People engage in ethical transgressions and there are ethical ways to deal with the existence of such transgressions. People behave badly to one another all the time without being thought to have either abandoned their role or their humanity, on the one hand, or to have simply made a mistake, as happens when they apply the wrong postage to an envelope. Indeed, much of ethical life consists of people finding ways of forgiving or excusing one another's behavior while continuing a relationship, or using lapses in ethical behavior as reasons for modifying a relationship or even letting go of or breaking a relationship. People regularly tell stories to one another about why they lost friends, why people drift apart, how their bosses betrayed them. People also tell themselves or their psychologists or their lovers why past relationships foundered and what sense they make of that in constructing their present lives and relationships.
One important area of ethical life, therefore, is dealing with the consequences of ethical judgments. How does one ethically respond to the recognition or the accusation of ethical lapses by oneself or others? This question is usually applied only to the person who has lapsed from proper ethical conduct. Can that person be trusted again? Does a person caught in an ethical lapse feel guilty, apologize, make amends, commit suicide? But it also applies to how to relate to the ethical lapses of people with whom one is associated. There are ethical considerations that fall on those who deal with the lapsed, such as whether a person is obligated to forgive another. Can a coach refuse to play an athlete who had flubbed his last chance? Moreover, there are ethical considerations that a person who has failed at ethical life must take into account other than the way to overcome the stigma of having ethically lapsed. The person must learn how ethical lapses are noticed and how blame for them is placed. In short, ethical life is not only a matter of individual or collective responses to transgressions, but provides multiple structures through which can be understood the inevitable ethical transgressions that take place in social life. People can be over amorous in courtship or insufficiently diligent at work or meek on those occasions when they might assert their rights.
Durkheim wants to treat all ethical transgression as occasioning horror or suicide or the invocation of the gods, for that is what the untoward emotions deserve, since they are a rejection of some defining element of a society or a rejection of the very idea of society. But social life is more forgiving than that, since people not only have emotions which are excessive for a particular setting, but regularly act on them. People are not so fine tuned that they always feel what they are supposed to feel or form judgments which are identical with those of others in their group. Indeed, people are praised for having their own insights or being slightly more concerned than most of their colleagues about getting a job done or pursuing the job in their own manner, which is to say, with their own characteristic feelings rather than with the usual degree of feeling.
Transgressions, as well as other aspects of the ethical, stand out in bipolar role sets. These are sets of two roles which are opposite to one another on some dimension or other, and therefore appreciated in conjunction with one another. Three of these bipolar role sets will be used to demonstrate not only the ubiquity of ethical life as a constituent of social life but also the particular ethical stances required of different roles. Employees and employers are a bipolar role set based on the bureaucratic distinction between those who make decisions and those who carry them out. Spouses and lovers are a bipolar role set based on the putative antagonism between those who court or cohabit with one another despite the differences between the sexes (or those supplemental differences of age or character which may substitute for gender differences in homosexual or lesbian courtship and cohabitation). Children and parents are a bipolar relationship where the antagonism is based on bipolarizing stages of physical and social maturation into responsible adulthood and not yet responsible childhood. All these bipolar relations have a characteristic asymmetry in the way in which the blame for transgressions are distributed. It is unethical to blame employers but it is not unethical to blame employees. It is unethical for spouses to blame one another except in private. And it is unethical for parents to blame children.
Friendship, on the other hand, is a non-bi-polar relationship and so does not invoke asymmetrical responses to transgression. Friends do not take responsibility for the weaknesses or successes of one another except to the extent that we are rhetorically and practically all responsible for one another. Friends can give advice, can have deep feelings for the fate of one another, can be competitive or otherwise ambivalent about the relationship, but there is less of a struggle to say that they have their own lives to live, which is to say that their weaknesses and strengths do not become a courtesy stigma, as Goffman might call it. A friend who is a nerd does not make you one, though it may raise questions about why you would want to associate with nerds. Whether you are a nerd by your associations is an empirical question, while whether you are responsible for the weaknesses of your spouse is not, in that it is an ethical premise of the relationship, even though not part of the definition of the relationship.
