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Charity No

313712

From Value Conflicts to Dual Mandates: Do Organisations at the Beginning of the 21^st Century Face an Ethical Impasse?
Fernando Leal & Patricia Shipley

At any given time we believe in many different norms, which may have contradictory implications for the situation at hand.

Elster 1989, p. 129

The humanising of technology is likely to involve the increasing introduction of moral issues into the now largely ‘instrumental’ relation between human beings and the created environment.

Giddens 1990, p. 170

In this globalised world of the third millennium economies, societies and organisations are increasingly being defined by knowledge. That’s the starting point of this conference. Knowledge is, or has become, a commodity that travels around swiftly and efficiently. As such, it has a profound impact both in the places in which it actually originates and in other places which are, geographically or mentally, very far from that origin. This is all part of the very meaning of knowledge societies, knowledge economies, and even of globalisation.

Now for knowledge to be able to go from one place to another and to exercise such tremendous effects, a previous process must have taken place, a process which we seldom think about: knowledge has to be packaged in appropriate ways, it has to be converted into bits and bytes, it has to be coded. Knowledge, whether true or false, sensible or meaningless, relevant or irrelevant, does not start its eventful and consequential career in the world in the form of clear, ie readily intelligible and communicable units of information. Knowledge is in the beginning always vague, formless, intuitive, elusive, hard to express. And means have to be found to do the work of expressing, means which are not innocent, which have all sort of intended and unintended consequences and even, we may say, a life of their own. We will never understand the nature of knowledge economies, knowledge societies or knowledge organisations if we don’t come to terms with this original fact. As such, it is an essential part of the diagnosis of our current malaise.

If we may anticipate a little: our current malaise is ethical in nature. Which is why that word appeared in the title of our submission in the first place, even though this conference might appear at first sight as the wrong forum to discuss ethical issues. Before our potential readers throw up their hands in despair, we want to make a point clear: we use the word ‘ethical’ in full consciousness of its complex history and its liability to all sorts of misunderstanding and misuse. The point we made before about the difficulty of expressing knowledge and the lack of innocence of the means of expressing that knowledge applies to this particular case.

Of course, we have misgivings about it, which is why we shall introduce it as cautiously and gently as we can. For the undeniable fact is that no other word can do its work. The present paper, whose main task is to present a diagnosis of our malaise has thus to travel a long and somewhat meandering way to make its different points. Knowledge is certainly at the centre of it, which you may think is good, but so is ethics, which you may think is bad. Yet neither knowledge nor ethics can be the place to start. As far as the modern world is concerned, in the beginning there was rationality. So that’s where we start, at the beginning.

As is well known, Max Weber conceived modernisation as a process of rationalisation. His analysis is still considered one of the best, if not indeed the single best attempt at a comprehensive theory of what has been happening in, and to, the advanced societies and economies. A lot of things have taken place since he died eighty years ago, but the tendencies he painstakingly observed and meticulously described seem to have deepened rather than radically changed. In fact, the iron cage seems to be even more strongly forged than it was when he memorably wrote about it.

Weber’s scheme is based on a theory of individual action whose intelligibility to the observer depends on emotion, habit, and reason – or rationality – in quite complex ways. A very common misunderstanding of Weber’s subtle distinctions is that emotion and habit are excluded from rational action. He never intended that. When he talked about emotional (‘affective’) and habitual (‘traditional’) actions as distinct from rational actions, he only meant to point out that some human actions are purely emotional or purely habitual, not that emotion and habit are not part of rational actions. In other words: the intelligibility of an action (our capacity to give a reasoned account of it) is inversely proportional to the amount of pure emotion or pure habit that action contains. Nothing here to make anybody think that Weber neglects the ‘dark’ side of people.

Anyway, rationality as a source of intelligibility has a particularly prominent role to play, especially as the specific traits of modernity begin to unfold. No other sociologist has made such a profuse and subtle use of the concept, or concepts, of rationality than Weber. A simple count of the occurrences of the word and its cognates in Weber’s work runs to several hundreds. The most famous passage (and the one we will be mainly referring to in this section) is, of course, §2 of the ‘Sociological categories’ (a first version of which was the general prolegomenon to his 1921 contribution to the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, see Weber 1922). We shall see in a later section that another Weberian distinction (that between material and formal rationality) is as important as this one, if not more so.

