Critical Moral Philosophy and Management

Edward Wray-Bliss

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Critical Theory on Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Reason and the Moral Philosophy of Critical Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Management, Critical Theory, and Moral Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Abstract
This chapter considers the contribution which critical moral philosophy can
make to an understanding and appreciation of management. It concentrates
principally upon works in the Critical Theory tradition – authored by such figures
as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno. It also draws in
contributions of other critical writers such as Hannah Arendt who, while not
identifying as part of this tradition, nevertheless shared its abiding concerns
and Kantian philosophical heritage. The chapter is structured as follows.
Section One, Critical Theory on Management, outlines Critical Theory’s take
on our administered, rationalized, managed society. Section Two, Reason and
the Moral Philosophy of Critical Theory, considers the moral philosophy which
informs and underpins Critical Theory. A number of Critical Theory’s philosoph-
ical debts are noted, including its fundamental indebtedness to Immanuel Kant’s
conceptualization of a reasoned morality. The final section of the chapter,
Management, Critical Theory, and Moral Reason, considers what implications
the critiques and concepts discussed in this chapter have for management and
managers today.

E. Wray-Bliss (*)
Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: edward.wray-bliss@mq.edu.au

# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

C. Neesham, S. Segal (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management,
Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_5-1
2 E. Wray-Bliss

Keywords
Critical Theory · Hannah Arendt · Immanuel Kant · Instrumental rationality ·
Managerialism · Reason

Introduction

In writing a chapter exploring the contribution of critical moral philosophy for

our understanding of management, there are numerous moral philosophies and
works with philosophical relevance that could figure. To give this short chapter a
specific and achievable focus, however, it will concentrate upon one main body of
work, the Marxist-informed tradition of Critical Theory. Critical Theory refers to
writings that originated at, or were later strongly influenced by, scholars at the
Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (often reduced to the “Frankfurt School”).
It is most associated with Max Horkheimer, and writers such as Herbert Marcuse and
Theodor Adorno who worked at the Institute in Frankfurt under Horkheimer’s
directorship during the 1930s, and in exile in the USA when the Nazi government
made continuing their critical work untenable in Germany. Under Horkheimer’s
direction, the Institute undertook to revise orthodox Marxist thought, which was
considered to reproduce a problematic economic determinism and reductive class-
based analysis, and to develop Marx’s project through genuine interdisciplinary
work involving philosophy, psychology, law, economics, history, and the study of
culture. Supplementing, then, its Marxist foundations, Critical Theory was strongly
informed by other conceptual resources including Weberian critiques of rationality,
Hegelian philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Kantian moral philosophy.
Critical Theory’s influence spread far outside its geographical and temporal
origins, defining or dovetailing with the concerns of other influential writers such
as C. W. Mills, W. H. Whyte, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman,
Robert Jackall, Robert Putnam, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin – and its ideas
and concerns continue to have a strong influence on the field of critical management
scholarship (Alvesson and Willmott 1992).
From its beginnings Critical Theory sought to produce social critique that trod
a line between what it regarded as two inherently problematic approaches to
knowledge. The first was a positivistic empiricism, which was understood as a
gathering of ‘facts’ that failed to subject these to moral critique or philosophical
appraisal, thereby foregoing the critical role of considering how reality ought to be
and not just how it is. The second was that of an idealist or abstract philosophy,
which was regarded as a retreat from the conditions and difficulties of the real to
the realm of pure speculation and ungrounded ideals. In treading this line between
the sterility of empiricism and the futility of abstraction, Critical Theory was strongly
informed by the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant – on whom Horkheimer wrote
his postdoctoral thesis – and in particular Kant’s critique of reason. The Kantian
moral philosophical concept at the heart of Critical Theory is explored in a later
Critical Moral Philosophy and Management 3

section of this chapter. First, however, the chapter considers what Critical Theory
would have to say about management today.

