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Page 1: A Levinasian Ethics Critique of the Role of Management and Control Systems by Large Global Corporations the General ElectricNuovo Pignone Example 2009 Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Critical Perspectives on Accounting 20 (2009) 751–761

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting

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A Levinasian ethics critique of the role of management and controlsystems by large global corporations: The General Electric/NuovoPignone example

N.B. Macintosha,∗, T. Shearera, A. Riccabonib

a School of Business, Queen’s University, Canadab University of Siena, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 5 February 2007Received in revised form 6 February 2008Accepted 25 February 2008

Keywords:Management and control systemsLevinasian ethicsGeneral ElectricNuovo PignoneGlobal corporationsSix-Sigma-SystemTalmudJack Welch

a b s t r a c t

This essay extends [Shearer, 2002] Levinasian critique of the role of financial accountingwith its neo-classical underpinnings in today’s global market capitalism. It expands on Lev-inas’s ethics-of-being-for-the-other by emphasizing how he developed his radical ethicsby drawing on the ancient Jewish texts, an ethics that gives place of privilege to ontologyrather than epistemology in contrast to much conventional Western philosophy. The essayillustrates the potential of his ethics for mounting a critique of the use of management andcontrol systems by global corporations. It provides General Electric’s takeover of the Italiancompany Nouvo Pignone as an instance. The systems are an essential element in the expan-sionary strategies of these massive enterprises that have come to dominate the world. Theessay concludes that GE’s instantiation of its generic management and control systems intothe firms it acquires runs afoul of a Levinasian ethics. That many large global corporationsemploy similar systems and tactics highlights the urgent need for a broader accountabilityon the part of such organizations than economic efficiency and producing profits to reportto capital markets. Levinas’s ethics, thusly, presents a space of entry to expose and confrontthe economic commodification of employees scattered across the world.

© 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The dominant role of the large-scale, global-multinational corporation in today’s world is a matter of great concernto scholars in many disciplines. It has been estimated a decade ago that some 25 mega, multinational corporations allbut ruled the world (Lowe, 1992). Their combined economic power exceeded the total GDP of four-fifths of the world’spopulation and all but half a dozen of the largest nations. Today the proportion is even larger. In 2006, the combinedturnover [revenue] of the ten largest corporations exceeded the GNP of all but three nations [USA, Germany, Japan] whilethe turnover of the top five corporations exceeded the GNP of all but seven nations. This astonishing concentration ofeconomic power has been accomplished in no small part by the merger and acquisition strategies employed by global multi-national corporations that are facilitated by their generic management and control systems. This essay presents a critiqueof these practices, instancing General Electric’s1 takeover in 1994 of the Italian company Nuovo Pignone, by drawing onLevinas’s ethics.

∗ Corresponding authors.E-mail address: [email protected] (N.B. Macintosh).

1 General Electric was one of the largest three corporations in the world in terms of market capitalization during the early 2000s.

1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2008.02.004

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This essay extends Shearer’s (2002) seminal Levinasian critique of the role of accounting in the currently ever-expandingglobal market capitalistic economic system. Today, she observes, market forces have increasingly exerted an ever-greaterdiscipline over the individual’s personal and communal life, so much so that, “we find ourselves increasingly unable tocontrol, direct, confront or challenge the system that supports them. We are all, it seems, caught up in the web of a globaleconomic system that we feel powerless to change” [p. 541]. Shearer mobilized Emanuel Levinas’s (1969, 1985, 1998, 1999)philosophical ethics-of-being-for-the-other to show how it, “both demonstrates the ethical inadequacy of the economicconception of accountability, and provides the ethical foundation for a greater moral responsibility on the part of economicagents and entities” [p. 559] than does the self-interested agent of neoclassical economics that has been adopted as theunderlying philosophical foundation of much accounting research, practice, and theory. The very act of practicing accounting,she concludes, cannot be undertaken without adopting a position regarding the extent of moral accountability “proper” toeconomic entities, especially corporations, which prepare and issue accounts of themselves. Accountants, including academicones, on Levinas’ view, cannot escape this immanent moral duty [p. 542].

This essay takes up these arguments and claims in the context of management accounting and control systems; it extendsShearer’s exegesis of Levinas’s philosophy, and it explores, along Levinasian lines, the issue of the kind of ethics embeddedin the management and control systems employed by the global multinationals that rule over massive amounts of theworld’s wealth. For this purposes it instances the General Electric Corporation’s [GE] takeover of the Italian state companyNuovo Pignone [NP] as a case in point. Thus it adds to the critical body of accounting research, exposing the “other” side ofmanagement and control systems.2 In doing so, this essay presents a radically different picture of the takeover than that ofBusco et al. (2001, 2002, 2006) and Busco (2003).

The fact that some of the authors of these studies acted as consultants to NP in the transformation process and in GE’straining sessions may have influenced them to celebrate the transformation of NP into the GE Way and offer it as a model foreffective organizational change. Their case study, they report, “Shows how organizational transformation can be facilitatedby the implementation of an organizational wide system of accounting and performance measurement. In particular, byemphasising the potential of MAS to support rationales underpinning the processes of organizational change” [Busco et al.,2006, p. 35]. It was by means of establishing trust in these systems that NP employees, “learned how to be GE rather thansimply hearing about GE” [p. 37]. The takeover, they posited, improved communication and integration by giving employees acommon language of accountability based on financial management control and non-financial metrics [e.g., the SSP system].Once the employees came to trust these systems, the instantiation of the GE Way, they concluded, proved to be a greatsuccess. The Levinasian critique below presents a very different picture.

2. Levinas’s ethics of being for the other3

In accessing Levinas’s philosophy, it is vital to recognize two aspects of his intellectual development that profoundly influ-enced his thinking and which often go unnoticed by some of his critics (Chritchely, 1992, p. 5). Early on in his academic careerhe studied general and classical philosophy, psychology, sociology, and most importantly, phenomenology with Husserl andHeidegger. Such phenomenologists are want to bracket off anything beyond our immediate experience to focus on our con-sciousness by itself, “the only absolute data from which we can begin” (Eagleton, 1983, p. 55). Levinas, however, rejectedHusserelian “meontology” in favour of the direct experience of encountering texts and other human beings. As we shall seelater, the coming face-to-face with the other is a vital strand in Levinas’s philosophy.

