Corporate psychopathy

Let us at first say that a business can be treated as an entity practically independent of the people who comprise it. This entity has a personality. It appears that the bigger the company becomes, the more psychopathic it appears.

A company must play two games: one of image and one of balance sheet. There is no reason that a company must necessarily be psychopathic because of this duality, however let's have a look at how this disjoint might develop. Imagine now that you have a large corporate and that the upper mgt are playing the image game. Yes, the business might issue edicts to attempt to ensure ethicacy or environmental awareness or any other 'good' thing. This will filter down the ranks with some impact. However, once you get a couple of stages removed, you will probably find younger, less experiences or even just less competent people. The obvious way to make a name in a big company is to do one of two things: save money (limit a liability) or make money (exploit an asset). In fact, this is written into most contracts of employment with performance related pay or ongoing appraisals. So somewhere around the 'doing' level, the 'good' policy will be unknown, side-stepped or just plain ignored.

Fairtrade is an interesting concept. Do you think that supermarket buyers will go out to win a bad deal for their corporate? Or do you think, rather, that some method of side-stepping will be employed such that the buyer can show they haven't damaged the corporate's bottom line? I can think of one simple sidestep: pass on the markup, and even better you could add a bit of extra margin on top! Woo, image win, bottom line win. Ethical or manipulative? Who created the need for Fairtrade in the first place?

This illustration of psychopathic tendency of a larger organisation can be applied across the board in practically all situations. As Pinel put it, rational and morally neutral but without restraint or remorse.

Smaller organisations have fewer people. They generally more closely resemble the individuals that work there. Cheating scumbags aside, people who run their own businesses want to do well, but also do right. Within such a small organisation there's less disjoint between policy and implementation. So they act more humanely.

So what? Well, I'm suggesting that larger organisations need control more than smaller ones. Control needs to be external to those entities because they cannot have any themselves. This is a political point for governments, although these are immense entities themselves, a dilemma! Yes, big business will probably baulk at more control and stamp their feet. Jobs might suffer, but I suggest that in the long run, keeping psychopaths carefully controlled is probably a good thing. The corollary of this is that smaller businesses require humane treatment by the policy makers of government.

Of course, this is all practically impossible because government is a psychopath too! Ah well, nice thought wasn't it?