From the beginning Weber makes quite clear that there are, so to speak, two kinds of rationality, namely the rationality of ends (Zweckrationalität) and the rationality of values (Wertrationalität). Rationality of ends is usually defined by means of three procedural traits:

1. Define the end you desire with as much precision as possible.
2. Among the available means choose those most appropriate to that end.
3. Direct your attention to the success of the endeavour.

Rationality of ends has been formalised via decision theory and game theory. Its most popular model is Rosenblueth’s idea of a teleological machine: the envisaged result is allowed to control the outcome via a feedback mechanism (Rosenblueth et al. 1943). It has also been called instrumental rationality, especially by its critics, whose objections can be summarised as follows:

1. There is no rational procedure to search, choose, and evaluate the means over and above the need for precision. In fact, rationality of ends seems compatible with the pursuit of irrational ends.
2. The only criteria for choosing the ends are availability and appropriateness. Availability seems unobjectionable in that it seems to be a kind of realism. But appropriateness may on the one hand be unrealistic insofar as it presupposes perfect information on the part of the actor and on the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, may ultimately lead to Machiavellianism (‘the end justifies the means’).
3. There are always hosts of unintended, unpredictable and undesirable consequences of human action. Such unintended consequences increase with the complexity of the environment and the technological sophistication of the means.

The general picture emerging from these criticisms is that of a perfectly rational actor who is ruthlessly pursuing what may be horribly irrational ends. Hence the expression ‘rational fools’ coined by Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen long ago (see Sen 1976-1977). The critics’ picture can sometimes be quite bleak, for we know that there are no perfectly rational actors on earth, so what remains are only the possibly irrational ends. Yet in fairness to Weber, it must be said that he insisted on a fourth procedural trait to complete his picture of the rationality of ends, namely:

1. Foresee and monitor the consequences, desired and undesired, of the intended action, for not only the means should be appropriate to the ends, but the consequences of our actions should also be appropriate (commensurate, not disproportionate) to the ends.

This other kind of appropriateness, clearly expressed in Weber’s writings, is often glossed over in discussions of rationality in general and of Weber in particular. Nevertheless, an objection immediately springs to mind:

1. Although concentration on success is mitigated by careful foreseeing and monitoring of consequences, the latter are increasingly difficult in a complex world.

The four objections to rationality of ends raise the question of a three-fold acceptability:

• acceptability of the ends we want to achieve by our actions,
• acceptability of the means we want to use to achieve our ends,
• acceptability of the consequences of the actions we carry out in pursuit of our ends.

People who criticize rationality of ends would probably agree that such three-fold acceptability would make a far better rationality than the merely instrumental one. In Weber’s work we often find that the concept of a rationality of values is introduced precisely to do part of that job. By the way, it is at least interesting to note that, although the literature, both academic and professional, on the rationality of ends (often under the shape of ‘rational choice’) is enormous and multidisciplinary, writings on the rationality of values are rather scarce. In fact, rationality of values as a topic is clearly an underdeveloped field – a remarkable exception being Raymond Boudon, who in a remarkable series of books and papers written in the last 15 years has been trying to develop Weber’s ideas (Boudon 1986, 1990, 1995, and for a direct interpretation 1996a and 1996b).

Anyway, according to Weber rationality of values has to do with something like single-minded realisation of values, with acting in the world in accordance with deeply held convictions – duty, dignity, beauty, piety, truth, justice, ‘the cause’ – no matter what the (often quite predictable) consequences in the real world might be. The reader can sense here that rationality of values has its own problems. At its worst, it reminds one of old Roman adages like summum ius summa iniuria (‘the maximising pursuit of right produces a maximum of wrong’) or fiat iustitia pereat mundus (‘let justice prevail even if the world goes under’). It also inspired Weber’s important distinction between an ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) and a mere ethics of conviction (Gesinnungsethik). Idealists who just unflinchingly follow the latter sort of ethics will ignore the consequences of their actions at least as often as the amoral actors of the business and military worlds whom we hear so much about.

This theme, although present in Weber, constitutes a central subject of analysis in Pareto’s general approach to sociology, first adumbrated in a number of papers and in his courses on economics, then more particularly applied to socialism and liberalism (1901-1902) and finally systematised in his massive Trattato di sociologia generale (1916). We don’t need to remind the readers of the enormous, if not yet properly investigated, influence that Pareto had – especially via L. J. Henderson (1935) – on the American theory of organisation. In any case, Pareto believed, and demonstrated in great detail, that all good things – as well as all bad things – on earth are produced by deeply held beliefs and values.

