Thomas Klikauer - Critical Management Ethics

Thomas Klikauer

Thomas Klikauer 2010

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First published 2010 by
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ISBN 978-0-230-23825-1 hardback

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is dedicated to

Josef Klikauer

1st October 1895 to 20th October 1944; born in
Konstantynw, Poland; executed at the Nazi Concentration
Camp Gross Rosen, Rogonicy (http://www.gross-rosen.pl).
All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to the
Gross Rosen Museum at Rogonicy.

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 assistance 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 funding 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.

Many books in the area of management ethics are written under the premise that ethics relates positively, if not affirmatively, to management, 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 philosophy 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 management 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 operations, marketing, sales, Human Resource Management (HRM), etc. that needs to be managed.

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 everyday life.(384322 BC) to Kants means-ends imperatives (17241804) 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 managements use of the term value, philosophy applies the same term to something totally different. 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, its all just a matter of opinion, anyway. For many managers 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. 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 managements 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.

In contrast to this formula, one can never simply subsume ethics under management. For one, Kants categorical imperative demands that this has to be done the other way around. For perhaps the greatest ethical philosopher ever Immanuel Kant (17241804), the sage of Knigsberg 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 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 Hirschmans (1970) famous three options of