The other crucial element stems from his extensive and unrelenting study, which he began in 1957, of the ancient Jewishtexts in general and the Talmud in particular. The Talmud itself is a monumental work and has been the basis for Jewishlife, law, and philosophy over the centuries. It is, however, said to be extremely difficult to penetrate, requiring years ofintensive study and a mastery of the Aramaic and Hebrew languages to come to grips with it. Levinas aimed to draw onhis detailed studies to understand ethics from that perspective, rather than from the traditional canons of Western phi-losophy. His engagements with the Jewish texts deeply influenced his thinking (Wygoda, 2005, p. 11). The style of thesetexts differs dramatically from the classical Greek and the more recent Western approaches to philosophy. The Talmudalways challenges the reader to find his or her own reading of it and so Levinas approached it as a phenomenologicalreader.

Levinas’s face-of-the-other notion, then, can also be traced to his experiences with the Talmud. He saw in its teachings thatwe are capable of restraining ourselves to nothing and so willing to let other’s interests precede our own. In one of his mainrabbinic commentaries given to the meetings of the Colloquium de Intellectuals Juifs de langue Francaise, he selected a Suggiahfrom Tractate Sanhedrin as the subject of his reading. The text includes a Mishnah describing the seating arrangement forthe Judges in a court authorized to decide life or death for individuals brought before it. Levinas saw a link between the eroticSong of Songs with, “The Sanhedrin with its magnificent semi-circle, making human faces show themselves to each other,with a perfect hierarchy, attesting to an objectification and subjective absolute order, will find its basis in an erotic poem,in a verse of the Song of Songs.” (Wygoda, 2005, p. 16). In eroticism, Levinas saw that all is out in the open. This particular

2 See for instance, Arnold (1998, 1999), Froud et al. (1998), and Arnold and Sikka (2001).3 Levinas was Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne and the director of the Ecole Normale Superior Isrélite Orientale. His thinking is said to have had a

profound effect on 20th century philosophy and he has been acclaimed by many as one of the greatest philosophers of our time.

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reading indicates his phenomenological experience with the text to elicit the ultimate significance of its ethical implications,including for him especially the teachings regarding man’s relationship to man.

Thusly, Levinas’s philosophy diametrically opposed the traditional Western canon. Man, he came to understand, is capableof acting, not out of self-interest and exploitation of his fellow man, but rather out of concern for the other’s well-being tothe extent of willingly giving priority to the other’s interests before our own, and of restraining ourselves to nothing, thatis to say, no-thing. These ideas are part of the Nezikin order of the Mishnah, a distinct part of the Talmud that deals withmaxims reflecting the relationship of Man [self] to Society [others in society]. Many other parts of the Talmud also stress theidea that the individual should see him or herself as “nothing” in relation to others. Thus, these texts provided Levinas witha “referential framework” for working out a philosophy that opposed systematic moral philosophies.

Levinas, as with some other philosophers, makes a crucial distinction between ethics and morality. Ricoeur (1992), forexample, provides a helpful distinction. He reserves the term “ethics” for the individual subject’s “aim of an accomplishedlife and the term ‘morality’ for the articulation of this aim in norms characterized at once by the claim to universality andby an effect of constraint” [p. 170]. He reminds us that both ethics and morality refer to the Greek term mores, which has adouble connotation. Ethics is that which is regarded as the good, while morality is that which is imposed by society at largeon the individual as the obligation to follow the mores of one’s community. Morality constitutes “only a limited, althoughlegitimate and even indispensable, actualization of the ethical aim, and ethics in this sense would then encompass morality,”so the ethics–morality relationship involves, “at once subordination and complementarity” [p. 170–1].

Such a teleological claim for the primacy of ethics over morality is consistent with a deontological perspective thatsees morality as the obligation to respect the norms of the particular social system or society in question. While morality issubordinate to ethics, together they form a complete whole and enhance each other. On this view, which Levinas shares, moralobligations are ubiquitous within one’s community, while ethics applies to individuals in all communities. Business ethicsresearch, for the most part, while explicitly incorporating the morality dimension, fails to elucidate an ethical dimensionby which this morality may be judged. In order to address this lacuna, the ethical issue of the individual’s [or the entity’s]obligation to others, in and outside of her community is addressed by investigating two ontological questions: “What is thebasic nature of one’s ethical obligation to the other?” and “When does this obligation arise?”

Levinas’s response to these questions strikes at the heart of traditional Western metaphysics and, by extension, its historyof ethical thought. Western metaphysics – even the decentered subject of Freud or Lacan – conceives of the individual subjectas a self-contained ego for whom the “other” is merely an object to be internalized in consciousness or comprehended throughrepresentation. The individual is deemed to be an autonomous being who can act intentionally with respect to others. Thisbeing [or self as Levinas calls him or her] sizes up others upon encountering them, knows them in particular ways, drawson some kind of metaphysical knowledge or intuition of what is good and what is not, and then treats them accordingly. Aspostulated in neo-classical economic theory, the self-contained individual encounters other[s] and at that moment treatsother according to some kind of universal law, and expects other[s] to treat self similarly.4

The ontological thrust of the Western philosophical tradition is defined by its reduction of the other to the same as theself. In this act of representational appropriation, the other is comprehended only as a mirror image of oneself, with the resultthat the other’s alterity is effaced. On this ontology, other “is assimilated into self like so much food and drink” (Chritchely,1992, p. 16). So, self is a law unto herself, guided by some putative universal truth, and other becomes the medium to anethical end or action. On this view, ethics is the application, or instantiation, of metaphysical knowledge in some particularsituation. For Levinas, this is epistemology, not ontology, and therefore not ethics. Taking a phenomenological position, heconcludes that the ontological ethical moment does not arise at the moment of coming into contact with some other person,that is to say, simply in virtue of becoming. Rather, it is already immanent in being; it is there before encountering other[s]but is transcendent of that moment. This is, according to Chritchely, Levinas’s “Big Idea” [Chritchely, 1992, p. 6–8].

Levinas’s philosophy, then, focuses on the relationship between the self, the other and the face of the other. The self isthe self-conscious, knowing subject or ego.5 The other denotes self’s alterity who can be neither known to nor reduced tothe same as self in that other “. . .escapes the cognitive powers of the knowing subject [p. 5]. And the face is “. . .the way inwhich the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me” (Levinas, 1969, p. 56). This “epiphany of the humanface” penetrates the crust of self, thus rendering “. . .the responsibility for the other man undeniable” (Levinas, 1998, p. 17).As Levinas (1999, p. 110) explains this crucial point:

I am generous toward to other without that generosity being immediately claimed as reciprocal. The moment one isgenerous in hopes of reciprocity, that relation no longer Involves generosity but the commercial relation, the exchangeof good behaviour. In the relations to the other, the other appears to me as one to whom I owe something, towardwhom I have a responsibility. Hence, the asymmetry of the I-You relations and the radical inequality between I and theYou, for all relation to other is a relation to a being toward whom I have obligations. I insist, therefore, on the meaningof that gratuitousness of the ‘for the other’ that arises within the I, like a command heard by him, as if obedience werealready being [l’être] listening for the dictate. Alerity’s plot is born before knowledge.