Ignoring the consequences of one’s actions is foolish, whether we are ‘rational’ or ‘idealistic’. That’s why rationality of values was not unambiguously better for Weber than rationality of ends. He was obviously worried about both rationalities and about the effects of both in the world. Nevertheless, he thought that rationality of values is often all we have to choose between incompatible or conflicting ends. In fact, one could say that for Weber the two kinds of rationality, in spite of their contrary nature, are more or less always combined in real human action. That’s one of the reason why we may want to say that rationality of ends and rationality of values are ‘ideal types’ in Weber’s terminology.

Moreover, we will have to recognise that the distinction – albeit undoubtedly useful – masks the fact that ends are nothing if not an expression of values. (Incidentally, this is what Pareto meant when he classified ‘interests’ as a subclass of ‘residues’.) So what really distinguishes both sorts of rationality is not so much the opposition of ends and values, but the attention to consequences. Yet it is not clear that actions guided by instrumental rationality are necessarily always well aware of them.

In order to apply Weber’s analysis more aptly, we would like to remind the readers that the conflict between ends often takes place between different actors, either individual or collective. We can here usefully distinguish between conflicts of interests and conflicts of values. Both the distinction and the following argument has been developed at more length in earlier papers (Leal 1998, 2000, in press).

In a conflict of interests the values of the conflicting parties are the same, eg the quarrel is not about whether money is what both parties want but about who gets how much of it. In fact it’s because the parties want the same thing that a conflict of interests emerges in the first place. This sort of thing happens not only in profit-making organisations but also in so-called disinterested ones. The frequent quarrels among scientists and scientific teams about priority of discovery are a very good example. The parties here also share values – in this case it’s not money but knowledge – but their interests – who gets the prestige – provoke a struggle. (Some readers would cynically add that prestige is often accompanied by more clearly financial awards. This may be true in our Big Science world, but only an outsider can really believe the struggle is really at bottom over money alone.) Now, because conflicts of interests are founded on a solid rock bottom of agreement in values, they can be handled, and eventually even resolved, by negotiation. In fact, even the toughest negotiation is to some extent easy because the parties in a conflict of interests understand each other only too well.

Not so the conflicts of values. To make our point perfectly clear, let’s imagine a situation in which the parties in a conflict of values share a common interest, say they are both interested in preventing the organisation in which they work from being swallowed by a bigger one; they want to preserve their organisation as it has been. Yet what each of the parties understands the nature and purpose of their organisation to be is subtly different – because of the very different values they cherish. Universities, for instance, can sometimes be very important from a political point of view in certain communities; this political weight can be something which some administrators (and academics!) consider very valuable indeed. So if such a university would be threatened with cutbacks, privatisation, or dismemberment, the political people may be as interested in fighting back as those academics (or administrators) who value university life because of teaching and research. An interesting conflict of values might ensue which may manifest itself only at the level of strategies (how can we save our university?), but is much deeper than that. The curious thing about conflicts of values is that they are tougher than any pure conflict of interests can ever be; and that is because the parties involved do not really understand each other.

Of course, the distinction between conflicts of interests and conflicts of values is ‘ideal-typical’ in Weber’s sense. No actual conflict is as pure as all that; in real life agreements and disagreements over both interests and values are always mixed to some extent. But it is a useful construct all the same, especially in view of the widespread cynicism according to which interests is all there is to conflicts. We think this is wrong and misleading. Values are not interests; and the picture of our all too human struggles and quarrels is essentially incomplete if we leave values aside or reduce them to mere interests. Having said that, we admit that values are only part of the whole picture; our emphasis on them is in a sense methodological. Most social scientists prefer to talk about culture, meanings, symbols, discourse, strategies, modes of negotiation, interests, power relations and whatnot; all these are certainly important factors in social life, but not to the exclusion of values.

This is perhaps the most important part of Durkheim’s legacy; but we tend to forget it all too easily. When discussing division of labour in society (1893), Durkheim indulged in the metaphors, images and ideas which the rise of Darwinian biology and the invention of experimental physiology (Claude Bernard’s control mechanisms of physiological subsystems) had made very popular in the late 19^th century. That’s why it has become too easy to criticise Durkheim’s structural functionalism. But while we may be partly justified in doing so, we may also lose sight of the fact that Durkheim’s central intention was to illuminate the problems of society from an ethical point of view. (Durkheim, of course, used the adjective ‘moral’ rather than ‘ethical’, but he was certainly far from confining the meaning of ‘moral’ to the narrow field of sexual mores, as many people have both before and after him.)

