The Ethics of Shifting Ties: Management Theory and the Breakdown of Culture In Modernity

Abstract

Despite a long tradition of documenting unethical practices in organizations, the sociology of organization literature has seldom addressed the question of management ethics. One early work in the field, Melville Dalton'sMen Who Manage(1959), did develop a contingent approach to ethics that is seen as a precursor to contemporary discussions in modern and postmodern organization theory. In this essay, Dalton's work is interpreted in terms of a premodern or traditional view of moral theory. It is concluded that Dalton and those who have followed him have reduced morality to politics and have provided an intellectual rationale for the contemporary dark ages of moral behaviour with its worship of the cult of the individual.