4 See Shearer (2002, p. 547–56) for a detailed critique of the economic theory depiction of all individuals as atomistic, self-interested, rational, utilitymaximizing beings. See also Roberts (2001) and Lewis and Farnsworth (2007) who “detail the irreconcilable ethical conflict between the acutely humanresponsibility of corporations and the sophisticated dehumanizing regimes of calculation which they both mobilize and in which they are entrenched,” [p.179].

5 Levinas refers to the self variously as “the same” [la même] and the “I”, and the other as l’autrie, and the face as la visage d’autre.

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Thus, in contrast with traditional transcendental philosophy which ontologically privileges the intentionality of Being[such as the teleological intention to “live well” or to “live the good life”], for Levinas the ethical moment is already therebefore any intentionality. The obligation of self to other exists before one examines the adequation of her actions in terms of“living well.” Thusly, the scission between the fact of being [existing for myself] and the fact of being obligated [having anobligation to other] is erased. Both are immediately present in the face of the other and the ethical moment is already therebefore the self becomes aware of the face. This, for Levinas, is the very condition of possibility for ethics, a condition thatis transcendent, not in the sense of some universal, permanent, and foundational access to truth, but rather in the senseof the relationship of self and other in the presence of other’s face. Crucially, this relationship must be non-reciprocal: “Ihave always described the face of the neighbour as the bearer of an order, imposing upon me, with respect to the other, agratuitous and non-transferable responsibility, as if the I were chosen and unique – and in which the other were absolutelyother, i.e., still incomparable, and thus unique” [p. 170].

Face, then, is self’s interlocutor who puts self’s essential being in question. It overflows self, bringing with it an epiphanycontaining the imperative ethical injunction, “Thou shall not do violence to other.” As Levinas puts it: “This facing position,opposition par excellence, can only be as a moral summons. This movement proceeds from the other . . . but what is producedhere is not a reasoning, but an epiphany that occurs as a face” (Levinas, 1969, p. 196). Such an epiphany, importantly, is not,a la Kant, the infinity of Reason, or a la Hegel, the coming into fusion with the Universal Spirit, but rather a command not toviolate other’s difference. This injunction, and this is the point to underscore, does not come from within self. It is alreadythere in the “infinity of his transcendence [and its] primordial expression is the first word: you shall not commit murder . . .this infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in its face, in his face” [Levinas, 1969, p. 199]. As Critchley (1992) sumsit up: “The ethical relation – and ethics is simply and entirely the event of this relation – is one in which I am related to theface of the Other. . . whom I cannot evade, comprehend or kill and before whom I am called to justice, to justify myself” [p. 5].

From this perspective, the self [as a unique being] is not a self-designated subject of discourse, action, narrative or ethicalcommitment. Nor is self [contra the ideas of the intentional philosophers of representation such as Socrates, Descartes,Hegel, Sartre and even Husserl] self-contained and so able to determine her own unique ethics of obligation to herself and toothers. Nor is self under the push and pull of some transcendental, universal metadiscourse that exists in virtual time-space,such as the reciprocal laws of the market place or ultimately under the sway of some mysterious, sacred realm. Nor is ethicsa way of “developing ab ovo a code in which are the structures and rules for good private conduct, public policy, and peacebetween nations” (Levinas, 1998, p. xi). Instead, Levinas wants ethics to be seen “in relation to the rationality of knowledgethat is immanent in being, and that is primordial in the philosophical tradition of the West” [p. xxi]. In this special sense,ethics is transcendent, but only, crucially, in the intersubjective relationship between self and other.

Thusly, Levinas rejects the individual as existing only for her or himself. Instead, Levinas insists on an absolute andirreducible difference. Therefore, as much as self wants to exist as a being for herself and in herself, she cannot do so sincethe ethical obligation is already immanent before face appears. In this phenomenological sense, self is transcended, existingattached to but different than other, before becoming self. Self is always and already beyond herself. “Prior to any act, I amconcerned with the other. And I am never absolved from this responsibility” (Levinas, 1992, p. 290). This immanent duty,this concern for other, commands that self does not violate other’s difference. Thus, self must not demand other to take onany such mutual responsibility, for to do so would mean that other and self would be the same. Such a condition wouldnegate other’s uniqueness, the very thing that self needs to be self. This desire for other’s radical difference is at the heart ofLevinas’s ethics.

Levinas’s philosophy is not without its skeptics. One not unusual reaction holds that it is merely an appropriation ofOld Testament commandments, especially “Thou shalt not kill.” This somewhat simple-minded view ignores the fact thatLevinas studied avidly and wrote extensively about various Jewish texts, especially the Talmud. He wanted to understandethics from that perspective, rather than from the traditional canons of Western philosophy. He carried out these activitiesnot to find their narrow, original meanings, nor to verify their most accurate versions, nor to identify their historical layersand the external and internal influences reflected in them [as is the want of historical-philologists]. Rather he wanted tophenomenologically “encounter” and “experience” them in order to sense and intuit what is or might be possible for humans.Levinas saw in these texts a philosophy diametrically opposed to those of say Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,which rely on the basic idea of some essential, self-preservationary, self-sufficient, autonomous individual subject.

Levinas’s conception of the self, however, raises troubling challenges to our taken-for-granted assumptions of morality ineconomic agency. In rejecting the metaphysical idea of the individual as a being who exists for him or herself alone, Levinasalso negates the very idea – which is at the heart of economic theory – of some kind of intersubjective realm where eachindividual self stands free of all other selves and where self and other share a common space of mutual obligation, existingin a symmetrical, mirror-like relationship. Levinasian ethics, then, imposes on economic actors, such as the multinationalcorporation and its executives, a “radical accountability” to the other that is irreducible to the economic interests of theaccountable entity.6 His ethics affords the ground for a critique of GE’s actions in its takeover of NP.

6 See Shearer (2002, p. 556–61) for a detailed argument on this key point. As Roberts (2001) explains, it is the resistance of Levinasian ethics to the logicof economics that makes it such a valuable source of ethical critique, “One of the difficulties of economics . . . is that its atomistic conception of the self – theindividual conceived as an independently existing and self-seeking entity – makes ethics almost impossible. All relationships are then by definition cast inthe form of a trade and all conduct is reduced tautologically to the exercise of self-interest. . .By contrast, for Levinas, ethics is only to be discovered as anapproach to the other which denudes us of the illusions of such a sense of self-identity, of a self that is essentially closed upon itself,” [p. 111].