What binds an hierarchical work organization together, whether it is a church or a government or a profit making organization, is the idea that the boss is always right. Whatever the shortcomings of the boss, people assigned to that boss adopt the emotional or ethical stance that it is their job to carry out the goals of the superordinate or at least make the superordinate look good, or failing even that, make it appear that the desires of the superordinate are being honored. A bureaucratic structure of the sort that Weber identifies may make it in the self interest of the subordinate to carry out the wishes of a superior, but the ethos of a hierarchical organization may require a subordinate to tell a boss the bad news even if that is not in the subordinate's self interest, or for an officer to carry out the orders of a general even if those instructions seem foolhardy, or for a political operative to do what an officeholder might want done even if that is never announced so as to retain deniability in case matters don't work out.
It is only the exceptional case, however, where the subordinate must infer that what is to be done is different from what the subordinate has been instructed to do or is contrary to the subordinate's self-interest. For the most part, the infallibility of bosses is demonstrated in the fact that bosses are given responsibility for the successes of their employees, but not for the weaknesses of employees. This is true whether or not people claim responsibility, which may of course be pro forma. Richard Nixon, when asked whether he was responsible for his employees, simply said "yes", as an acceptance of his general responsibility for everything that went on in his administration, but that was a way of claiming he was not responsible for the particular transgressions of the people who operated under the color of White House employees. Had he denied responsibility, it would have made only a rhetorical difference. Those who worked for him had engaged in transgressions. The American people, on the other hand, who employed Richard Nixon, could impeach him for his failures to, among other things, supervise his own employees. The characteristic of whether one can find fault with an employee is therefore independent of what might be culturally acceptable or rhetorically acceptable at one time or another, but is a non-distributed characteristic of the relationship. A politician can take credit for the work of a speech writer and can be blamed by the public for what he says but the politician does not take the blame when the speech writer has not been able to meet the deadline for preparing in the speech.
It works out the same way in less elevated examples of employment. A manager can take credit for an organization which does good work but the manager can blame the organization for their failures at work, haranguing them to do better. An employee may grouse to another employee about how bad work circumstances are, but to grouse to an employer makes the employee look bad-- either a complainer, a malingerer, or insubordinate. An employee may, on the other hand, advise the employer on how to improve the work organization, couching what might be taken as criticisms as objective descriptions of problems the employer faces in the organization.
This is not simply a matter of the employee deferring to the superior power of the employer, trying to stay on the employer's good side. Rather, it is in the nature of the role of being an employee (i.e. part of the ethical strictures of work roles or, in other terms, the "culture" of bureaucratic life) that one is at least putatively trying to be of assistance in getting the work done. The employer is the one who sets priorities by giving instructions and the employee's job is to make the boss look good by making the unit productive. The employer can therefore take credit for having motivated the unit and selected the staff, even if the staff has spent its time covering up the deficiencies of the employer since, after all, the employer could not have been so deficient as an organizer or motivator if the unit was driven to get the job done, even if they thought they were doing so despite the obstacle of their employer, and even if they thought the real object of the unit was not to do the things that get the boss to look good.
In short, the structural meaning of the ethical precept that the boss is always right is that organizations always rely on position holders to define whether the next immediate subordinate is doing a good job. The descriptive wisdom of the ethical precept is that it provides a solution to an ineluctable feature of those organizations which are designed with goals in mind, such as providing a service or a profit or an education. It is peculiar to goal driven organizations that there is no other way to tell if an organization is being successful, even though other kinds of social structures, such as families, only sometimes come to ask themselves whether they are successful or not, with the possibility of divorce as the result.
