Accountability and the Bureaucratization of Corporations

“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in organizations.” Whoever thus altered Rousseau’s original dictum must have been aware of the facts of life in large, modern corporations. Large corporations are succumbing to the pressures of bureaucratization, and experiencing the problems typical in bureaucracies. Their transition carries direct implications for the issue of accountability, because the extent to which people are submerged in and controlled by bureaucracies is the extent to which ordinary individual accountability is diminished. The aim of this paper is to examine accountability in the large modern corporation, and to show how the increasing bureaucratization of corporate life threatens the very possibility of meaningful moral accountability. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.