Suchergebnisse

The corporation and the local community repre sent sometimes conflicting ends for members of the corporate hierarchy. There is a citizenship of the corporation and a citizenship of the local territorial community that may and do conflict. The corporation offices constitute many of the top status positions in the local community; the behavior of cor porate managers influences that of many others. Where cor porate managers are more loyal to the corporation than to the local community, the natives, the local citizens, are as likely to resent this as exploitation as are the people of a banana re public to resent the alien rule of the fruit company. Yet cor porate managers are supposed to be primarily businessmen run ning a business on a competitive basis. If they forget this and run a welfare organization, the business and the economy suffer. The conflict between immobile territorial loyalities and the need for the mobile recombination of the factors of produc tion is built into the situation. Corporate managers cannot escape involvement in local politics, for they have power. They must, in a sense, be alien if they are true to the interests of the corporation and, indeed, to the larger economy. But, if they are visibly alien as irresponsible holders of power over local lives, they must be hateful to the natives. The dilemma is real, and no public-relations wand will wave it away.

Although any view of the social role of manage ment can be shown to have assumptions about the nature of man and society, it is necessary to create such views with philosophical criteria in mind from the beginning. This last has not been done, and the consequences are that the decision- making manager is isolated from general theories about social values. Social responsibility is defined in terms of conformity to the mores of the society in which the businessman—manager —is operating. This truncates his thinking just below the level where philosophical decisions must be made, because it eschews the role of management in guiding social change and totally ignores the classical content of social philosophy and the methods of ethical analysis. There is an analogous fallacy of reducing ethics to psychology, which is a common con ceptual failing of management as well as of managerial "philos ophers" such as Mayo and Drucker. These failings, combined with a reluctance to face a reassessment of the ethics of profes sionalism, decrease the ability of management to cope with basic disagreements among systems of values. The foregoing can be illustrated by reference to three problems: social respon sibility, the destructive reduction of ethics to psychology, and the conflict between the ego and the ethics of professionalism.

Corporate managers must weigh the public con sequences of their decisions if they wish to keep the state from reasserting its proper authority vis-à-vis the corporation. The only defensible standard to guide them is the public interest defined in exclusively procedural terms. This definition should lead them to underwrite projects likely to keep the ultimate ends of life private, pluralistic, and uncongealed. Such a com mitment requires their support of practices which keep the political machinery in good repair but not their manipulation of the machinery so that it will produce some definite, substan tive result. If this is recognized as being too unnerving an assignment for corporate managers, legislation should free them to direct their energies once again to the single purpose of maximizing profits.

The heliocentric allusions in Antiokh Kantemir's First Ode make it one of the earliest poetic statements in Russian literature to support the Copernican theory. As such it is often cited, and it is certainly the best known of the poet's four surviving odes. Yet neither the precise date of the poem's composition nor its origin is known, though attempts at solving both these problems have been made with a view to explaining the change in Kantemir's poetic style after he left Russia in January, 1732. Though he was then only twenty-three, some of his best satires had already been written, and his poetic output declined after that date.

What is a businessman's moral duty when there is real uncertainty in the law? Uncertainty in the meaning of legal regulations must be distinguished from uncertainty that the law will be enforced and uncertainty that the law will ac complish its intended purpose. Assuming a moral obligation to obey laws that are reasonably clear in their applications, a businessman has no obligations to guess that an uncertain law requires the greatest conceivable sacrifice. There is no moral culpability in trying to secure interpretations that are convenient and profitable. A manager does, however, have an obligation not to expose his enterprise to unbearable risks and not to sabotage the rule-making process, though there may be hopeless disagreement as to the identity of those who are doing these things. The common objections to bare compliance with law do not identify a fault in the attitude toward law but rather a defect in extralegal matters. As long as systems of social control are imperfect, there is good reason for not lumping legal and extralegal duties together under the word "responsibility."

In a recent memoir Iurii Olesha, one of the most sophisticated Soviet prose writers, recalls a conversation he once had with V. E. Meyerhold regarding a film version of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons which the famous avant-garde director was then contemplating. "I asked him whom he had in mind for the part of Bazarov. He answered, 'Mayakovsky'."The resemblance between one of modern Russia's foremost poets and Turgenev's harshly antipoetic hero may not be immediately obvious. Yet a close look at Mayakovsky's poetry, especially at his earlier, Futurist lyrics, reveals the presence of what might be called the Bazarov syndrome. The tenor of these Surrealist urban still-lives ("Night," "Morning," "The Street," etc.), these impassioned lyrical manifestoes ("I," "Man," "A Cloud in Trousers"), is total negation of the status quo.