Durkheim was deeply worried by the signs of disorder (anomie) which he detected everywhere around him and which would indeed end up in an all-embracing conflagration (la grande guerre), to be rapidly followed by an even more extensive and destructive second world war. He was worried by poverty, crime, suicide, popular riots, and political corruption. So for him the problem of the division of labour in society was an ethical problem, and the usual functionalist answers relating it to the creation of wealth and economic development or the increase of scientific knowledge, efficiency and excellence, culture and civilisation he found very unsatisfactory.

Division of labour is for Durkheim not only and nor even mainly a matter of social fact but first of all an ethical imperative (or rather: it is a social fact that it is an ethical imperative). Division of labour originates in ethical impulses, it serves ethical purposes, it is the basis of the ethical order of society. How could that ethical order be maintained and developed? How could we prevent disorder from destroying human society? Durkheim’s great hope was that the different ethical orders generated in the professions as a result of the increasing division of labour were the answer. At the beginning of the 21^st century, however, this hope appears to be not only unfulfilled but in a sense completely wrong. Yet his question, and the ethical viewpoint which informs it, is all the more relevant. So in that respect it would be useful to complement Weber’s immensely important and subtle conception of rationality with the ethical sense more clearly to be found in Durkheim’s work, despite all the misgivings we may have about other aspects of his functionalism.

Division of labour is not only about labour, it is as much about values. And if values are what ethics is about, then division of labour is a matter of ethics. Not only the work we realise jointly but our values as such – all those good things we want to realise through our joint working efforts – get divided and apportioned: some people take care of some of the good things and other people take care of other good things. In a university I take care of teaching, you take care of research, she takes care of the funds. In a commercial business I take care of the stock, you take care of the accounts, she takes care of the sales. In a police precinct I take care of the paperwork, you take care of the beat, she takes care of the prisoners. In a hospital I do the nursing, you do the room assignments, she does the diagnosing.This is, of course, a simplified version of often very complex arrangements. But the ethical essence of the thing is thereby preserved: each portion of the joint work is attached to certain values to be realised, either the comfort of the patients or the efficiency of the management, either the gentle introduction of beginners to the world of science or the astute maneuvring between political agendas, either the satisfaction of the customer or the orderliness of a workshop. Thus each group develops its own norms, its own symbols, its own moral climate. Within any single group produced by division of labour there are things one should do and things one should avoid at all costs. There are lines drawn, limits that cannot be trespassed, codes of conduct only insiders quite understand. This is how things work, and, more importantly, how people work, when division of labour is in place.

That was the essence of Durkheim’s message. And also something that is only half clear in his own work, but which is, if anything, more important: human beings develop as human beings through such ethical division of labour. They learn what they are and what is valuable through the process of becoming a member of a group that has a particular role to play within society or an organization. In this respect conflicts of value are absolutely central. They help us define who we are and what we stand for. This does not mean that we have to understand conflicts of value in a necessarily benign way. Our values, and the conflicts which emerge because of them, certainly make us; but they can also break us. For that is precisely what a value amounts to: the kind of thing without which we cannot live (because it gives meaning to our lives) and in whose defence we are prepared to go very far indeed. How far, that depends on circumstances. But people have been known to die, and even to kill, for an ideal, a vision, a dream. Of course, things are usually far less dramatic than that. But it is useful to remember we are not talking about trifles here. Otherwise we will be unable to understand the passion which presides over conflicts of value.

Well then, what we are now witnessing is a post-Durkheimian order, in which division of labour thus understood is under massive and global attack. Or at least that is our diagnosis. Contemporary organisations and societies are increasingly polarising in that people are being assigned to one of two categories. On the one hand, we have people who only find employment in what may be called junk jobs. These are poorly paid, mechanical and externally-paced, routine-like, boring, unqualified (even for the qualified, who are underemployed in them). Women and young people are very often the particular victims of junk jobs. There are plenty of examples in modern electronic offices as described e.g. by Garson (1988). The so-called ‘McJobs’ epitomise junk jobs as described by Ritzer (1998), who expounds the concept of ‘McDonaldisation’. In the third place, we have people who have the good jobs, i.e. jobs which are challenging, varied, creative, forever changing, self-paced, exciting, qualified and even highly qualified; in a word, the exact opposite of junk jobs. Everything is as it should be; or at least it may seem so until we notice that the old ethical structure, as found on the division of labour, is crumbling around the good jobs. (We don’t use inverted commas around the expression ‘good jobs’, because this would sound like cheap irony. The matter is too serious for that.)