Even in the most rational or economic or bureaucratic of organizations, any management style is a successful one if its results are successful, but the only measure of that success is whether the supervisor of the boss of the unit under examination thinks a good job is being done. There are at least three aspects of the structure of hierarchical organizations that lead to the inevitability of uncertainty about the success of the organization. First, it is difficult to consult the process of the organization to determine whether the organization is well run because there is no single management technique that is regarded as procedurally essential, so that management skill can be measured as a process rather than an outcome. Some managers delegate authority, while others don't; some managers emphasize psychological and group dynamics; some emphasize task orientation; some managers are mean, some are nice; some managers are hierarchical, some are informal.
Second, hierarchical organizations are such that only what the supervisor perceives as accomplishment is recognized as such. Some will be convinced by data, others by output, others by personal relations. The employees of the unit may think they are doing a bad job or an irrelevant one, but the person who supervises the unit head for the larger organization is by definition the one with the monopoly of control of information. Whatever information that person regards as sufficient proof or disproof of the effectiveness of the unit is the truth about the unit. It is very rare that an organization will conduct a full scale audit of its management to tell exactly where the fault lies, sorting through all the conflicting stories of personnel to find out what is the heart of the matter, rather than whether the sub-unit is accomplishing its goal to the satisfaction of the superior, regardless of the impediments to the meeting of the goal, and so the manager is fired because that is easier than any other course, and takes the heat off the superordinate.
The superordinate is similarly evaluated, but as a manager is more likely to be evaluated against externals of the organization. So what seems like poor results may be a result of a downturn in the market, the "maturity" of an industry, outrageous governmental regulation, bad luck, or any number of other reasons which can be offered to show that the manager did the best that was possible under the circumstances. There is no controlled experiment that can be used to see if it might have gone better with a different manager.
Large organizations are particularly subject to this reasoning because they are so hemmed in by externals, which is to say that they profit or suffer from externals such as the real estate market or a war or foreign competition. Large organizations also provide so many excuses for an insulated upper management that it is difficult for a board of directors to decide who is culpable, even if the bottom line looks bad-- because even that is subject to financial manipulation through, for example, trading off future investment for current profits.
Thirdly, any procedures or goals adopted by an organization can be regarded as necessary even if they adversely affect the bottom line. In business, that means that not every part of the organization is a profit center, but is justified as a way to contribute to the eventual profits of the organization. Research and development and corporate charitable contributions also serve their functions in the organization, as do golden parachutes and interlocking directorates and any number of corporate practices. It would be difficult to imagine a corporate practice that could not be justified as a legitimate business expense.
Public sector hierarchical organizations are no different. A hospital provides health education whether or not it can be demonstrated that it reduces the cost of providing health care in that community because it may improve health care for the population as a whole and because it satisfies the politics of the local community and the benevolence of doctors. A school can spend a large part of the school year providing its students with games and parties because these are motivators for those occasions when lessons are being taught, though it is never clear how much motivation is required or should be the responsibility of the school.
Generally speaking, any activity of an organization can be regarded as a function of the organization necessary to its larger goal of making a profit or providing a public good. Irrational activities are simply those not immediately related to the production process, and so necessary for the maintenance of the organizational culture or for the good offices of the consumers, the public and the government. Different organizations specify these functions differently because of the view of the leadership of the organization or because the culture of the organization is too difficult to change to make it a worthwhile activity. In short, treating organizations as rational in the sense that each one of them has a specific goal which is to be maximized, is incorrect, even for those organizations that claim to be economic and so only to be interested in a calculation of profit and loss. There are many ways to get there.
The rational model of an organization is also challenged by the fact that the line of loyalty need not be unilinear or purely hieratic. Members of an organization will trust to their peers rather than to their bosses because of the religious or ethnic ties they have to one or the other, because they have shared common training or "battlefield" experiences or have come up with the same cohort, and because their cohort has developed a different management "philosophy" or set of skills. The computer literate may look askance at managers who cannot run regression lines, even if they keep this distrust to themselves or share it only with confidants, biding their time until they become managers and so can do things the right way.
