Nestar Russell - Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2: Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust

Nestar Russell

Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2 Milgrams Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust

Nestar Russell

University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

ISBN 978-3-319-97998-4 e-ISBN 978-3-319-97999-1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950507

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The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

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For Mum and Dad.

Contents

List of Tables

Table 6.1 The rate of killing at Operation Reinhard extermination camps

Table 9.1 Some destructive organizational processes in modern society

Answers are always anywhere anyone asks.

Tony B. Anderson ( Anderson , p. 6)

Schleunes ().

What, in terms of a brief synopsis, were Volume 1 s key arguments and conclusions? At the expense of repeating what I said at the end of Volume 1, this book set out by presenting a resilient conundrum in Holocaust studies . That is, considering that many specialist historians agree that during the Nazi era most Germans were only moderately antisemitic, Extrapolating from this observation, I suggest that if it was possible to delineate Milgrams start-to-finish inventive journey in transforming most of his participants into compliant inflictors of harm on a likeable person, perhaps the insights gained might shed new light into how onlymoderatelyantisemitic Germans so quickly became willing executioners.

So how then was Milgram able to quickly transform most ordinary people into torturers of a likeable person? I argue he did so by deploying formally rational techniques of discovery and organization. To be clear, what exactly did I mean by the term formal rationality ?

Max Weber conceives formal rationality as the search for the optimum means to a given endthe one best way to goal achievement. Webers model of a formally rationalized strategy was bureaucracy , an organizational process designed to find the one best way to goal achievement. To construct the one best bureaucratic process , managers break an organizational goal into a variety of discrete tasks, the achievement of which they allocate to different specialist functionaries or bureaucrats . Using a predetermined sequence, each bureaucrat performs their specialist task by following certain rules and regulations , after which the next bureaucrat in the organizational chain performs their specialist task until the goal is achieved.

The specific rules and regulations each bureaucrat follows are determined by what past history has suggested to managers is probably the one best way to goal achievement.

Building on Webers legacy, George Ritzer argues that organizational strategies like bureaucracy have four main components: efficiency , predictability , control , and calculability (E.P.C.C.). Efficiency is the pursuit of a shorter or faster route to goal achievementthe optimal means to a desired end. Predictability is the preference that all variables operate in a standardized and thus foreseeable way, thereby enabling managers to steer an organization toward future beneficial outcomes. Control is greater manipulative command over all factors and therefore the elimination of as many uncertainties as possible. Greater control enables greater predictability (especially as human labor is, over time, replaced by more controllable, predictable, and efficient non-human technologies). Finally, calculability involves the quantification of as many factors as possible. Advances in calculability enable greater measurement, which extends control over more variables and in turn improves the predictability of future outcomes. The greater the degree of formal rationality (advances in E.P.C.C), the greater the chance of discovering the one best way of arriving at organizational goal achievement, whatever it might be.

The one best way of producing motor cars over the past century or so provides an excellent example of advancing E.P.C.C. The production of the first-ever motor cars involved a few skilled engineers and tradespeople laboriously constructing and then attaching handcrafted parts to a stationary vehicle frame. This technique was not only slow (inefficient) but also unpredictable as the variable, non-standardized car parts ensured an equally variable end-product. Furthermore, because the engineers and tradespeoples skills were rare, they could resist managements coercive attempts to make them work faster by, for example, threatening to quit or go on strike (uncontrollable). Because control and predictability were low, management struggled to calculate daily, monthly, and annual production outputs. Thus, E.P.C.C. in relation to the one best way of manufacturing motor vehicles was low.

Henry Ford then invented the inherently bureaucratic motor car assembly-line production process. In Fords factory, a line of vehicle frames moved along a conveyor belt. The frames moved past many specialist assembly workers, each of whom sequentially attached a standardized car part. At the end of the moving line, a constant flow of assembled vehicles emerged. Fords moving line caused production efficiency to greatly increase. The standardized car parts meant identical end products, and thus predictability also increased. The set speed of the moving line enabled Ford to quantify daily, monthly, and annual output, thus increasing calculability . But it was control perhaps that advanced the most. If one worker failed to keep up with the speed of the moving line, to the frustration of other workers and management alike, a bottleneck might form. Therefore, the set speed of the moving line in conjunction with a fear of falling behind pushed workers to perform their tasks faster than they probably would have on their own accord. The assembly line is therefore an early example of a more efficient non-human technology capable of imposing greater workforce controlall felt pushed by an unsympathetic machine into working quickly. And if workers resisted the set speed of Fords moving line (by quitting or going on strike), because they were unskilled, he could more easily replace them. Fords one best way of producing motor vehicles increased all four components of a formally rational system. It transpires Ford developed this revolutionary system by relying on his intuitive feel of what might work best, his previous life experiences, and his real-time observations of the emerging production process. Thus, it was