Not having a job at all is the deepest form of exclusion imaginable. But junk jobs are also a form of exclusion. On the face of it they are just an extreme form of division of labour. Its distant source is obviously Taylor’s ideas on ‘shop management’. In fact, there is a clear line of organisational thinking leading from Taylor through Ford to McDonald’s. It has to do with the kind of knowledge that can be defined and packaged into job descriptions which are precise to the last minute detail. Yet something fundamental has changed here. To understand that, we need another of Weber’s extraordinarily fruitful and sagacious distinctions, namely that between material and formal rationality, which is orthogonal to the distinction between rationality of ends and rationality of values. The concept of ‘formal rationality’ was introduced by Weber in relation to the sociology of religion around 1913, and later extended especially to the sociology of law and more schematically to economic sociology (the most important sources are Weber 1920 and 1922).

If the two distinctions are orthogonal to each other, we can have four combinations in the good old manner of Parsons, as shown in Figure 1.

[PLACE FIGURE 1 HERE]

We offer here a list of some of the most obvious historical examples of people acting according to one or another combination of rationalities. The list is necessarily incomplete, but hopefully suggestive. Material rationality of ends is above all the province of the ‘man of action’. (No apologies for the gender bias, for it reflects a social bias throughout history.) It is based on some form of means-end calculus which is rarely reflected upon, not systematic and mostly intuitive. At some point in history another kind of people emerged who, more or less at the service of the ‘men of action’ started to give formal (intellectual, cognitive) expression to that kind of rationality. Whole systems of thought, disciplines and even ‘sciences’ were constructed for that purpose and with more or less success. A parallel development took place in the domain of the rationality of values, where pundits of all colours have tried to find verbal and systematic well-reasoned formulations for the values which first made their appearance in the world via a different brand of ‘practical men’, those who dictate and pontificate on divine things, the order of the universe, the right morals, the good taste, and so on.

Now Weber is often credited with the idea that the emergence of the modern world through rationalisation is a movement from rationality of values towards rationality of ends; and there certainly are passages in his work which suggest that. But he was actually more insistent on the movement from material towards formal rationality. And it is in this context that our argument about junk jobs can be stated. These are jobs which embody certain ends and certain values in such a way that the employee has nothing to say about them, but is simply an instrument to realise them: from the size of the hamburger to the smiling at the customer, everything has been codified and systematised. There is no conflict of values because (1) the employee is not asked to identify with the values involved in the job, and (2) there is no room for interpretation, modification or otherwise organic development of such values. In the old division of labour, the employee could be treated in the beginning of her career as an ignorant apprentice, but in the course of time she was able, and sometimes actively encouraged, to propose changes. Her development as a person paralleled her career and was an element in the development of the profession itself. That was a central aspect of what Durkheim had in mind when he thought so highly of the particular moral codes of the professions. In junk jobs all that is abolished (see Sennett 1998). Yet junk jobs can still be interpreted as a form of division of labour (even if degraded and degrading). What about good jobs?

Some examples of good jobs are: the nurse, the air traffic controller, the train driver. We could also include the academic, and perhaps even more acutely the professional academic, in this category. These jobs are good because they employ and utilise the skills of qualified and well-trained people, they carry some status, are comparatively well paid and there is plenty of scope for discretion on the job. So far, so good. The problem starts when we see that it is in great part the challenging and creative aspect of these jobs which are increasingly accompanied by dual mandates. The concept of a dual mandate can be traced back to ideas developed in the 1950s by Everett Hughes on the sociology of professions (1959; see also 1958). In a nutshell, Hughes argues that social science has a dual mandate, in that it is supposed to deliver general knowledge of social processes as well as historical and contextual accounts of particular events. More relevant for our purposes, Hughes suggests that behind this hides another dual mandate: to help society cure its social evils as well as to deliver knowledge and truth. Such professionals are left coping with the dilemmas produced by such tensions and by a potentially irreconcilable inner conflict of values.

