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An Extraordinary Concept in the Ordinary Service of Management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Daniel R. Gilbert Jr
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Abstract:

The papers by Mele, Randels, and Schrag call attention to the proper work that the concept of loyalty can perform. All three authors argue that loyalty is not taken seriously enough in modern corporations. As Mele, Randels, and Schrag independently ascribe special status to the concept of loyalty, their analyses converge along numerous conceptual margins. Along these margins, a singular conception of loyalty comes into focus. Along these margins, we can see simultaneously why each author assigns extraordinary status to loyalty and why, ironically, each turns the special concept of loyalty over to the service of conventional management thinking. Mele, Randels, and Schrag leave it for us to ponder whether this ironic twist is unique to the concept of loyalty.

Type
Loyalty
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , January 2001 , pp. 1 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2001

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References

An earlier version of these ideas was presented at the Hobbie Symposium on Ethics at Hampden-Sydney College in Hampden-Sydney, Virginia, in February 1998 and was discussed in a First-Year Seminar at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, in October 1998. The seminar topic was loyalty, and the discussion that day dealt with Wendell Berry’s book, Remembering.

These ideas have benefited from discussions with Kathryn Rogers and Gordon Meyer. My parents have taught me lasting lessons about loyalty. The core theme of this paper was developed in the course of several visits to Edison International Field in Anaheim, California, home of the Major League Baseball Anaheim Angels.

This research effort has benefited from resources provided by Gettysburg College.

1. Business ethics is not the only place where this kind of lament thrives in America. See, for example, how Robert Putnam weaves statistics, sociology, and nostalgia in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

2. My comments pertain to the final, accepted manuscripts sent by the authors to Business Ethics Quarterly. The manuscripts are entitled: D. Mele, “Loyalty in Business: Subversive Doctrine or Real Need?”; G. Randels, “Loyalty, Corporations, and Community”; and B. Schrag, “The Moral Significance of Employee Loyalty.” I refer to these papers in alphabetical order throughout this paper.

3. This appeal to grammar draws on E. Wolgast, The Grammar of Justice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).

4. See D. Quinn, Ishmael (New York: Bantam/Turner, 1992).

5. See note 2 above about the sources that I cite.

6. This vocabulary is no more privileged than any other vocabulary about loyalty. Like the vocabulary that I interpret from the Mele, Randels, and Schrag papers, this alternative vocabulary, too, comes into clear view along margins with opposing concepts. For instance, with regard to loyalty, an anchor is different from an obligation that can eventually be concluded. Randels and Schrag discuss this kind of margin between loyalty and employee obligations to employers. For instance, with regard to loyalty, autonomy differs from behavior dictated by others (as in “we expect you will be loyal”). This account of language as a margin between competing ways of talking draws on R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

7. For a detailed account of this use of literature in the practice of criticism of management concepts, see D. R. Gilbert, Jr., “A Critique and a Retrieval of Management and the Humanities,” Journal of Business Ethics 16 (1997): 23-35.

8. First published in 1981, this book has been recently published as T. Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000).

9. These texts include: W. Berry, The Wild Birds (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1996); W. Cather, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913); E. A. Proulx, The Shipping News (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); B. Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell Industrial Labor Relations Press, 1997); T. Bell, Out of this Furnace (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976); and J. Raban, Bad Land (New York: Vintage, 1997).

10. “Dilbert” books are published by Andrews McMeel.

11. It is the possibility that stakeholders can be used as mere means by management that accounts, to a significant degree, for our defense of the stakeholder concept in terms of “personal projects” in R. E. Freeman and D. R. Gilbert, Jr., Corporate Strategy and the Search for Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988).