Morality by Design by Rowland Wade;

Author:Rowland, Wade;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789381245
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Over the past half-century, sophisticated management techniques and new surveillance technologies have combined to impose internal controls regulating corporate employee behaviour at every level, from the shop floor to the corner C-suites. So effective are these tools that today it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the corporate entity per se manages its managers, confining them to modes of behaviour that are defined entirely by the instrumental needs and goals of the corporation. Those who do not fit this mold are either re-educated to conformity through various forms of coercion and persuasion, or weeded out.

The situation of humans within the corporate entity is in many ways analogous to the role of modern military personnel, who often operate within an environment defined by the needs and objectives of their weapons systems: ‘The [human] aircrew of the Apache [attack helicopter] is expected to function reliably as an extension of such machines […] or weapons systems generally; [as] adjunct for some limitation the machine has due to its incomplete development’.3 The ‘machine’, in the case of the modern business corporation, is the organizational structure, or bureaucracy, that defines its existence. It is the very close integration of machine and human elements of the system which suggests the term cyber-corporation to distinguish these modern innovations from their evolutionary predecessors. As with the military machine, a goal of the cyber-corporation is to replace humans with robots to the extent feasible.

University researchers have for some time been seriously examining modern business corporations as examples of a wider, cross-disciplinary research category called ‘self-organizing systems’. The studies draw on biologists’ study of ‘collective beings’, which are defined as complex, goal-oriented, self-organizing systems made up of large numbers of autonomous entities.4 In the study of collective beings, theories of self-organization and computer modelling are employed in an attempt to understand how large numbers of autonomous creatures – bees in hives, or ants in their colonies, or birds in flocks, or fish in schools – can exhibit highly coordinated behaviour without apparent overall management. A promising line of enquiry is found in emergence theory, a field of physics (and a branch of chaos theory) that studies the ‘emergent properties’ of highly complex systems, as, for example, the spontaneous emergence of tornados from certain weather patterns, or the spontaneous emergence of consciousness from billions of neurons in our brains, or the similarly spontaneous emergence of life from complex chemical soups. A feature of emergent properties is that they often have the ability to influence and even control the very systems that spawned them.

Applied to the cyber-corporation, the new disciplines suggest that these huge bureaucracies are more than the sum of their parts: they need to be understood as systems made up of autonomous individuals (i.e. workers and managers) whose behaviour on the job is governed both by initial design parameters, and an emergent property that could be called a culture. Within the system, human managers are made to conform to the cyber-corporation’s goals and values, rather than vice versa.

The antisocial

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