Critical Theory on Management

Management, in general, is not viewed positively by Critical Theorists. For instance,

in the opening of One-Dimensional Man, perhaps the most famous paragraph in all
of Critical Theory, we do not have to look hard to see the hand of management
implicated in each of Marcuse’s laments:

A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial

civilization, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than
the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful
performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive
corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic sub-
jects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the interna-
tional organization of resources. (Marcuse 1964 [2002], p. 3)

Themes in the above critique are each carried forward by other critical writers.
Vance Packard, in The Hidden Persuaders (1957 [2007]), would highlight man-
agers’ use of psychological research and subliminal tactics to market products
in ways that captured and subverted individual drives and desires. For Erich
Fromm (1976 [2007]), consuming came to displace other expressions of self or
creativity, and a ‘having’ mode of life comes to dominate and diminish a more
‘being’ orientation. For Marcuse and Horkheimer, commoditized mass culture
would “dissolve traditional forms of art, literature, philosophy” (Marcuse 1941,
p. 158) and “. . .human relationships tend to a point wherein the rule of economy
over all personal relationships, the universal control of commodities over the totality
of life, turns into a new and naked form of command and obedience” (Horkheimer
1941, p. 39). Within the workplace, psychology again was to be deployed by
managers, this time to more effectively capture not consumers but employees.
Taylorism’s monopolization of managerial control over work would be cast as
liberating employee potential; productivity would be increasing through exploiting
the individual’s social needs and ‘human relations,’ or their desire for a sense of
personal achievement and ‘self-actualization.’ More recently, individuals’ contra-
dictory drives for group acceptance and individual uniqueness would be exploited
to maximum advantage within corporate culture; and employee identity would
be reconstructed around discourses of entrepreneurialism and self-management.
For critics such as C. W. Mills (1951, p. 235), techniques and tactics such as these
would be regarded as managerial “attempts to conquer work alienation within
the bounds of work alienation.”
While citizens were being seduced by consumerist fantasies, dreams of self-
actualization, or latterly maximizing their portfolio of job-ready skills, organizations
would consolidate and grow, and this would change their relationship to the people
within them.
4 E. Wray-Bliss

In a world crowded with big ugly forces, the white collar man (sic) is readily assumed to
possess all the supposed virtues of the small creature. . . The white collar man is the hero as
victim, the small creature who is acted upon but who does not act, who works alone
unnoticed in somebody’s office or store, never talking loud, never talking back, never taking
a stand. (Wright Mills 1951, p. xii)

Administering, controlling, and psychologically manipulating white collar and blue,

consumer and employee, were the tasks assumed by the growing ranks of managers:
“at the top, society becomes an uneasy interlocking of private and public hierarchies,
and at the bottom, more and more areas become objects of management and
manipulation” (Wright Mills 1951, p. 77). These managers would conceive of
themselves as “morally neutral characters whose skills enable them to devise the
most efficient means of achieving whatever end is proposed” (MacIntyre 1985,
p. 74). Such ‘means-ends’ rationality diffused throughout the organization (Bauman
1989) and beyond: into the rationality of everyday life (Lefebvre 1947 [2008];
Hancock and Tyler 2009). “Its features can be summarized as the optimum adaption
of means to ends. . . It is a pragmatic instrument oriented to expediency, cold
and sober” (Horkheimer 1941, p. 28). As a result, the ability to reflect critically
upon the ultimate desirability of ends is diminished for all sections of society: for
political classes and academics (Marcuse 1964), for the population at large, and for
management itself. “Reflective thought and theory lose their meaning in the struggle
for self-preservation” (Horkheimer 1941, p. 38). Managers themselves become
dulled and risk-averse (Whyte 1956). Entrapped within a claustrophobic milieu
of organizational politics and riddled with anxiety over the efficacy of their own
actions, they replace decision-making in the long-term interests of the organization –
let alone society, humanity, or the world at large – with a focus on individual careers
(Jackall 1988). One of the major casualties of this is morality itself. Rising up the
organizational hierarchy replaces consideration of substantive moral issues. At all
times this is a deleterious situation. And at the worst moments in history, such focus
on career advancement and instrumentality can enable atrocity. Hannah Arendt’s
(1963 [2006]) account of the mind-set of senior Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann,
reported from Eichmann’s 1961 trial for war crimes, is the landmark study here.
“Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement,”
she would observe, this war criminal “had no motives at all” (ibid, p. 287).
Drawing us closer to the present, and to the last elements of Marcuse’s opening
quote, contemporary critical writers highlight the narrow wealth-maximizing eco-
nomics, the instrumental rationalities, and the usurping of the state which define
neoliberalism (Harvey 2005). This has produced “quantitatively extreme” (Picketty
2017, p. 367) inequality, where disparities in income in a context such as the USA
now match those of the late Victorian era. Management is deeply implicated
here too. The dramatic inequality is largely the result of “the emergence of extremely
high remunerations at the summit of the wage hierarchy, particularly among top
managers of large firms” (ibid, p. 374). Thus the “primary reason for increased
income inequalities in recent decades is the rise of the supermanager in both financial
and non-financial sectors” (ibid, p. 398), representing the “veritable separation of the
Critical Moral Philosophy and Management 5

