Aug. 11, 1998
Contact: Jennifer Peck Information Specialist (573) 882-7869 [email protected]
MU Professor Researches Administrative Evil
COLUMBIA, Mo.--Anyone who has ever worked in or had to deal with a large organization might wryly consider administrative bureaucracy to be a "necessary evil." Now, University of Missouri-Columbia professor Guy B. Adams' recent research and award-winning book, Unmasking Administrative Evil, takes a serious look at evil in administration.
With Danny L. Balfour of Grand Valley State University, Adams is the first to research and write about the evil side of public administration. While evil in administration has not often been discussed or recognized, Adams and Balfour argue that it is as much a part of administrative life as the concepts of efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.
"My co-author and I looked at the problem of how large organizations tend to dehumanize and exploit people," Adams said. "Our window on this problem from a historical viewpoint was the Holocaust and how mass murder was accomplished through bureaucratic methods and advanced organizational techniques."
Adams, who teaches ethics in MU's master of public administration program, said the key to the research is that evil in organizations is masked. In other words, it is possible for ordinary people to engage in acts of evil and not be aware that they are doing anything wrong. The research suggests one of the most frequent masks that administrative evil wears occurs in the modern organization, which disguises evil acts by making them a normal part of the employees' organizational roles. Another mask occurs in social and public policies, which can result in evil when they have been convincingly packaged as something good.
"If you look at the Holocaust, many people were able to participate in that without feeling that they were responsible," Adams said. "Some people identified Jewish businesses, some processed forms, others carried out plans and did all kinds of tasks, but maybe never even saw a Jew. But without the cooperation of these thousands of people, you could never have had genocide on the scale that it happened. It was a massive administrative undertaking that required the participation of virtually every social and political institution."
In the book, which today received the Best Book Award from the public and non-profit division of the Academy of Management, Adams and Balfour link the administrative evil in Nazi Germany to situations more contemporary and close to home. The researchers don't offer any easy solutions to eliminate administrative evil because the root of the problem is that it is not easily recognized.
"We are not suggesting that people set out to do evil," Adams said. "But people can find themselves administering policies that are doing harm to others and doing it in a routine way. In our modern, 'rational' system, we have created an atmosphere in which you can do things the right way according to the law and administrative procedure, where you can be a good professional and still do things that by all accounts are evil."
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