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3. The “GE Way”

3.1. Background

When Jack Welch took on the CEO post in 1981, GE was a large diversified conglomerate with nearly 600,00 employees.It had expanded rapidly in the 1970s during which time revenues had increased significantly but profits had lagged. In 1980,GE’s stock price was 13 percent below its 1972 high. Welch, determined to reverse this downward trend in GE’s stock price,soon spearheaded an extensive, company-wide restructuring and downsizing program. By the end of the 1980s, GE haddivested 125 businesses and “eliminated” a total of over 300,000 employees. Welch had “taken out the layers,” “pulled outthe weeds,” and “scraped off the rust” on the GE “family of businesses” (Tichy and Sherman, 1993, p. 246). Throughout histenure, Welch “maintained his demand for steady quarterly earnings growth, even as preparations for the more distant futurefocused heavily on investments and the turmoil of large-scale reorganization” [p. 85]. The ultimate objective was to reportearnings to the stock market of around fifteen percent increase each year, maintain a strong balance sheet, and producestrong cash flows. In nearly every year from 1981 until 2002, GE accomplished these goals. GE executives attributed muchof this success to its management and control systems, which they considered to be “an incomparable management tool”(Stewart, 1999, p. 124).

By 2005, GE’s stock market capitalization reached $382 billion, the largest in the world. It reported profits of $17 billion onsales of $151 billion and total assets of $673 billion making GE’s command of wealth greater than all but a dozen or so nationstates. Much of this was attributed to Jack Welch’s relentless promotion during his two-decade tenure as CEO of “soft values”which every GE employee was “encouraged” to enthusiastically embrace. For Welch, “sharing the values of our company”was an absolute must for an individual to rise through the ranks, and leadership meant having a “sustained passion for andcommitment to a proactive shared vision and its implementation” (Tichy and Sherman, 1993, p. 321). It is also noteworthythat during Welch’s tenure as CEO, his manifesto declared: “Companies can’t give job security; only customers can. Succeedin the market place or you’re out of a job” [p. 8].

Operating globally had always been a central plank in GE’s business model. While GE had been carrying on business inmany parts of the world since the late 1880s, most of these operations involved exports and trading companies. In the 1960s,GE increased its global business mainly by forming joint ventures with foreign firms. In the wake of the slow-down in the USeconomy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with CEO Jack Welch leading the way, GE began to expand its global operations.7

GE, as with most other large-scale US corporations, experienced a leveling off of profit rates during the 1970s and early 1980s.8

These corporations, as Marx and Engels foresaw a century and a half ago, began to look seriously at expanding globally. Bymid-1980s, Welch recognized this need. “The urgency of the need to globalize struck him during a twelve-day would tourin May, 1985” (Tichy and Sherman, 1993, p. 188). In 1986, he realized that large-scale globalization was necessary in orderfor GE to grow profitably and he began pushing hard for it. The idea, however, encountered much resistance throughout themanagerial echelons and he realized building the necessary consensus would take time. Indeed, it took nearly a decade toinstill the globalization ethos into the ranks as part and parcel of the GE Way.

At first most of these new operations were defensive undertakings to protect their core businesses such as their electriclight markets. But a golden opportunity appeared in the early 1990s. A European recession coinciding with a constantlyrising US dollar relative to European currencies, the fall of Eastern European socialist and communist governments, and theadvent of government privatization programs in many countries, meant that GE could “buy earnings” in Europe at bargain-basement prices. GE also had a network of “scouts” around the world looking out for potential takeovers. Most acquisitionswere identified and selected on an ad hoc basis rather than in accordance with some master plan.9 Between 1997 and 2000GE made over 100 acquisitions in Europe each year, and by 2000 employed nearly 90,000 people in Europe.

3.1.1. Acquisition integration modus operandiGE’s earlier European acquisitions had proven to be chronically unprofitable, partly because they were made defensively,

but more so because at the time GE was still unsure of how to export its “widely envied management know-how” (Stewart,1999, p. 125). During the 1990s this changed as GE perfected its expert management system integration process with itsslogan, “There are no mergers of equals for us; there are only acquisitions” [p. 126]. The company reembeded this managementsystem in the host companies to effect rapid change in their social structures and local cultures. In fact, the integrationusually began before the official takeover date. “Due-Diligence Teams,” made up of financial, human resources, and generalmanagement experts, drafted up a plan including the embedding of GE’s management and control systems into the hostcompany the instant the acquisition became legal.

As soon as an acquisition is formalized, an experienced GE chief finance and accounting officer is installed who imme-diately takes control of the accounting operation, including setting up the general ledger in GE’s worldwide format. Closebehind comes the “Integration Manager,” usually a younger, ambitious, GE manager with an outstanding “track record” at

7 See Welch and Byrne (2001, ch. 19), “Globalization” and Tichy & Sherman (1993, ch. 19) for descriptions of GE’s global initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s.8 See Harvey (1990) and Woodiwise (1993) for documentation of this general trend.9 By 1999, GE’s European operations accounted for one-third of its reported net income, a percentage that was growing at a compounded rate of nearly

33 percent per annum.

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“restructuring” [who plays the role of “bad cop”]. Then, a new General Manager [“good cop”] is parachuted in with the man-date to “integrate” the host company into the GE mold as fast as possible. Usually a dramatic reorganization of reportingrelationships is also effected within 100 days, replacing the existing geographic, matrix, or whatever organizational designwith its traditional functional lines of authority – marketing, sales, manufacturing, engineering, R&D, etc. – and assigningbusiness units profit responsibility. This often involves eliminating two or three layers of middle and upper management. Asone GE executive put it: “You have to move very, very quickly. There’s a window of opportunity – an expectation of change– so you must deliver it fast.” One local manager likened it to a WW II Panzer division blitzkrieg.

A vital strand of the integration model is the practice of identifying the key local people GE wants to keep as well aspinpointing the “blockers” [those locals who impede change]. The former are quickly given key management and trainingjobs while the latter are dismissed. As one GE manager explained, “You have to get rid of blockers and identify “high-pots”[high potential employees] simultaneously. Otherwise you lose the high-pots and the blockers drag their heels. You need toshow people the future” [p. 125]. This policy reflects the “human relations philosophy” that Welch strived to instill throughoutGE, “Find the best, and cull the rest” [p. 127]. GE executives believe that this tactic immediately improves operating margins,one of its key profit performance indicators, by as much as three to eight percent. They also believe that introducing GE’saccounting and control systems and practices into the host company, is worth another eight percent.10 From GE’s perspective,companies like Nuovo Pignone fit almost perfectly into GE’s acquisition campaign of the 1990s.

