Kutz (2000) Complicity (6) Problematic Accountability: Facilitation, Unstructured Collective Harm, and Organizational Dysfunction

Kutz, Christopher (2000). Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

There is an important difference between expressing recrimination at an organization and expressing it at an individual. Individuals who are the subjects of response respond affectively, ideally (from the perspective of the victims) with shame and guilt, perhaps with resentment. But a collective cannot respond affectively to these expressions, only its constituent members can. The lack of an affec tive counterresponse is troubling, because the efficacy of responses of accountability partially depends upon affect.59 The responses of shame, guilt, and regret help to register the significance of the harm. When responses focus primarily upon the collective rather than upon individual agents, some degree of misfire is inevitable. The sting of collective blame will often be felt least where it is needed most, in the head office. To the extent that blame focuses upon an organization as a whole and its substandard procedures, individuals within the organization have little motivation to do better. Practices of accountability bear fruit only when some individuals within a group seize the initiative and pursue both more specific sites of accountability and modes of rectification. For instance, the Bhopal disaster seems to have been the product of lax supervisory and main tenance standards at the plant, undertrained employees, understaff ing as a result of low profits, the absence of effective regulatory authority within the relevant Indian ministries, and inadequate over sight by U.S. headquarters.60 The duty of compensating victims can perhaps only be borne by the company as a whole.61 But in order to prevent such accidents in the future, very specific individuals and office holders must be held and hold themselves accountable as well. Blame focused upon the company as a whole is overly diffused with respect to its proper targets, the individuals whose conduct really did fall below acceptable standards.