Indifference or obedience? Business firms as democratic hybrids.

Abstract

To the perennial question of why and how people obey, organizational and political theories usually offer a restricted vision mainly based on interpersonal power processes and organizational control mechanisms. Although such theories are useful, the recent evolution of business organizations toward post-bureaucratic models means they must be combined with another dimension that we call 'moral obedience'. In this article, we suggest that morality is developing in managerial strategies as business contexts become more and more fragile, uncertain and threatened. We argue that this 'moral movement' may be pervasive in hybrid political regimes of governance combining democratic and bureaucratic aspects. The purpose of business leaders is to create loosened communities where people should feel a sense of duty and where, at the same time, a sense of being unique and competitive should remain strongly embedded in individual rationales.

Keywords: obedience, morality, community, democracy, bureaucracy, hybrids

Introduction

In the jungle of the entrepreneurial post-bureaucratic organization, where empowerment systems apparently play a central role in the enhancement of cooperation, the issue of obedience to an authoritative centralized power deserves scrutiny. A crucial concern of management is how to control empowered people working and acting within consensually based systems of power (Heckscher 1994: 53). To put it differently, the entrepreneurial age could offer business leaders new opportunities to enlarge their employees" zone of acceptance. This article will thus explore how authority and obedience interact within the presumed entrepreneurial systems of governance. Our hypothesis is that new political forms of management have not suppressed the question of obedience to authority, but have given it a new consistency. Post-bureaucratic business firms request obedience because they are individualized and subjectivized forms of organization. Business leaders therefore seek new motives for obedience, because the rule-governed actions and ethical behavior of the classical members of bureaucracies should be replaced by self-controlling practices. In this article, we argue, first, that business firms elaborate specific combinations of 'businessed' self-interest and moral conduct in the management of obedience. Managing these two facets of obedience is a crucial contemporary political challenge for business firms, and therefore, so too is searching for hybrid communities capable of sustaining and supporting the ends of the organization.

Conceiving of business firms as hybrid communities leads us to suggest that the expression of 'voice' is considered morally suspect by managers: for them, it entails following self-interest, and has nothing to do with the overall objectives and values of the firm. Voice is presented by Hirshman (1970) as helping people to make and suggest improvements to the organization, in the kind of 'entrepreneurial spirit' which should be pervasive. Thus, second, we argue that managerial power, in fact, offers no alternative between loyalty and exit. The result of disagreement in contemporary business firms is mainly obedience. But this obedience is not a passive response supposing that people accept a status quo without saying or doing anything to improve or change the situation; it is the result of a social obligation clearly perceived by people. Third, we argue that obedience derives from specific interlinkages produced within business firms between bureaucratic modes of coercion and democratic modes of cooperation, these interlinkages being generated by the permanent infusion of a sense of being part of a fragile community, and thus producing a moral justification for obedience.

Through that political hybridization morality is rationalized and used as a way of generating active forms of obedience, in the name of the collective fate. This article will thus analyze and illuminate how business firms try to combine morality and efficiency in the same movement through specific forms of obedience. It will also suggest that the use of moral rationality in governance is derived from specific external and internal conditions related to dramatic changes in organizational and political forms, and to the increasing power of external threats emphasized by business leaders.