Abstract
In this important and timely book, Ilsup Ahn sets out to construct an ethical framework to model the precarious location of position holders in society and to provide substantive criteria for what ethical conduct looks like in such roles. Ahn draws on Jürgen Habermas and Reinhold Niebuhr to conceptualise what he terms the ‘positional self’, a subjectivity located within positions of leadership in organisations and institutions, straddling individual and interpersonal as well as corporate and broader social spheres. Ahn’s aim is to speak to contemporary challenges felt in late capitalist societies where language is being sought for institutional accountability, ethical business leadership, and corporate social responsibility, for instance. His intervention provides a lean conceptual schema for beginning to assess the nature of these mediating roles, which must engage and negotiate personal, institutional, and societal interests and concerns in a quest for what constitutes the good.
Ahn’s first chapter is a whirlwind tour of key theorists who provide a backdrop to Habermas and Niebuhr, and who have made their own contributions to theories of (inter)subjectivity and institutionality. Thinkers like Kant, Hegel, and Weber are not treated with significant depth here, but Ahn does retrieve the elements in their thought apposite to his argument. Kant’s primarily individualistically-grounded Moralität and formal criterion for ethical action give way to Hegel’s attention to Sittlichkeit, a contextual, intersubjectively-attuned perspective calling for substantive ethical criteria. Habermas, via Fichte, Mead, and Humbolt, emphasises the linguistic and metapragmatic dimension as a necessary addition to Hegelian intersubjectivity. Whyte’s ‘organisational man’ provides a starting point for depicting the forces shaping and challenging subjectivities whose identity is defined in part by the bureaucratic institutions they inhabit. Ahn’s aim is to begin to assemble conceptual language for describing the place of position holders: they are at once persons caught up in the same network of linguistified, intersubjective relations as the rest of us, and yet, because of their locations of authority within organisations, they bear a special relationship to forces of rationalisation, bureaucracy, and so-called ‘de-linguistified media’ such as money and power. Thus, Ahn incorporates Weberian concerns about rationalisation in modernity and the challenges it poses to culture and social relations. The tension between bureaucracy and democracy, often posed at odds in Weberian thought, is a divide straddled by the positional self.
Finding the democracy–bureaucracy opposition too narrow to describe the predicament of the positional self, Ahn turns, in chapter two, to Habermas’s concepts of lifeworld and system. Broadly construed, the lifeworld is the cultural context, the space of common values and linguistic meaning-making. Systems are discrete spheres anchored in the lifeworld, drawing their legitimation from it, and yet governed by a more technical, quantitative logic distinct from the practical, qualitative character of the lifeworld. Modernisation, according to Habermas, is the interplay and tension between the lifeworld and system(s). What constitutes modernity’s crisis is the decoupling of the system from the lifeworld and the ‘colonisation’ of the lifeworld by the system. Money and power, two main ‘steering media’ of the system, now come to define and shape values in the lifeworld in a way that undoes the capacity for meaningful communication. Ahn’s important constructive move here is to note that position holders partake of both lifeworld and system, and, because of the power they hold in organisations, are tempted to participate in the colonisation process, raising a moral challenge. This sets them apart from employees and clients of administrative systems. The latter can be said to be affected most directly by forces of rationalisation. And yet, Habermas’s analysis, claims Ahn, misses the distinction of holders of power positions who decide the course such institutions take. They are not only objects of rationalisation, but agentive subjects as well, who need to be held to ethical and moral account.
Ahn rounds off his exposition of Habermas in chapter three by considering the latter’s response to the ethical challenge of modernity’s crisis, or, alternatively, its unfinished project. This ambivalence is important because for Habermas the rationalisation of the lifeworld by systems presents as much opportunity as threat. Despite decoupling, various imperatives that emerge from the lifeworld continue to restrict and coordinate the system. In turn, rationalisation forces from the system provide frameworks for discourse ethics to seek further rational consensus, enabling meaningful communicative situations. Legal discourse is a key nexus which establishes parameters for the operations of systems, including the employment of money and power, while drawing on the values and norms of the lifeworld. And yet, Ahn concludes, what Habermas provides is a minimalist ethical framework for how position holders might be construed and held to account. Relying on a legal framework, it ‘stops short of providing us with a comprehensive moral criterion that regulates the moral conduct of the positional self’ (p. 119). Interestingly, Hegel’s critique of Kant’s formalistic model lacking content, reviewed by Ahn in chapter one, is here turned by Ahn upon Habermas.
Ahn turns to Niebuhr in search of substantive moral criteria to guide the actions of the positional self. Chapter four transposes the tension experienced by position holders between organisation and society onto Niebuhr’s distinction between ‘moral man and immoral society’. At stake here are the different dynamics between individual morality and group politics, and the capacity for groups to multiply the effects of personal choices, and override individual aspirations to act ethically. Ahn calls for a ‘socio-existential perspective’ which will account for the individual, subjective choices and perceptions of the positional self while mediating the demands of the organisation and broader society. Because freedom is paramount in Niebuhr’s anthropology, the limitations to freedom imposed by institutional parameters is one factor in the positional self’s moral predicament. Niebuhr’s critique of societal ‘big men’ like Henry Ford exposes the complexities: individuals may have noble aims, and corporate structures may even capture some of these through various public initiatives; yet personal aspirations and corporate directives to accumulate power and money undermine such efforts. Niebuhr’s Augustinianism foregrounds pride and sensuality as two sins which stem from the anxiety of human existence. Ahn applies these to position holders, claiming that pride is manifested in succumbing to personal desire for power accumulation, while sensuality is sinking back into group/organisational pressures to pursue such directives, relinquishing personal freedom and agency. While all actors may be considered sinners on equal footing, guilt is unequal, and power brokers are held to a stricter account for the ways their decisions have far-reaching impact. The multiplier effect of groups and institutions highlights the urgency for moral parameters for positional action.
