Durable Goods : A Covenantal Ethic for Management and Employees (Soundings: a Series of Books on Ethics, Economics, and Business)

Perhaps no other aspect of business ethics is today more germane to Christian belief and practice than the quality of relationship between management and employees. Here the raw forces of the global market and the more subtle currents of power relations within corporations have tangible impacts upon millions of lives. How can managers and employees work together toward an atmosphere of mutual trust and fairness? For people of faith, what does it mean to covenant under conditions of recurrent labor conflict? What moral claims are evident in the long struggle by management to run their enterprises as they see fit, as opposed by the efforts of employees to achieve a collective voice through unions? By melding the biblical account of covenant with a social-scientific understanding of organizations, Stewart W. Herman presents a groundbreaking theory. Herman examines the strategies and tactics which management and employees have used to control each other. He explores the deep historical roots and complexities of the management-employee relationship in the US, taking into account the initiatives and responses of both sides during the past two hundred years. As this narrative unfolds, the rudiments of a covenant become evident, not in a steady evolution, but in a turbulent intertwining of achievement with failure. The author tracks the development of two enduring goods which have emerged tentatively in this history: the enlarged freedom both management and employees have gained by seeking cooperation from each other, and the respect they have internalized for the moral principles central to the action of each other. Genuine cooperation requires that the moral claims of both sides must receive impartial consideration. To achieve such fairness, this book sets aside both the easy optimism of managerial ideology and the pessimism of disillusioned employees and takes an unsparing look at labor-management history in light of the long covenanting experience narrated in the Bible.