, London:
Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (168) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell.