Wednesday, October 28th, 2009...5:28 pm
Good vs. Evil (ADLT 623 – Reflection #5)
Good vs. Evil / Culture ( Happy Halloween)
Photo Courtesy stopdressingthedogs.com.
Chapters 7, 8 and 9 of the Shein text were a lot to digest, but chewing on them was interesting, especially chapter 9 and the discussion of human nature and culture. Are we intrinsically evil or good? I’d like to think we are basically good, but by and large we define good as being that which we are no longer. Well, that is if you believe in evolution. If we assume the theory of evolution is true and that our civility and ‘goodness’ are part of our ‘evolved’ being, then we must inherently be evil, no? Have we simply learned to be ‘good’, through necessity and in order to live harmoniously? If evolution is in fact true, our ancestors were certainly not, good, as we would define it now.
Someone once said that character is defined by our actions when no one else is around to see what we do and hear what we say. Personally, I think we as a nation (I don’t want to speak for us as an entire human race) are struggling to maintain a ‘good’ society while we seem to encourage many values that seem to make these efforts more difficult, such as competition, individuality and a general ‘go out and get yours’ mentality. We each take this with us to our jobs.
I did stumble on one thing that Schein said in chapter 9. In speaking of the concept of ‘Power Distance’, he describes it as the perceived amount of ability to control each others behavior in a hierarchical situation. He says that there is a higher power distance among unskilled or semiskilled workers, vs. professional and managerial workers. I wonder how this was measured or on what he bases this belief. It seems to me that there is an espoused belief among professionals and managers that there is less inequality, but that typically an espoused belief is as deep as the feelings go. In practice, I think managers believe there is a great divide between themselves and their subordinates. Sometimes this goes as far as an underlying assumption, where managers or superiors do not even know they ascribe to this power divide. Would you agree with this?
Chew on that!
3 Comments
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:22 am
I feel as if the divide or the understanding of a divide varies based on whose perspective you use. For the managers who tout an open-door policy, the divide probably seems less pronounced because they have made the effort to clear a path for access. For the labor force, the divide is still pronounced. I believe that most managers will acknowledge a power divide and the efforts made to maintain the status quo. Even from an evidentiary standpoint, the separate office and the salaried role allows for justification of the divide. And then there’s the actual title. I have seen it when there is a difference of one word in a title (like lead teacher vs. teacher) and the perceived divide was larger from the lead’s perspective. When is the divide justified though? In my opinion, the divide is more of a reality when it is from the perspective of the labor/skilled workers looking up.
I like your allusion to our national conscience. I agree with you, but I think it is a byproduct of capitalism and free market values. The alternative, socialism, doesn’t typically work because there is still a huge divide but its usually between a very few and the masses. This goes back to Theory X and Theory Y but on a bigger level. Can the mission of the organization/society coexist or be one in the same with the individual?
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:49 pm
When you say that our ancestors are evil, I don’t quite get the connection. Sure, if we look back in history you can see actions or behavior which one could call negative, violent, or selfish. Can these be called evil? We could probably have quite a debate about that. I heard from what I will call a wise person that evil is that which takes us away from our highest potential. To me, that means one who lives or strives to live with integrity, compassion, understanding, truth, love… Yes, perhaps those are ideals, but I think there are examples of humans who have demonstrated those. History also shows another side of the human being too.
I think we have a sense of what is good somewhere inside, if we pay attention to it. I know that when I do some things that I later regret, I usually reflect on it and realize that something was off. If I dig deep enough, I can sometimes find it is based on some gap between what I value and my tacit beliefs or assumptions. Those are not so easy to uproot. However, as I become aware of them, I find that they can change with time… sometimes slowly.
I think that as science goes deeper into the exploration of consciousness, perhaps we’ll gain some deeper insight into how we form those underlying assumptions and learn how we can change more easily.
About the power-distance idea and skilled/semi-skilled and professional/managerial workers. I thought that Schein said that in some countries there is a low power-distance ratio and other countries a higher one. In the high-power-distance countries which he lists some as being Philippines, Mexico, and Venezuela, he said that there is more perceived inequality between subordinates and superiors vs. the low-power-distance countries such as Denmark, Israel, and Austria (p. 181-182). I guess this was based on some relative criteria that Hoefstede, a researcher, defined.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:12 am
Hi Johnathan, Thanks for the feedback. I agree, there are certainly examples of compassion, love truth etc, as far back as we can look. I think the point I was trying to highlight is how Schein is defining good and evil as a basis of organizational culture, and how we as individual are either good or evil inherently. Thus, I read this as if Schein is talking about greed, competition and a ’survival of the fittest’ perspective as defining evil and he questions if we as people are inherently this kind of ‘evil’ or good. I point back not just to ‘cavemen’ but the multitude of examples that include conflicts and wars that are were born from a need to conquest, be the best, have the most, rule all, etc etc. I believe our most basic instinct to be survival and that most of our actions are based on this underlying drive.
I’m not suggesting that we were all ‘evil’ in the sense that most of us would define evil today. However, in the context of corporate greed and aggression, I think we are inherently evil and have learned and evolved to be ‘good’ or better. Again, there are many examples of highly compassionate and non-competitive humans going back as far as we can date, just as today there are many examples of extreme evil in the context that Schein alludes to, such as ENRON.
Agreed, this would be an interesting topic to debate, but I do we are talking about the same ‘evil’.
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