When an employee has other roles, as a labor negotiator, as an after hours friend of the boss, that person is in a position to say other things. But an employee who is not supportive is being difficult, something to be managed or excused as an excess caused by strain or personal difficulties. The "culture" or ethics of professional life, on the other hand, lead to less productivity than does bureaucratic life precisely because the obtrusive opinions of colleagues have to be given due respect.
Some employers are regarded as particularly nice because they do indeed seem to accept rather than cast aspersions upon their employees, not shedding blame but accepting it. But to do so is to be regarded as unusual not in the statistical sense but doing what a boss is not required to do to be a boss and risking being ineffective as a boss. The boss who takes the blame for a subordinate is foolhardy not only because the boss is endangering his own position but the credibility of the unit as a unit, while letting the subordinate go does not endanger the unit, even though keeping the subordinate may also result in increased solidarity within the unit, a tradeoff which the employer may consider. So there may be employers that go beyond their ethical character as bosses, but that does not mean that being a boss does not have an ethical character, since ethical rules are not ones which cannot be violated or only violated to a certain statistical degree. Ethical rules are, rather, characteristics of the interaction of a role and their violation is simply a way of doing the role that can be considered wrong or right.
An employee who regularly says to customers that he only works here is wrongly performing his job as, let us say, a postal employee, not because his job requirements include being polite to customers, which may well be the case, but because the employee is blaming failure on his employer, in this case the Post Office, rather than taking responsibility on himself, or blaming a letter carrier rather than the system, let us say, for a late delivery.
It can therefore be said of that postal employee that it is the employee rather than the job that is wrong, the ethics rather than the role. And, indeed, that is what we regularly do say of those who blame their superiors for their bad work performance, that it is their personal failing rather than the failing of their role, since if the role is so awful, find another job or go on strike or make a political or legal issue of the structuring of the role. A postal employee who goes berserk can claim, as a matter of morals, that work alienation made him do it, but he can't claim, as a matter of ethics, that he killed a supervisor because the supervisor was mean to him. More routinely, customers can expect employees to act in a conscientious manner, for otherwise they are not acting as employees.
Some people have great difficulty learning the ethical dimensions of their work. Children and students are regularly reminded to learn to be conscientious, to assume that the burden of work will fall "unfairly" on them, but not to regard a work situation as a matter of fairness in which one had an equal call on authority with a boss, but was, to some extent, the instrument of the boss. The application of the rhetoric of political equality therefore does a disservice to those trying to make sense of their job situation, even though that rhetoric does serve as a spur to action by poor people seeking employment opportunities, and so are questioning the morality of the employment system. Employees can find, however, that their rhetoric and the ethics of work are in conflict with one another.
Lee Rainwater describes Mr. Paterson, a resident of the ill-fated Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. Mr. Peterson was ambitious to keep his job so that he could keep his wife. His wife did start two-timing him after he lost his job, and Mr. Peterson adopted a Nationalist posture that imagined black revolution as the solution to the continued failures of blacks to make their way in the world, even though before he lost his job he had insisted that he thought he could make it as an individual. The crucial reason he lost this job which seemed to him so critical was that his boss had been disrespectful, had repeatedly criticized him without sufficient reason.
Mr. Peterson expected work to have a symmetrical rather than an asymmetrical distribution of blame, but that is not the way this relationship works, even if one could conceive of work roles that are so stripped of bureaucracy or the profit motive. In that case, employment would have to be defined as something else than work or as a new stage or kind of work. That is a political or moral agenda rather than an ethical matter.
So it is possible for a great many people to have a misconception of the relation of employers to employees. But it is not simply a cultural matter because the reestablishment of employer-employee relationships in revolutionary circumstances, whether on the Kibbutz or the collective, seems to recreate the same set of ethical relationships whereby everyone is equal but some are more equal than others. So ethical strictures are not just learned as empirical information about the way relationships work, and so are known to all "native speakers" of the work "culture" or some other institutional culture. Ethical strictures, to the contrary, may only be known to some and discussed with some clarity by some few others, and so become a kind of technical knowledge about which one can instruct children, whatever the politics of the parents or the circumstances.