According to Lisa Herzog’s Reclaiming the System, we should conceptualize, and run, organizations as spaces in which the moral norms, which we take for granted in the everyday life, are taken seriously and moral agency and moral responsibility have a place. While Herzog acknowledges that contemporary organizations are beneficial to societies in providing complex divisions of labor and capturing economies of scale, the focus of this book is on how organizations have become the “source,” and not just the “site,” of ethical challenges including the loss of moral agency. To explore this under-researched topic, Herzog combines normative theorizing and qualitative methods (thirty-two semi-structured interviews with practitioners). Unusual for philosophers, Herzog ventures out into the field with an “ethnographic sensibility” (Herzog and Zacka Reference Herzog and Zacka2019) that attempts to find the application of insights from ethnographic work in organizations to provide epistemic access to the nature and structure of normative demands (epistemic argument), to better understand obstacles to moral agency and to diagnose moral failures (diagnostic argument), and to contribute to normatively evaluating human practices and institutional arrangements (evaluative arguments).
Herzog’s contribution involves presenting social philosophy as a path to understanding how social contexts can be shaped in ways that support the realization of moral norms and, specifically, what it means for moral agents to work in organizations. In the introductory section, Herzog lays out her main argument: that organizations should respect basic moral norms because of the potential to amplify harm and the intensity of interactions with individuals, which may affect their lives. By reclaiming the system, Herzog means no social contexts are somehow “outside” of morality, and this translates into challenging the assumption that organizations’ realms function only according to amoral, functional, or systemic logics in “which non-intentional, non-communicative forms of coordination take place” (13). In chapter two, Herzog defends moral agency but also describes how it requires a supportive social context, or “scaffolding” (41). In chapter three, Herzog starts with explaining that morality is a pervasive feature of social life and defines a set of basic moral norms for organizations. In chapter four, Herzog draws from Weber’s work to characterize an organization (form) as a hierarchy of divided labor structured by rules. In chapters five, six, seven, and eight, Herzog analyzes moral wrongs that are intrinsically tied to the organizational form through the following dimensions: rules, knowledge, culture, and roles. In the ensuing chapters, Herzog addresses practical questions about how to alter the structures of both organizations and society in order to “reclaim the system” (218) and ensure compliance with basic moral norms.
At the center of Herzog’s account is the notion of the embeddedness of human agency in social contexts. This dependency suggests that moral capacities depend on external “scaffolding,” or context, to function well as cognitive and volitional capacities do. The question that follows is how organizations can be turned into contexts in which individual moral agency is supported rather than undermined.
Herzog proposes three basic moral norms that might apply to organizations: “respect toward all individuals . . . as moral equals,” avoidance of “individually caused harm to others,” and avoidance of “contributing to collectively caused harm to others” (51). In order to prepare the ground for defending these “uncontroversial” norms (53), as she describes, it would have been convenient to further justify why these and not others are the “basic” moral norms when interviewees were exclusively based in Europe and to highlight that practical wisdom is needed to use such norms to guide decisions in organizations, unlike mere abstract principles. Next, Herzog shows how, specifically, organizational structures can challenge the compliance with these basic moral norms, starting with a risk when organizations expose employees to hierarchies and separate their actions from distant, sometimes unknown, consequences. That said, the divisions of labor and hierarchies do not need to be morally problematic in themselves, but under certain circumstances these structures can be a threat to individual’s equal moral standing and cause harm. Group think, negligence, and the failure to question established patterns of behavior are a few examples of tendencies that can undermine moral agency and facilitate wrongdoing. For this reason, Herzog analyzes in detail four dimensions of the organizational form in order to propose solutions on how these threats can be minimized.