4. The Nuovo Pignone takeover

Nuovo Pigone came into existence in 1842 in Florence, Italy as a cast-iron foundry and later developed a series of productsincluding the world’s first gas-powered internal combustion engine. Over the years the company grew and prospered andin 1954, when it was incorporated into an Italian government state-owned agency, NP began designing and manufacturingspecialized equipment such as electrical turbines, compressors, pumps and turbines for process-based and energy relatedindustries. NP was successful in gaining contracts for mega projects such as supplying compression stations and othersophisticated technological equipment for the Trans-Siberian Pipeline. NP held a well-earned reputation for the quality ofits engineering and products and for its profitability. So in the wake of the Italian government’s massive 1990’s privatizationprogram, GE executives, sensing a great opportunity, rapidly acquired 81 percent of NP’s common shares and increased thisin 1998 to over 90 percent when NP was awarded another major contract by the Trans-Siberian Pipeline.

The Italian government’s privatization initiative presented a great opportunity to turn “. . .a bunch of state-run sinecuresinto a net income powerhouse” [p. 124]. With the European recession of 1992–1995, with the US dollar that kept risingrelative to European currencies, and with the fall of Eastern European socialist and communist governments and the adventof their privatization programs, buying companies in Europe became very cheap for GE. By 1999, its European operationsaccounted for $24 billion of its total reported revenue and nearly one-third of its reported net income, a percentage that wasgrowing at a compounded at a rate of nearly 33 percent per annum. GE executives attributed much of this success to the waythe corporation leveraged its management and control systems that considered to be “an incomparable management tool”[p. 124]. The company employed it to effect rapid change in the acquired companies’ management and control systems.

5. Shifting ethos

Prior to the takeover, as a state-owned bureaucracy, NP enjoyed “a fairly relaxed management style [according to a seniormanager at NP for more than 20 years], it has continued to be very profitable because of is excellent products and productionsystems” (Busco et al., 2001, p. 1). It also had a good cost accounting system and a solid financial accounting reporting systemand regularly produced the required budgets and ex-post financial reports for head office and for the state-overseeing agency.These systems, however, were not much used in the company’s management processes and, as for management control, littleemphasis was placed on measurement and performance indicators. All this was to change dramatically when GE installed itselaborate and comprehensive management and control systems including its much-vaunted Six-Sigma operational controlsystem program.

5.1. Six-Sigma Program

At the operational control level, the Six-Sigma-Program [SSP] is a key control system for GE. Ostensibly a quality improve-ment initiative, SSP is actually a comprehensive and sophisticated system for “defining, measuring, analyzing, improving, andcontrolling” all operations. Sigma is a measure of the number of mistakes per million operations [six-sigma was at the levelof 3.4 mistakes per million]. SSP called for categorizing everyone into one of the following categories: champions [leaders inprojects in their area]; master black belts [full-time quality control managers who lead teams]; black belts [new employeesand novices]; and green belts [employees working part-time on specific SSP projects]. SSP was rapidly implemented at NPand by 1999, 50 percent of its white-collar workers had been designated as “green belts” on various projects. Members of

10 These included GE’s array of management tools such as; CAP, CMS, MGDP, bullet trains, and QMI.

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the various SSP projects were objectified as “the new emerging warrior class” (Busco et al., 2000, p. 29). A special “QualityTeam,” reporting directly to the new CEO, promoted specific SSP projects throughout NP. The team also appointed black beltsin each business function and production process. An extensive SSP training program was initiated and rapidly implemented.

To support SSP a detailed and sophisticated measurement system was put in place that included a large number ofboth non-financial and financial statistics. Another team, led by a champion and a master black belt, developed the firstsuch measurement system using the Parts and Service Division as a pilot project. Each technical production operation inthe division was defined in terms of ITOs [initial customer inquiry time] and CTQs [quality characteristics developed byusing “activity-based-analysis”]. Then each operation was converted into accounting and finance numbers including theexpected contribution margin and sales increase for each particular department. “By integrating financial and non-financialmeasures, Six-Sigma extended the culture of measurement to all parts of NP” (Busco et al., 2006, p. 25). This system becamethe prototype for similar systems throughout NP.

5.2. Objectifying local managers and employees

A number of other initiatives complemented SSP. GE executives from other parts of the GE empire were parachuted intocrucial executive posts. As above, one of the first to arrive was a finance executive who, literally on day one, took control ofthe books, and set up the general ledger in GE’s worldwide format. Soon after his arrival, the new CEO began to categorizeall managers as either A players [those who subscribed to GE’s values and who would be kept and suitably rewarded], Bplayers [those who still deserve to be trusted and have the potential to improve their productivity and skills], or C players,“those who do not subscribe to GE’s values and who without remorse deserve to be fired (Busco et al., 2006, p. 21). Youhave to get rid of blockers and identify high flyers simultaneously” [p. 28]. As one B ranked engineer reported, in terms ofhuman relations, these rankings came as a shock, “From a rather relaxed system mainly based on egalitarian principles, wesuddenly faced the A, B, C ranking theory. I am not arguing it was right before . . . but it was scary” [p. 28]. As well, hundredsof managers and employees were shunted through NP’s Florence Training Center where they were indoctrinated into the GEWay, trained in SSP, and required to attend corporate seminars in a wide variety of subjects including finance, marketing,project management, TQM, and human resources. GE company manuals, which supplemented this training, also stressed theimportance of value added, cost reductions, financial gains, and especially profits. NP employees were objectified as “financehat wearers” (Busco et al., 2000, p. 14, 15).

As one NP financial manager put it, “GE’s headquarters need the right numbers to show Wall Street. If these are not met, thenext week ‘tough inquirers’ start to cross the Atlantic” [Busco et al., 2006, p. 20]. Another NP manager explained, “Numbersbecame the core of our organizational life . . . you need to achieve the targets, you need to show the numbers, and you mustdo it on a quarterly basis” [Busco et al., 2000, p. 15]. And, “Reports, data, information, charts and so on flow continuouslyaround the company, largely in response to the pressure to produce numbers, and good ones, every three months” (Busco etal., 2001, p. 3). Furthermore, the entire sales force was trained to “master financial selling” the GE way by showing customershow NP solutions for them can affect their financial results and bottom line goals. The GE Way was constantly supported bywaves of training, especially aimed at spreading an understanding of financial performance measurement throughout NP.“The resources invested in NP to communicate the GE Way were massive, and communication was endemic . . . It follows youinto the toilet” (Busco et al., 2006, p. 29). The “measurement-based GE Way” with its unrelenting pressure to meet efficiencyand profit targets, penetrated NP from the top down to the shop floor and sales department as, “The role of MAS becamecentral” [p. 30].