top managers of large firms from the rest of the population” (ibid, p. 32). Extending
Picketty’s analysis further, Duménil and Lévy (2015) go so far as to argue that
economies such as that of the USA are now in a new mode of production, a
“managerial capitalism.”
As we have seen in this section then, management in general is not favored
by Critical Theory nor, indeed, by a broader pool of critical writers. As purveyor of
an instrumental economic rationality, management is regarded as the harbinger of
an administered, disenchanted, and fundamentally unequal world. What though is
the central moral philosophical concept that Critical Theory is drawing upon to fuel
their disavowal?

Reason and the Moral Philosophy of Critical Theory

The fundamental concepts of civilization are in the process of rapid decay. . . The question
of how far these concepts are at all valid clamors more than ever for answer. The decisive
concept among them was that of reason, and philosophy knew of no higher principle.
(Horkheimer 1941, p. 27)

As Horkheimer avers in these lines from his essay The End of Reason, the central
moral philosophical concept of Critical Theory – if not Western philosophy more
generally – is reason. Reason and its corollaries – rationality, thinking, and (what
to our modern rationalized world may seem unlikely bedfellows) the formation
of ideals and the notion of freedom and of moral self-determination – form the
backdrop to the critiques of advanced managerialist/capitalist society presented
above.
Much of the work of Critical Theorists would focus upon the capture of reason
in modern society. Marcuse, for example, would argue in his 1941 essay,
‘Some social implications of modern technology,’ that liberal society was founded
upon the ideal of the human individual “as the subject of certain fundamental
standards and values which no external authority was supposed to encroach upon.
These standards and values pertained to the forms of life, social as well as personal,
which were most adequate to the full development of man’s faculties and abilities”
(pp. 139–140). As a rational being, the individual “was deemed capable of finding
these forms by his own thinking and, once he had acquired freedom of thought,
of pursuing the course of action which would actualize them. Society’s task was
to grant him such freedom and to remove all restrictions upon his rational course of
action” (p. 140). Free competition was enshrined as the basis upon which such
individuals could best pursue their own interests. However, competition led to
consolidation of property and an imperative to grasp the competitive benefits
of machine production and mechanistic organization. As a result, there was a
progressive eradication of the ‘costs’ of nonproductive, noninstrumental
(or non-machinelike) behavior and attitudes. This was accompanied and preceded
by a subordination of reasoning – first of the owner of production, then the
6 E. Wray-Bliss

employee, and eventually all citizens – to the logic of machine production, to

the structures of mechanistic large-scale organizations, to a technological rationality.
As large-scale, mass production, and mechanistic organizations dominated
the landscape, what seemed reasonable was for individuals to work out how best
to survive in the face of apparently overwhelming structures: “. . .through reason the
individual asserts or adapts himself and gets along in society. It induces the individ-
ual to subordinate himself to society whenever he is not powerful enough to pattern
society upon his own interests” (Horkheimer 1941, pp. 28–29). “He is rational who
most efficiently accepts and executes what is allocated to him, who entrusts his fate
to the large scale enterprises and organizations which administer the apparatus”
(Marcuse 1941, p. 157). There was, as such, no lack of reason in modern society.
On the contrary, there was a surfeit, an overwhelming and deadening abundance.

We live and die rationally and productively. We know that destruction is the price of progress
as death is the price of life, that renunciation and toil are the prerequisites for gratification
and joy, that business must go on, and that the alternatives are Utopian. This ideology
belongs to the established societal apparatus; it is a requisite for its continuous functioning
and part of its rationality. (Marcuse 1964, p. 149)

For all its technological rationality and seemingly irresistible reasonableness – and
the objective irrationality of pausing in the individual pursuit of productivity and
success to think critically, to reflect, or to question – the nature of reason embodied
by advanced capitalist society was only a faint shadow of what was once hoped
for it.
Some idea of what reason could be can be gleaned by looking again at Hannah
Arendt’s reflections on the trial of Nazi war criminal Eichmann. Arendt would
write that there was no radical or profound evilness to this orchestrator of mass
murder. On the contrary, “the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past
as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was
something entirely negative. . . a curious, quite authentic inability to think” (1971,
p. 159). In works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Life of
the Mind (1971), Arendt would argue that the systematic destruction of thought, “the
eradication of thinking in human beings, their ceasing to think for themselves, and
their willingness to obey superiors who gave them orders” (Kristeva 2001, p. 148),
was at the center of totalitarianism. Could, she posed, “the activity of thinking as
such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass,
regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be
of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evildoing?” (Arendt 1971, p. 160).
The link between reason and morality would go further still in Critical Theory.
The rational, for Marcuse (1964, p. 145), “is a mode of thought and action which
is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.” What is
rational is that which furthers human and other life, and what is irrational is that
which harms or cheapens that life. Reason, in this understanding, has a ‘subversive
power,’ the power to subject the ‘facts,’ or what seems oppressively inevitable, to a
higher set of ideals. If the present is found wanting, then that same reason can work
Critical Moral Philosophy and Management 7

toward changing the present and thereby seek to establish “the truth for men
and things – that is, the conditions in which men and things become what they
really are” (ibid, p. 127). Reason, in this sense, is far more than what it has become,
namely, a narrow economic rationality or an individual’s accommodations to a brutal
or overbearing corporatized world. Reason is unashamedly utopian, imaginative,
and idealistic. As such, it represents both the unique nature of humankind and the
way to realize that nature by creating a society that accommodates it.
In holding to this broader conceptualization of reason, Critical Theorists are
joined to a long lineage of moral philosophy. This would include Max Weber,
for instance, whose distinction between different rationalities – in particular,
zweckrational (or instrumental rationality) and wertrational (or substantive rational-
ity) – and his critique of the increasing disenchantment of society, its reduction
to instrumental rationality, its privileging of calculation over substance, and its
bureaucratization and mechanization all figure strongly. Karl Marx, whose formative
influence on Critical Theory is well established, conceived of humankind as having a
particular species nature founded upon the way we execute our labor in the world:
that is, our unique potential to conceive of something in imagination before
we execute it into reality (Marx 1867). Building on this, central to Marx’s ideas
was the notion that people can transform or revolutionize both the physical and
the social world to eradicate the imperative to exploit others or the world itself
for individual gain: thereby to make a world that more readily conforms to the
conditions and relations that foster human fulfillment. In his focus on the transfor-
mation of the real world toward a more rational ideal, Marx was to make an
important break from his teacher, Hegel. Where Hegel would see an idealized and
abstracted logic or spirit working its way through world events, Marx would
emphasize the progressive transformation of the world as a direct result of human
agency (Marx 1843). For Marx, reason, including our longing for an ideal and less
oppressive future, is not just abstract force or philosophical speculation (Marx 1845).
Rather, reason is normative and materialist: we project ourselves out of the present
and direct ourselves to make that projected future a reality. In Marcuse’s (1964,
p. 145) words, “Reason becomes historical Reason.”
While Critical Theory’s conceptualization of reason would owe much to Weber
and Marx, they in turn owed a debt to a far longer lineage of philosophical thought.
Indeed, understanding reason as the defining human quality goes back to Hellenistic
philosophy and Plato. And this privileging of reason was carried, in the neo-Platonic
writings of St. Augustine, into the development of Christianity. Notwithstanding
the intellectual lineage going all the way back to Plato though, it was the
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant who was to undertake the most con-
certed and radical examination of reason in the realm of moral philosophy, and it
was to Kant that Critical Theory owed its greatest philosophical debt.
Kant was to make the crucial distinction between reason and understanding.
Understanding is cognition of experience, the knowledge of how things currently
are. Such understanding is necessary and valuable, of course. But it is only a kind
of accounting or tabulation of the present. Reason, in contrast, is the capacity
to determine ends – and to subject experience to these ends. That is, in order
8 E. Wray-Bliss

to not be dictated to by the limits of how things currently are, and in order to decide
how things ought to be, reason “declares its right to make demands upon experience
in a manner forbidden to understanding” (Neiman 1994, p. 5). For Kant, proposing
ends – practical ideals that are determined through judgments of morality – is the
fundamental human activity. This capacity, not to be dictated to by the world as it
is now but to envisage and work toward the world as we reason that it should
be, defines human freedom. It is such reason that makes us human (Kant 1902, VII,
p. 70).
Kant’s conceptualization of reason is both philosophically and politically radical.
It was a conceptual position that freed human beings from being subordinated to
the present, to facts, or to any ruler or state that did not conform to the highest ideals
of morality – of equality, justice, the good, and the freedom of individuals to
determine their own ends. Indeed, such was the radical nature of Kant’s ideas that
he has been described as the philosopher of the French Revolution (Arendt 1982).
Neiman (1994, p. 111) draws out Kant’s revolutionary concept of reason well:

Every revolutionary proposal is vulnerable to those critics who claim that freedom and
equality may be very nice in theory but are invalidated by the “hard facts” of experience. The
greatest achievement of Kant’s moral theory is the metaphysical foundation of moral theory
itself. . . That moral theory contradicts experience is no surprise: it is precisely reason’s role
to deny nature’s claims to be definitive and to assert its authority by providing laws to which
experience ought to conform.

Kant’s ideas, as Arendt (1982) was to argue, are also radically egalitarian.
If knowledge and understanding are held to be the highest virtues, then those
claiming superior knowledge may defend the right to make political decisions
for others. However, while there can certainly be people with better knowledge
and understanding about particular areas than others – scientists, politicians, doctors,
and perhaps managers, for example – no person has a monopoly on judgments about
moral ideals and ends. For instance, the fact that we may soon have the knowledge
to create artificial intelligence that could make many jobs redundant does not
necessitate that we should do so. That is a judgment of moral reason, over which
no one has an authoritative claim – not least because any such judgment would lead
to futures that we cannot yet experience or accurately predict. Given the radically
egalitarian and indeterminate nature of moral reasoning, we come to Kant’s famous
‘categorical imperative’: as there are no legitimate claims to authority over moral
issues, no one can legitimately subordinate another’s moral reasoning. Indeed to
do so would be to deny the very humanity of the other.
We can see in this Kantian refusal to countenance the subordination of
individual reason the philosophical roots of Critical Theory’s opposition to an
orthodox Marxist position that reduced people to mere bearers of social classes,
economic location, or indeed to the determination of a Hegelian world spirit.
Though they were acutely aware of the totalitarian assault on individual liberty
and the totalizing effects of massive organizations, mass production, and mass
culture, we can appreciate too how these Kantian philosophical ideals enabled
Critical Moral Philosophy and Management 9

Critical Theory – and other critical writers such as Hannah Arendt – to retain a
central and abiding interest in the concept of the individual and the potential of
individual reason.

Management, Critical Theory, and Moral Reason

What might the above discussion of Critical Theory and its engagement with
reason as a moral philosophical concept have to tell us about the possibilities of
moral action on the part of contemporary management?
First, it needs to be recognized that Critical Theory would view the managerial
function as structurally implicated in the problems of the present. Management is
entrenched in calculative and instrumental rationality, and it cannot be relied upon
to produce the kinds of changes that societies will need to make to avert the major
crises we face. At a local level, the lived realities of working as a manager
in contemporary society would similarly tend to preclude individual managers
from exercising the kinds of critical reason privileged by Critical Theory: that
is, radical reflection on the ultimate moral desirability of organizational ends
and concerted action toward changing these ends outside the limits set by the
organization, markets, or share market. The pace of managerial work, its fragmented
character, its unpredictability, the constant demands, the brevity of tasks (Mintzberg
1971), the anxieties of hierarchical judgment (Jackall 1988), and the fatigue
that accompanies many incumbent’s experience of the managerial role – coupled
with the prior socialization, education, and training to think in a managerialist,
calculative, and instrumental manner – all act against managers having the inclina-
tion and energy to question their employing organizations in radically reflective and
transformative ways. As Arendt (1964, p. 37) expresses it in her essay ‘Personal
Responsibility Under a Dictatorship,’ “how unwilling the human mind is to face
realities which in one way or another contradict totally its framework of reference.
Unfortunately, it seems to be much easier to condition human behaviour and
outrageous manner, than it is. . . to start thinking and judging instead of applying
categories and formulas which are deeply ingrained in our mind.” It would seem to
follow from this that effective moral demands for changes in the function and
behavior of modern corporations, if they are to be heeded at all, will most likely
be forced upon managers from outside of the instrumental rationality of the organi-
zation: from recurring climate crises, major political instability from rising inequal-
ity, and the pressures of the mass movement of climate-political-economic refugees,
for example.
Critical Theory, and the moral philosophy that it draws upon, would then tell us
that managerial contributions to making the world more rational, in the sense
of Marcuse’s ‘that which furthers human and other life,’ are likely to be minimal
at best. Management as a function and managerialism as a form of rationality are far
more likely to continue as a mechanism of destructiveness and subordination.
In addition to informing us of the above, critical works and texts can also help us
to recognize some of the false ‘alternatives’ to managerialism and managerial
10 E. Wray-Bliss

rationality that are offered. For example, the idea of transforming mundane,
instrumental management into some form of inspiring or heroic ‘leadership’ and
the premise that the ‘business leader’ can solve just about any intransigent problem
we face are continually mooted in popular and business texts. While we might
understand such a discourse of leadership as being in part born out of dissatisfaction
with the stultifying rationality of managerialism, it does not follow that ‘leadership’
is a progressive response. In ‘What is enlightenment?,’ Kant would highlight the
abdication of responsibility for the world that we live in, a process he characterizes
as civilization’s immaturity.