We could provisionally characterise these hidden mandates as internalised value conflicts on the assumption that at best they are only partly in the job holder’s awareness. There is a question of terminology here: a ‘mandate’ is more external, a ‘value’ more internal, yet (a bit paradoxically) the ‘duality’ is internal and the ‘conflict’ external. So we need to use both concepts to capture the complexity of the issues. The from-to in the title of our paper refers to the second fact, viz. that conflicts of value are more readily interpreted as taking place between different parties (individuals or groups) and not within a person, whereas the expression ‘dual mandate’ implies that there is an internal conflict. (Dual mandates were originally assigned to social science, thus to a social role or institution, not to a person. However, the extension does not seem to be unjustified.)

The distinction between good jobs and junk jobs can only be clarified in terms of value conflicts: as we suggested before, junk jobs effectively exclude their incumbents from participation in value conflicts, and thus, we could say, from healthy development as individuals. (The social communities junk jobbers belong to may also be deprived of the creativity and skill which such people may otherwise have been able to develop in the workplace.) Now, in good jobs value conflicts may in principle be said to take place between individuals, and/or between groups of individuals in organisations (classically between labour and management groups). The complex modern labour market consequent on so-called ‘globalisation’ is, however, replacing overt value conflicts with hidden dual (or multiple) mandates. The nature of value conflicts is completely changed by this displacement with the consequence that the relatively few remaining good jobs are becoming increasingly inhumane too.

Conflict can be healthily dealt with if it is out in the open. If not, it can be stressful. In his discussion on the dual mandate of the social scientist Hughes concludes that trying to unite the two sides of the hidden conflict could land the professional in trouble. To illustrate from our own experience one has only to consider the role of the professional ergonomist who may be torn between meeting the interests of big business or protecting and promoting the welfare of the workforce. Look also at the roles of health care workers and managers in Britain’s contemporary welfare state and National Health Service. Whose interests are truly being served by them? The 1990s was a decade of great change in the NHS when the traditional caring ethic of the service was challenged by the introduction by the government of a neo-liberal market philosophy of competition and managerialism. Paperwork, meetings and cost-cutting tactics intruded into care work and resulted in the alienation of many care workers who point to a plethora of ‘them and us’ dualisms: care vs money; budgets vs employees, working for patients or working for the hospital trust, administration vs hands-on care. We could generalise this question to cover all the officials in state bureaucracies. How far are they agents of the state or public servants?

Nurses are archetypes of caring professions. They are under stress by the intrinsic nature of their emotionally draining work, but this is added to by extrinsic stressors from excessive bureaucratic rationality. Jocelyn Handy (1990) investigated the dual mandate element of the British mental health nurse. In particular, she was interested in the hidden conflict between the caring side of the job and the controlling custodial side. She found that nurses were reluctant to acknowledge the existence of the value tension. Indeed, as if in some kind of subconscious process of collusion they were hardly aware of it. In Ritzer’s (1998) terms you could say that the nurses regulated themselves in conformity with management’s expectations. Their defensive coping behaviours in fact resulted in reinforcing the very stressors from which they were trying to escape. The old public service ethic can be exploited by management. The rhetoric, the ‘angel of mercy’ role, is promulgated in many ways. The female child is ‘born’ into the caring role and this belief has been reinforced in the nursing schools and on the job.

Lest this example is taking us too far away from the field of globalisation and the 21^st century we turn now to another good job, that of the air traffic controller, who in busy airports today with the aid of advanced technology is at peak times juggling high traffic loads, traffic loads which are expected to increase massively in a relatively short time as a result of the continuous pressure from air travel in an economic climate of never-ending growth. Everyone is on the move these days. It is as if these people are at the edge of their skill in a world where technology, growth and rationality appear to have bumped up against the limits. It is a round-the-clock service which is typical of the global modern economy. The obvious biological and psychological stress of this job is compounded by the stress from the subtle dual mandate – balancing the need for safety against the demands of the industry for growth and efficient and speedy turn round of highly expensive aircraft.

Similar arguments can be presented on the current predicament of train drivers (the infamous Paddington crash was less an accident than a result of speed and efficiency pressures which in this case overrode the driver’s concern for passenger safety), teachers, university academics, and all sorts of professionals. A common feature of good jobs seems to be the encroaching of a limited set of values – formerly reserved for a particular group of people within the organisation – upon the incumbents of all groups. We can conceive an organisation under the old Durkheimian dispensation as a set of interacting groups, each one imbued with a particular ‘ethic’, charged with the preservation and promotion of particular values. The conflicts emerging from the fact that the different ‘ethics’ thus represented within any single organisation had to be fought out, they were part of some form of ‘political’ struggle. This is what in our view is coming to an end.