The capstone of the change program at NP, however, was the reorganization of NP into the standard GE market-orientedbusiness units with full profit responsibility. This included locating an accountant/financial manager in each operating unitwho could continuously track its financial performance. Not surprisingly, in the face of all these not insignificant changes,in a relatively short period of time the old bureaucratic, well-protected state ship culture was replaced by a habitus ofperformance measurement and accountability for the numbers. GE’s generic management and control systems template,with its ideology of financial performance, had been embedded into NP’s social fabric where it was routinely drawn onand reproduced by employees at all levels. As one manager reported GE’s “measurement-based systems of accountabilityenabled everyone to wear a new ‘hat’, the hat of finance” (Busco et al., 2000, p. 15).11 A financial manager summed up thesituation, “Numbers became the core of our [NP’s] organizational life . . . you need to achieve the targets, you need to showthe numbers, you must do it on a quarterly basis” (Busco et al., 2000, p. 15).

The speed of institutionalizing these expert operational and managerial control systems into a large, foreign corporationlike NP was remarkable. A major factor in this, no doubt, was that GE had purchased a large majority of NP’s shares, andso GE’s executives had considerable authoritative power resources at their disposal to ensure compliance by NP managers

11 See also Busco et al. (2006, p. 30), “When GE took-over, the role of MAS became central, and many were required ‘to wear the ‘hat of finance’. As theformer CFO of NP pointed out . . . the first three GE individual to arrive at NP were the chief financial officer, the financial planning and analysis manger,and me as a corporate auditor . . . The finance organization changed its mission . . . to being a more contemporary organization with financial skills, newaccounting systems, and mostly concerned with driving shareholder value by taking an active part within organizational life.”

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and employees with the new status quo.12 While NP employees had resources at their disposal for resisting – as Giddens’sdialectic of control notion suggests13 – those who resisted were soon identified as “C players” and dismissed, thusly negatingthe dialectic of control. And, just as crucially, the new business-unit centered reorganization served to unsettle, break up,and disperse the old bureaucratic hierarchy and its moral codes. “The stories and rhetoric, which contributed to the creationof the myth of the GE Way, had a powerful impact on the established frames of meaning” (Busco et al., 2006, p. 29). Thispower resource played a central role in effectively embedding the “GE Way” deep into NP’s social fabric.

The new numbers-based, profit-centered reporting system also proved pivotal. The “performance measurement andaccountability for the numbers” ethos came into being as the dominant signification structure. Upper management, drawingon their transplanted power resources with their rights of command, readily imposed the new “meet the numbers” discur-sive regime throughout NP. By 1999, GE had successfully disrupted and replaced the way of life of the armed but peacefulbureaucratic state ship. The remaining managers and employees alike had been trained and indoctrinated in the new gov-ernance discourse, which was now the major means for NP managers to communicate with each other and, more crucially,with personnel at GE headquarters in the USA.

The “meet the numbers discourse became intertwined with the new moral codes.14 The moral injunction at NP demanded:“Manage by and meet your numbers – or else!” Welch’s credo, “Control your destiny or someone else will,”15 with its goal tocontribute to GE’s reported quarterly and annual earnings, was made abundantly clear almost daily, and it was particularlyreinforced every time GE released accounts of its most recent quarterly earnings. From GE’s global perspective, the takeover ofNP was an unqualified success. As Stewart (1999, p. 125) reports, “Businesses like Nuovo Pignone symbolize one of the biggeststories of Welch’s storied career, how America’s most admired company, and a very American one, has become a truly globalcorporation.” Stewart (1999, p. 125). Busco et al. (2006) also seem to celebrate the GE takeover as a managerial success, “TheGE-NP case shows how organizational transformation can be facilitated by the implementation of an organizational-widesystem of accounting and performance measurement” [p. 35]. But from the perspective of Levinas’s ethics a quite differentpicture emerges. NP’s managers and employees paid the price of this success as they struggled to establish their places withinthe new social order with its morality of profits above all else.

6. A Levinasian critique of the NP takeover

Levinas holds that in one’s intersubjective relations with others one is interdependent with others. This manifests Levinas’sontological moment of accountability to others, one that is subject to ethical evaluation. Giving an account of oneself signalsthat as a unique ethical entity, one is accountable to a moral community at large. It is similar for corporations. As Schweiker(1993, p. 241) puts it, “This otherness involved in personal identity is also present in corporations. It inheres in the fiduciaryrelation between a corporation as an economic force and the accountant as the one who renders an identity.”16 It followsthat, “The issue, then, is not if one [a corporation] is socially responsible, but how that responsibility is exercised or neglectedby the corporation” [p. 246].

This deontological moment, then, imposes a demand for morality on GE that seems to have been neglected. GE discursivelyportrays its identity to the world at large, to a great extent, by means of its financial accounting reports. And this of necessityevokes awareness on the part of the corporation of its relationship to those who read, use, and rely on these reports to takeactions in the world of business, commerce, and government. While such relationships and accounts are not isomorphic withthose of the individual, they are, nevertheless, a source of moral agency and evaluation. On this view, GE is not a self-containedindependent entity and so free to determine some kind of GE-unique obligation to others, such as the companies it takes overaround the globe and their employees. For this would mean that GE exists only for itself; that it is part of an intersubjectiverealm where it stands disencumbered from all the other parts of society; that GE and the other corporations and institutionsin society share a space of mutual obligation; that they exist in a symmetrical, mirror-like relationship; and that they areidentical in that each stands alone pursuing its self-interest as best it can. This position imbues such relationships with asuspect ethical imperative.

This essay, then, aims to give ethics its proper place, as Levinas insists, as a stand-alone discourse outside of the logicof self-interest seeking. From this position, as much as GE wants to exist as a being for itself, it cannot do so since themoral obligation to others is always and already immanent. It precedes the moment when GE becomes aware of an acquiredcompany’s otherness. At this moment, GE is already transcended, existing attached to but different from these corporations.Its ethical responsibility is already there prior to taking them over. This immanent duty commands that GE not violate theirradical differences. Moreover, GE cannot be absolved from this obligation. Yet this is what GE did in the NP takeover.