With convincing examples, Herzog points out the risk of organizations becoming iron cages (norms) that destroy the exercise of judgment and may cause harm or injustice to atypical cases. In this respect, she acknowledges the usefulness of rules for preventing coordination failures and ensuring fairness, but also endorses the ambivalence of rules by proposing speaking-up mechanisms called “safety vaults" (100), by which a rule could be challenged if its application would yield a morally wrong decision. Herzog’s proposal may have plausibility, but it could have been more charitable when it comes to treat codes of ethics as minor rules. Although principle- and rules-oriented codes of ethics may have their own limitations, it is difficult to think that they are not a key part of “scaffolding” to promote moral agency. Including nonretaliation policies and being part of employment contracts are just a few examples of how contemporary codes of ethics may reinforce their credibility as protectors of speaking up and promoters of moral judgement.
The dimension of how knowledge is handled in organizations can also be a moral challenge: “Individuals within an organization only come to know a tiny fraction of the chains of production they are involved in” (112), observes Herzog. This lack of knowledge, Herzog attests, leads to a lack of meaning and an inability to control the normative status of one’s actions. To mitigate this moral challenge, Herzog asks organizations to “make sure that knowledge gaps are avoided” and “that all individuals receive the respect owed to them as bearers of knowledge” (138). It is uncontroversial, as Herzog claims, that more access from individuals within organizations to deal with morally relevant knowledge will bring the benefits of more participatory practices. But in practice, where Herzog places the center of her analysis, the criteria by which the level of knowledge should be shared, considering that all individuals are moral equals, are not clear. Also unclear is the extent to which sharing knowledge increases trust with hierarchies and prevent gaps, and when that sharing starts to create new moral challenges. New distributions of access to knowledge may bring dilution of accountability and conflict with widespread need-to-know rules regarding sensitive knowledge.
Another of Herzog’s dimensions is organizational culture, specifically, how its ethos and expectations should not allow for the violation of basic moral norms, nor prevent or discourage individuals from assessing an organizational practice in moral terms. She also suggests that the best way to control against unintended shifts in an organization’s culture is to maintain “a strict orientation towards moral rules” (164). Although Herzog explains the reasons why she does not try to define “a” moral culture (153) and the difficulty to envisage a set of ethical aspects applicable to any organizational culture, it would have been more enriching for the volume to discuss recent empirical research on ethical culture. For example, Kaptein (Reference Kaptein2008) analyzed 150 cases of unethical behavior and proposed a multidimensional approach to ethical culture that advances the understanding of this construct by identifying dimensions that help individuals to act ethically and prevent them from acting unethically: clarity, congruency of supervisors and management, feasibility, support to act with integrity, discussability, transparency, and sanctionability.
Individuals assume roles when joining organizations and roles are the last dimension Herzog assesses in relation to moral challenges derived from the organizational form. Complete identification with the role can lead individuals to follow blindly the “carrots and sticks” of incentive and disciplinary systems (191) and overlook morally questionable procedures or behaviors. To prevent organizations from morally derailing, Herzog proposes to establish a middle ground between complete identification with organization roles and radical separation from them. This level of identification is important because it encourages employees to value reflection and perspective taking and paves the way to transformational agency “in which individuals put the results of their reflection into action, taking moral responsibility for what they do in their jobs” (193).
From a Rawlsian perspective, Herzog concludes by taking a “non-ideal” approach in the sense that her proposal is pragmatic and asks what institutional changes could be realistically and incrementally brought about without drastic changes to current political and economic structures. For instance, Herzog contends that respect for individuals within organizations as moral equals demands more regulatory protection of individuals’ rights in the workplace so that moral abuses can be prevented, individuals can show more resistance to organizational pressure, and those individuals can “stand up for moral values and act as transformational agents” (237). In other words, the idea is to preserve spaces that are not shaped by organizational forces, in a literal and metaphorical sense (219). In addition, Herzog challenges the shareholder conception of the (corporate) firm as encouraging “ruthless, short-term profit maximization and the externalization of costs and risks to society,” but she leaves open the legal form of a reformed corporation by saying “privileges and rights of shareholders, managers, and other stakeholders could be carved out differently than they are at present” (243). Reclaiming the System is an appeal for a reconsideration of the moral relevance and the democratic accountability of organizations in contemporary societies.