The set of values being imposed on everyone else seem to fall all on one particular side – that of Weber’s rationality of ends, eg efficiency of output. We are certainly not against such values per se. We are as aware as the next guy that those values are necessary to the wellbeing and sheer survival of organisations. But it is a fact of life that those values sometimes enter into conflict with other values, eg the quality of the output. A case in point is the current predicament of academics. Under the old division of labour, all they had to care for was high standards in teaching, learning, research. Under the new post-Durkheimian dispensation they increasingly, and sometimes oppressingly, have to worry about budgets, fund-raising, student turnover, terminal efficiency of doctoral programmes, and so on. Why, even teachers of primary and secondary schools are crushed by all the non-teaching duties they have to fulfill these days.

Before we go any further, we would like to make an important disclaimer. People tend only to see the dark side of things – say, the division of labour as unmitigated evil. We are here in a sense making the opposite case that not everything is (or was) wrong with it. That does not mean everything is right, either (as should be clear from what we said on junk jobs). And again, in spite of the awful aspects of reduced division of labour, which this paper emphasises in relation to the good jobs, we do not think for a minute that everything is wrong with it. In fact, that is the main reason we still want to speak of certain jobs as good, even if they can be made better.

Not just the workload of good jobs (the characteristically long hours and long weeks) is the problem with them. The people we are talking about (nurses, teachers, etc.) are usually conscientious, so they go to enormous lengths to protect and promote the values endangered by the omnipresence of the gods of efficiency. They have to find by themselves ways and means to achieve a forever precarious balance between conflicting goals and ideals. In the process they can, and often do, get burnt out. In his discussion on the role of norms in bargaining and collective action Jon Elster (1989) caricatures ‘everyday Kantians’ (his expression) as people who always, or almost always, want to act on principle and more or less refuse to consider the consequences of their actions. This is a suggestive picture of what happens when collective action is shaped politically, ie by the Durkheimian process of developing an in-group ethic and defending it against other groups. But our post-Durkheimian Kantians are vastly different. Yet they are there.

For there is another side to the coin – we call it ordinary responsible behaviour or just ordinary goodness (see Oborne et al. 1993, Leal 1995). Without this quality (the responsible, caring commitment of the nurse, the train driver, the air traffic controller, the teacher, the academic, there are many examples from many walks of life) our systems would crash. If, according to the popular mechanical metaphor, the system (the organisation) is a machine, then the ‘everyday’ or ‘practical Kantians’ in it are like little greasers and oilers – there are many of them – and they are constantly monitoring and lubricating the wheels of the machine to guarantee its smooth functioning. They use their skill, know-how, their discretion, and will even rise to the occasion at times of stress and pressure on off days prioritising the system above their own comfort needs. Management knows this and yet frequently fails to recognise it openly, and to support and reward such people properly. Instead, they may allow these ordinary responsibly-minded creative people to be exploited through means like dual, or even multiple, mandates, covertly depending on the workforce’s sense of duty and capacity to cope with stress.

What we refer to as this ‘ordinary goodness’ is a common phenomenon but many workplace colleagues (easy-riders, if you like), who take advantage of its existence by not pulling their weight, also complicate the picture. So the system needs (and gets) these little dutiful oilers, who are forever running all over the place until they drop exhausted. Think of the dedicated nurse and her frantic efforts at trying to properly care for her patient against all the odds as opposed to lapsing helpless into ‘defensive’ and ‘collusive’ coping (Handy 1990). It is often only when these committed individuals rise up in protest, or ‘leave the field’ – the job, the organisation – refusing to play the game anymore, where such protest is discouraged in the workplace in an anti-union climate, that managers sit up and take notice.

We said before that these good people are there, millions of them. One question is, of course, for how long. Imprudent generals have been known to lose all their good soldiers in order to keep control over a strategically meaningless position (have you seen The Thin Red Line?). Even efficiency can be jeopardised by too single-minded attention to it.