It is so convenient to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor
who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth,
I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay; others will readily
undertake the irksome business for me. (Kant 1784, p. 17)

To this list of those all too willing to take responsibility from us, we could certainly
add the modern ‘business leader,’ a figure we might understand as a bearer
of instrumental managerialism clothed in an earlier rhetoric, one that assures us
that salvation is near if only we follow them. Critical Theorist Erich Fromm, always
attuned to the ways that elements of human psychology dovetailed with the long
shadow of mid-twentieth-century authoritarianism (Fromm 1942 [2002]), would
have had much to say about the call to venerate business leaders today.
These sober conclusions regarding the limits of managerial moral agency might
evoke Adorno’s (1951) famous quote, “es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”
(which we may loosely translate as “there is no right way to live when everything
is wrong”). However, there are still individual managerial actions of moral note that
we can glean from critical texts. Watson (2003), for example, has argued that some,
particularly ethically assertive, managers can find ways to bring their personal
ethical considerations into their professional roles. Drawing upon Weberian
ideas regarding the irrationalities and moral ambiguities of the world, Watson argues
that there is no pure ethical position available for individuals operating in complex
organizational roles. Instead, individual managers may draw upon situated moral and
ethical discourses to attempt to organize their professional activities in ways
they find more morally acceptable. One gets the sense, from Watson’s article, that
these attempts may be rather piecemeal. However, the work does depict at least some
attempt to bring to bear wider noninstrumental considerations within the orbit of
the managerial role. In other work, Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003) have argued
that it is in what we might regard as the everyday and mundane interactions between
the manager and the managed that feelings of care, respect, and acknowledgment
may be engendered. Such mundane interactions – time spent chatting with and
listening to individual employees and caring enough to remember and ask after
family members by name, for example – will not transform advanced capitalism,
for sure, or combat the acute issues of corporate power that we face. Nor will they
counter the instrumental rationality that remains embedded in the other technologies
and targets that the managerial task routinely carries. However, they can impact
Critical Moral Philosophy and Management 11

upon the experience of working lives and may help to ameliorate some of the
harshness of individuals’ interactions with the modern organized world. This in
itself has some moral merit.
Turning to what managers might do in the face of the more acute issues that we
are confronted with in advanced capitalist society – the environmental crises, the
unprecedented and accelerating inequality, the radical diminishment of state gover-
nance over corporations, and the continual spread of a destructive instrumental
neoliberal rationality across every sector of society – one small but significant
comfort that Hannah Arendt took in her examinations of atrocity in the twentieth
century was the unpredictability of who would refuse the order or the expectation
of immorality:

And when you have made it through such times as those. . . the first thing you know is the
following: you never know how someone will act. You always experience the surprise of
your life! This is true at all levels of society concerning the greatest differences between
people. (Arendt 1996, in Neiman 2002, p. 260)

As Neiman (2002, p. 260) observes, Arendt’s words reveal again her very clear
sympathies with the Kantian idea of the freedom of moral reason: “only the hardest
choices reveal absolute freedom. If nothing in your past determined whether
you collapsed in the face of fascism or whether you defied it, you are free in a
way no tyrant can control.” While we should not by any means compare the call to
complicity in the organized mass murder of fascism with the sort of demands placed
upon the modern manager – notwithstanding the fact that managerialism and
its rationalities are implicated in a number of planet-wide crises we currently face,
from radical inequality to species-threatening climate change – the moral lesson,
indeed the gift, that Arendt, Critical Theory, and Kantian moral philosophy offer is
that of freedom. This freedom is an awareness that all the excuses we may engage in,
or that are offered to us, or that are structured into our professional roles, all the
invitations to ‘go along to get along,’ the pressures to sacrifice what is right for what
is profitable or expedient, or the claims that this is ‘just the way things are,’ are
just thin rationalizations. As a manager, as a human being, the moral choice to
exercise individual reason and refuse to be complicit in whatever problematic
behavior seems expected or inevitable is still, despite all the machinations of
organized, rationalized, managed society, ours to make.

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