Fifteenth Variation
Corporate management must be steered towards the ethic of responsibility.

An ethic that continually questions itself on the consequences that our actions can produce and on the responsible assumption of risk.

The automatisms of early modernity killed the person, transforming him/her into an abstract subject, who populates the worlds of technology, the economy and the institutions. Scientific Management has recovered part of the personal autonomies through policy, or rather through corporate participation in policy construction: people – not just the workers, but also the professionals – feel that they belong to a group, to a category represented in social negotiations.

Post-modernity, breaking the circuit of a priori belonging (political or corporative) has given breath back to individuality, but in dispersed and slightly disordered forms.

The reflective contemporaneity feeds people into circuits regarding the evaluation and attribution of responsibility and of a sense for the effects of the automatisms and expert systems set in motion. From this point of view, a particular scandal within the more general Parmalat scandal is the justifying declaration of the top managers that they were simply carrying out the orders of the owner. The ethics of business professionals is instead that of mindful and responsible undertaking of risk, such as conditio sine qua non for the spending of one’s talents: to be multiplied and allocated in support of the enterprise’s service vocation.

Ethics become important, as does the imagination: both of them, however, not in extemporary, but shared forms. People become the centre of a personal capitalism that requires them to invest in themselves and at their own risk. Yet, people can only do this if they live in epistemic and practical communities that allow them to exercise these functions (reflection, sharing, correction of premises and the creation of new identities).

To risk in a shared, dialogical manner means designing together one’s interdependence, explaining to the others one’s own way of seeing the risks and assigning their significance. To risk means mutualism and inclusion, not just competition. To risk means to imagine the probable and the unforeseen, giving a shared significance that can be spent on the technological, economic and political markets of these imaginary productions. The enterprise that emerges from reflective contemporaneity is a unit in which risks are undertaken, these having been dialogically justified by those that participate (even if in different roles), in the presence of procedures and material conditions that allow the people involved to reopen the initial dialogue, to look for new justifications and to determine new reasons for staying together (or to dissolve the initial union). The ethical mission is also confirmed for this road, by which it becomes imperative for whoever has decisional and steering power to place it as the foundation for any vision: make the “enterprise” production system a community of work, a banquet, a “stay together for”.

The sense of the expression is twofold. For one thing, the “stay together” is not a simple conviviality like that of a group of friends. In the dynamic productive world, there is the discipline of the objective to be reached, well defined in the standards, in the times, in the quality and in correspondence to the market. But there is more. There is a personal purpose, the awareness of one’s own contribution, the sense of completeness in participating and contributing, and the reflectively shared responsibility. And this is the “for”. It has always happened in production systems of weak interaction and strong performativity: a theatrical company, a symphony orchestra, a string quartet, or an artisan’s workshop. It is already happening today in production systems of strong interaction and standard, if not poor, performativity: a professional firm, a research group, an advertising agency, a cooperative of information technologists that produces software or web designs, an investment bank, a securities house, or a professional community inside or outside of the enterprise. “This is utopia!” It certainly is. Like habeas corpus, the Magna Carta, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, the end of colonialism and apartheid, the constitutional condemnation of racialism and equal opportunities. The path to utopia coincides with the progress of civilization. We conclude with a declaration by the man who is perhaps the greatest innovator in the field of organization science, Jonathan Swift. Swift was a conservative and an aristocrat. Nevertheless, he understood that control, hierarchy and fiscality are destined to failure and, in addition, to spark off a devastating, uncontrollable, counteroffensive with an ahead of time guerrilla technique. He also knew that even the most open of his colleagues of social and political class, the Tories, considered the proposals of social reform that started to appear at the beginning of the 18^th century, “unworkable utopias”. Yet he was convinced that, in spite of everything, it was the only alternative to systematic sabotage by subordinates. However, in Gulliver’s Travels Swift gives voice to the philosophers of theAcademy ofLagado, almost to contradict himself and in support of the sceptics. Those scoundrels schemed nothing less than plans to persuade the Sovereigns to choose the favourites from the most judicious, capable and virtuous people – to teach the ministers to consult the public properly – to compensate merit, great skills and outstanding services – to make the princes understand that their interests coincided with those of the people – to entrust offices to experts – and for similar mad illusions, never before crossing the mind of man, and which, if anything, only serve to give me confirmation of that which has long been observed: there is nothing so extravagant and irrational that certain philosophers do not sustain as the truth itself. Swift was convinced that man, although not a rational animal, was nevertheless “able to reason”. Based on this minimal conviction, he carried forward his discourse and, in the end, redeemed his pessimism. The only result of not listening to the philosophers of Lagado would have been of leaving the world as it was.

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