Anyway, the big question is here, again, one of knowledge – very important yet barely-understood knowledge – which is still crucial in a new machine age, in an electronic age of digital economies. What is it that these ordinary people know and what is it that other people know, or may think they know, about them? It is informal vital knowledge, closer perhaps to what Michael Polanyi referred to as ‘tacit knowledge’ (1958). It is under-researched and under-theorised knowledge. Why? For at least two reasons: Management might not openly value it, and even if they did it is difficult to research and pin down because it is more than technical skill; it is a sophisticated knowledge which includes a special psychological, indeed moral, something as well as skill. Skill is notoriously difficult to analyse, as any ergonomist will admit, even if seen from a merely instrumental point of view. It becomes even more difficult to understand and appreciate once we realise that in practice skill is always combined with certain values. It embodies individual intentions – to maintain the status quo because things are going well or to seek to change if it is judged to be not up to standard. But we barely know how to express these in a formal way.

The text books and management training manuals are replete with formal knowledge. The clerks help the bosses with their administration and the professionals help them, in their capacities as agents of the state or of business, by doing the research, writing it up and presenting it for ‘consumption’. They code it. Once coded it is subject to rules and regulations, to routines and procedures. In general, material rationality of ends works, but sometimes the ‘man of action’ needs the help of these pundits, who are originally recruited from the professional world (originally priests, lawyers and doctors, later also engineers) but in the modern university-based world increasingly from the academic world (statisticians, economists, sociologists and psychologists are the most obvious cases). They all help the ‘man of action’ to encode the knowledge necessary for sophisticated instrumental rationality. Such codes (from laws and regulations to contracts and job descriptions, from industrial psychology and time-and-motion studies to decision and game theory, from cost-benefits analysis and quality control to IQ testing, and so on) serve also the purpose of control.

But the knowledge and rationality of ordinary goodness is very different: it is deeply informal. You can’t code it. It eludes analysis. That’s why individual creativity and discretion is always needed on the job. At the centre of that informal uncodeable knowledge is ethics. But that knowledge is in the last instance inexpressible. Which is why instrumental rationality (Weber’s rationality of ends) always wins over axiological rationality (his rationality of values). Bosses who fail to acknowledge and sustain this are actually ‘rational fools’. They operate complex systems which are prone to crash and which are plagued with myriad unintended consequences – with stuff they cannot control. Their ordinary staff may fail to flourish in such systems and give of their best. They risk exploiting their staff instead of treating them with respect.

We argue that these ordinary people act on the basis of a Weberian rationality of values. Now that rationality is difficult to express for the actors. For the most part they rely on some form of Giddensian ‘practical consciousness’, although from time to time they actually manage to voice their concerns and complaints, either by themselves (Hirschman 1970) or with the help of another sort of ‘theoretician’ – social scientists prepared to listen to them in an appropriate manner. But it is painfully clear that we are much smarter and vastly more successful in verbalising and systematising rationality of ends than we are in doing the same kind of job on rationality of values.

The complex game played by the ‘man of action’ and his material rationality of ends aided by the ‘theoretician’ and his/her formal rationality of ends, constitute together the full picture of instrumental rationality at work. Anyway, the organisational malaise, together with the more general social (extra-organisational) malaise produced by the effects of wild instrumental rationality on the public sometimes create the supposed need for codes of ethics. So enter the pundits again to help by formulating written codes of practice. But do these ethical codes help? Can one put one’s values onto paper in such a way that it really solves the problems? We have our doubts. Durkheim’s hope of professional groups building up strong ethical codes which would save society from ‘anomie’ was probably mistaken. They are no substitute for ordinary goodness.

The Tavistockers with their concept of the sociotechnical system in which social and technical dimensions were to be perfectly balanced was also misconceived. (They probably wanted to appease the techno-freaks). What we have now in reality is the social swallowed up by the technical, ie axiological rationality subservient to instrumental rationality, and with ordinary goodness saving the day again and again. This is surely the case in good jobs. In the case of junk jobs it is not even that , as McJobbers frantically try to get a proper human life outside the organisations in which they work, sometimes in surprising admirable ways (cf. Wuthnow 1991), or sometimes in horribly wrongheaded ones, such as through the drug scene.

To escape from the iron cages of instrumental rationality – differently conceived by Weber and Ritzer – we need technique that is subservient to the social, ie instrumental rationality under the control of axiological rationality. (Although, we would not wish to deny there are problems here as well). For sure, technology is a good servant but a bad master. Our diagnosis seems bleak on the face of it. But there is hope. There are signs of ‘organising knowledge societies’ in an ethical way. Because that’s where we want to go: to ethical people, trying to do ethical jobs in ethical organisations. This is the task in front of us.

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Figure 1

Weber’s four types of rationality, and some social actors who typically embody them