NP existed prior to the takeover as an entity in its own right relying on its unique institutionalized relaxed managementstyle that, as one former manager reported metaphorically, safely steered the NP ship of state through the waters of business,

12 Giddens (1979, 1984) refers to authoritative power resources as the rights of some agents to command others; and allocative resources as the rights ofsome to hold command over material objects such as technology, equipment, knowledge, etc.

13 Giddens (1984, p. 374) defines the dialectic of control as: “The two-way character of the distributive aspect of power [power as control]; how the lesspowerful manage resources in such a way as to exert control over the more powerful in established power relationships.”

14 As Giddens (1984, p. 31) puts it, “Structures of signification always have to be grasped in connection with domination and legitimation.”15 This is the title of the book about Welch by Tichy and Sherman (1993).16 Schweiker discusses at some length and provides the rationale for speaking of the ‘agency’ of a corporation.

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armed but not having to fire a shot. One manager described NP before the take over as “a bureaucratic ship . . . armed [but]we didn’t need to shoot; no one asked us to find our limits: there were no wars to do” (Busco et al., 2006, p. 24). This changeddramatically, “when GE took over, the war began and there was a common enemy to shoot at: the market competitors” [Buscoet al., 2006, p. 24]. The ship was “boarded” by GE executives and managers and NP’s long-standing templates for managerialbehavior were disrupted and dismembered as GE embedded its management and control systems into NP thus “providing‘guarantees’ of expectations across distantiated time-space” (Giddens, 1990, p. 28).

Yet Levinas’s philosophy enjoins us to realize that an ethical imperative is there before GE reembedded its management andcontrol system with its different moral imperatives at NP. When NP appears before GE as the face, it brings with it an epiphanycontaining the imperative ethical injunction; “Thou shall not do violence to NP.” Thus, the very condition of an ethics-of-being-for-the-other – a transcendental call for a non-reciprocal relationship, a gratuitous non-transferable responsibility –arose. GE’s executives, however, paid little heed to this summons. Not only did GE do violence to NP’s otherness, but also, aswe shall see next, to NP’s managers and employees as well. GE’s much-vaunted Six Sigma Program [SSP] serves as a specificexample.

SSP defined each and every employee as a champion, a black belt, or a green belt. Complementing SSP, the new CEOcategorized every manager as either subscribing to GE’s values, or who can be trusted to subscribe to them, or who does notsubscribe to them and deserves to be fired. And in virtue of GE’s desire to report quarterly and annual steady growth year afteryear in reported earnings to the capital market, managers and employees alike were construed by the new management andcontrol systems as self-same individuals whose job it was “to meet their numbers.” All were pressed into the GE universalcorporate mold. For Levinas, such treatment would stand as a clear and unmistakable case of doing violence to their otherness.Welch’s own categorization of employee types evidences this. For Welch there were only four kinds of managers:

Type I shares our values, makes the numbers – sky’s the limit. Type II doesn’t share the values – gone. Type III sharesthe values but misses the numbers – typically, another chance or two. Type IV: is the “hammer” who delivers thenumbers but does it on the backs of people, often kissing up and kicking down during the process. We have to removeType IVs because they have the power, by themselves, to destroy the open, informal, trust-based culture we need todayand tomorrow [GE Annual Report, 2000].

Welch made this message perfectly clear throughout the entire company when Type IVs were dismissed. And he attributedmuch of GE’s “great leap forward” in the 1980s and 1990s to this practice. Such actions, however, clearly violate a Levinasianethical command for relationships with the other.

Welch also articulated a moral ethos for GE in no uncertain terms. His dictum, “Control your destiny or someone elsewill,” permeated the organization. [Presumably this someone else was Welch]. A forceful injunction – “Change or Die” –reinforced this maxim (Tichy and Sherman, 1993, p. 7). Employees lived in “fear of the pink slip” and all its business unitshad to be No. 1 or No. 2 in their industry. Moreover, the GE Way featured a mean and lean, meet your numbers, improveoperations continuously, achieve high growth in sales and profits, and don’t resist, mantra. These words betray GE’s andWelch’s staunch advocacy of neo-classical economics with its one-dimensional, self-interested, and atomistic behavingsubjects – homo economicus. GE’s managers and employees around the world were objectified narrowly as self-serving andutility maximizing subjects.

Yet as Shearer (2002) emphasizes, when all humans are construed as sovereign, self-interested maximizers “self-interestbecomes the means to the attainment not only of the actor’s private good, but of the collective or interpersonal good aswell. Within economic theory, the individual’s ethical obligation to other is transferred to the ‘invisible hand’ with its lawsof the market place” [p. 569]. In the NP situation, this means that GE deems its managers and employees to be equal andsovereign moral subjects and so invested with an ethics of a symmetrical intersubjective reciprocal obligation that nullifiestheir radical differences. From a Levinasian philosophical position, however, absolving GE’s executives of their obligation toNP’s managers and employees is out of the question. It cannot be “discharged by the pursuit of private economic interests.The obligation is not discretionary; it is transcendent of the very constitution of the economic agent” (Shearer, 2002, p. 570).

7. Discussion

This essay aimed to effect a broader accountability, especially a concern for justice in economic life on organizations likeGE and their executives than their economics-based practices permit. The “GE Way” featuring “meet the numbers or else” isa discourse [a linguistic formation] with power effects that often go unchallenged and even unnoticed. As Shearer and others[see Arrington and Francis, 1993; Arrington and Puxty, 1991] have argued, economic discourse needs to be counterbalancedby an ethical discourse that takes seriously the obligation to the other, and that holds the GE’s of this world and theirexecutives accountable to a wider scope of good than that of private interest where they are obligated to pursue only theirand their own good. Under such conditions local employees must sacrifice their personal identities [selves] in order to keeptheir jobs and so they become subservient agents to the takeover corporations. As one manager told the researchers, “Thenumber of yes-man [sic] mushroomed, particularly among the youngest and newcomers who, very often, acted more forcareer purposes, than according to true personal beliefs” (Busco et al., 2000, p. 26). Nor can the executives, including financialofficers, escape involvement in such undertakings. They too sacrifice their identities in order to secure their jobs and becomemercenary servants to their corporations. They too need to identify the ethical situation in which they place themselves.

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In this regard, Levinas’s ethics offers a point of resistance to the imperialism of such discourse and thus of resistance tothe imperialism of firms like GE and the other massive multinationals whose operations reach around the world and whoseeconomic power exceeds that of all but a dozen or so nation states. While Shearer’s insights alert us to the general issue,this essay pinpoints the specific role that management and control systems play in making such domination and expansionpossible. These systems are at the heart of any attempt to establish a broader accountability on the part of these corporationsand their executives. Thusly, this essay offers the possibility of challenge and resistance to one-dimensional discourses suchas the GE Way. Otherwise, employees such as those at NP will be commodified and treated as mere objects of appropriationand as such will remain accounted for but not accounted to. The discourse of management and control systems, on thisLevinasian view, needs to be expanded to include an accounting to the individual employees of the acquired companies. TheGE Way discourse that is embedded in its management and control systems is bereft of accountability to these others.

In more general terms, such economic theory-based, one-dimensional discourse assimilates the ethical by denying Lev-inas’s ethics its ontological presupposition of otherness, substituting its symmetrical self-interest ontology instead. Thusly,the notion of other’s otherness goes unnoticed. It can be recovered only by bringing this discursive violation to the surfaceand into the light. Levinas’s ethics, then, presents a space of entry to expose and confront the economic commodification ofemployees scattered across the world in organizations such as GE. Crucially, NP is by no means an isolated case. During the1990s GE acquired 133 European companies and in 1999 alone GE made 108 acquisitions worldwide. Nor is GE alone in this.Most other global multinationals did likewise.

The GE take-over tactics can also be seen as a manifestation of the phenomenon Shearer discerningly brings to theforefront. “As market forces exert a greater discipline over our individual and collective lives, we find ourselves increasinglyunable to control, direct, or challenge the system that supports them. We are all, it seems, caught in the web of a globaleconomic system that we feel increasingly powerless to change (Shearer, 2002, p. 541).” The NP case provides a strikingillustration of how these forces are instantiated in the individual manager’s and employee’s practical consciousness throughthe medium of GE’s management and control systems – systems that they were hard pressed to challenge. Their moralobligation was made clear by GE. One NP manager described the relentless and intense instilling of the GE Way into theseindividuals’ ways of thinking and acting, “To fully understand the magnitude of the change, you have to look at GE’s operatingsystem, which is the GE Way in action: i.e., a year-round series of intense learning sessions . . . In January 1995, this was therollercoaster we suddenly found ourselves on. With no chance to escape or postpone, we had to learn quickly how to fastenour seat-belts, and enjoy the ride” (Busco et al., 2006, p. 22). In the face of this onslaught managers and employees feltpowerless. GE executives were clearly intent on producing NP personnel as the same as themselves, making them GE Wayclones, and thereby enacting a reciprocal relation of responsibility. Thus they violated the fundamental injunction of Levinas’sphilosophy – the non-reciprocal relation of responsibility.

It is also of interest to note that even the trade unions, which were strong in Italy at the time, also seemed hard pressedto challenge the GE modus operandi. In January 1997, CEO Welch, made a speech to all employees that made GE’s positionclear regarding its employees, including those at NP. Everyone at GE would be classified as either A, B, or C Players and theC’s [those who don’t ascribe to the GE Way and deserve to be fired]. Thusly the moral obligation of NP employees was anunconditional Hobson’s choice – the GE Way horse or none. In response, even the trade union seemed able to offer onlytoken resistance. It placed a notice in the Florence factory canteen stating that NP has always had a strong commitment toits workers. It stated, “We will not allow the destruction of an asset [human resources] by someone [GE headquarters] whoignores our history, our culture . . . or by someone [local management] who has suddenly lost his memory due to being wellpaid” [Busco et al., 2006, p. 28–9].” But rather than resisting, the unions meekly referred to the need for re-training stressingthat workers who leave the company must have appropriate support and guarantees, and that those who remain shouldhave the means to re-qualify, to be re-educated, and to have an assurance for the future [p. 29]. Even the previously powerfulunions seemed powerless in confronting GE’s colonization of NP.

8. Conclusion

The GE/NP takeover is a case in point of the phenomenon Shearer (2002, p. 541) fore fronted but that rarely gets addressedin the accounting literature, “Expanding global markets have resulted in renewed concern with accountability by transna-tional corporations . . . [that] exert a greater influence over our individual and collective lives” [p. 541]. Moreover, “Accountantscannot escape involvement in this undertaking. Indeed, it is impossible to engage in either accounting practice or accountingresearch without assuming a position on the extent of accountability proper to the economic entities for which they areprepared” [p. 542]. Yet management and control system research, by and large, has tended to ignore the considerationsbrought to the forefront in Levinas’s philosophy. As Reiter and Williams (2002, p. 577) observe, “Researchers do not have aninclination to engage in philosophical and methodological introspection”.

But, as Shearer (2002, p. 567) emphasizes, “Any system of accountability that is restricted to a purely economic rationale isinadequate to discharge the obligation to the Other because, within economics, the very existence of the Other is subordinatedto the instrumental purposes of the egoist self.” Levinas’s ethics exposes and forefronts how organizations and their executivesalso have an obligation that the pursuit of self interest alone cannot discharge. Nor is this incumbent duty discretionary. Ittranscends the intersubjective realm of the management and control systems designers and implementers. GE’s impositionof its generic management and control systems into the firms it acquires runs afoul of a Levinasian ethics of being for theother. It implies a predetermined knowledge of what each unique other needs or demands, prior to any encounter with the

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face of the other. In contrast, the transcendent injunction of the face – not to violate other’s uniqueness – supercedes anyself-interested motivations. GE executives seemed oblivious to this ethical duty and put reporting profits to the stock marketover ethical obligations to people. The NP case is not an isolated one. In 1994 and 1995, when the European recession madeacquisitions cheap, GE acquired hundreds of European companies, its European revenues rose $9.1 billion.

Many global corporations operated in like fashion, installing their unique integration models and management and controlsystems in companies acquired around the world. The role played by management and control systems of all kinds, in the faceof the ever-increasing domination of the world by giant global corporations operating as “private” enterprises whose ownself-interests dominate their actions and decisions, surely needs critique. That these systems are underwritten by a suspectethical stance should be of vital concern to management and control systems researchers and practitioners alike. This essay,then, might enable corporations and their managers to see their obligations to the broader human, environmental and moraldomains of today’s world in a new light, one that might expand the scope of their management and control systems tobetter mirror the ethical obligations they have to stakeholders other than the shareholders of transnational enterprises. AsSchweiker (1993, p. 231) makes the crucial point:

The need for economic accountability in our world situation cannot be doubted. If it is impossible to render economicforces morally accountable, then human beings have become slaves to their own financial and corporate creations andthe earth is subjected to unending exploitation under the aegis of ‘efficiency.’

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for partial support of thisresearch.

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