Chapter five recapitulates Niebuhr’s insights on love and justice to provide more guiding content for Ahn’s project. The image of God is a key anthropological category for Niebuhr, speaking primarily to human freedom. Christ is held up as the moral norm for human conduct, manifesting freely chosen sacrificial love. This model is universalised by Niebuhr through critical appropriation of Roman Catholic Natural Law theory and the notion of justitia originalis. Though obscured through the Fall, this original capacity for justice and love in human nature has not been lost and serves as a guiding criteria for action. Love and justice work in dialectical tension, with justice and the law providing the minimal criteria for what actors, and especially position holders, are accountable to, while love propels such action onward toward goals of betterment of and service to fellow human beings. Agape is the standard to which the positional self must be held.
In chapter six, Ahn develops his constructive integration of Habermas and Niebuhr. The chapter remains primarily expository, assessing the strengths and limitations in each with regard to theorising and ethically framing the place of position holders. One clear conclusion is that both Habermas and Niebuhr fail to consider the peculiar notion of positionality, and it is one of Ahn’s important contributions to the field to limn this notion and call for ethical language surrounding it. Ahn seeks here to mediate Habermas’s ‘minimal moral provision (‘keep the law’) and Niebuhr’s maximal moral prospect (‘perfect justice as a discursive anticipation of universal regard for all affected subjects’)’ (p. 233). Habermas’s notions of deliberative, democratic discourse and the principle of universalisability—that norms must be generally observable as being in the interests of all involved—are integrated with the anticipatory nature of justice in Niebuhr, that perfect justice is a not fully realisable aim. Freedom and communicative reason are two critical moral faculties that must be balanced, as position holders act within the parameters of the laws and interests of society and organisations, while freely transcending the limitations of such laws in the interests of more robust love and justice. A pragmatically-inflected notion of communal investigation of truth provides the scope for both position holders and those affected to pursue together actions beneficial to all. Ahn concludes by formally articulating the positional imperative as such: ‘Act in such a way that your positional action not only meet the standard of the law but also anticipatorily receive the approval of all affected’ (p. 233).
While much of the book is expository, it is geared toward the advanced reader and not as an introductory textbook to either thinker or the subjects involved. The prose is dense and terminologically laden, and Ahn assumes familiarity with core concepts employed. The text is useful for Habermas and Niebuhr scholars and those interested in institutional and organisational dynamics, civil society, corporate social responsibility, and business and leadership ethics.
Although the moral predicament of the positional self as agent of systemic colonisation of the lifeworld might appear obvious, Ahn could have devoted more space to justifying this. In other words, the text assumes that colonisation of the lifeworld is negative and presents a moral challenge to position holders. Yet, as Ahn notes, ‘[i]t is Habermas’s ingenious point that the rationalisation of the lifeworld has not led society into moral bankruptcy … but rather it has actually opened a new possibility of moral reconstruction’ (p. 92). Conceivably, position holders can be construed as agents of positive rationalisation, contributing to the forces which render public discourse meaningful according to rational principles accepted with increasing universality. The source of the problem may be Habermas’s (in my view misleading and inappropriate) colonisation metaphor. Ahn might have integrated Enrique Dussel’s insights to provide a more robust account of the moral predicament. Dussel not only engages in metapragmatic reflections and draws on similar sources as Habermas (e.g., Apel), but he locates his reflections within the awareness of actual colonisation processes. What is a confused metaphor in Habermas is a concrete social situation in Dussel which qualifies discursive parameters and would provide a fruitful framework for the challenges to the positional self engaged in decisions with global impact.
Ahn might have also devoted more analysis to the differences in discursive situations between (corporate) organisations and broader society. Questions of law, legality, interests, and the good are elided in the text such that the persistent conflict between corporate and societal interests, and differing ideas of the good, are not addressed. To say that position holders must conform to the law appears to conflate corporate by-laws and society’s legal codes. The main tension in interests that Ahn negotiates is self–other, where position holders must balance their own desires with those of all others, whether organisational or societal. Yet, the reality appears tripartite, as discrete sets of interests among self–organisation–society should be considered to provide a fuller account of the challenge of positionality.
Nevertheless Ahn’s text is highly original, innovative, and significant. While in my view he is liable to the same critique he levelled at Habermas, majoring on a formalised ethical framework yet lacking substantive moral criteria, he certainly succeeds in the former, and this is no small feat. Ahn has made a noteworthy contribution to the underdeveloped conversation on organisational and business ethics, drawing on sophisticated language and robust concepts. His model of the positional self must be reckoned with, to be refined, amplified, and deployed in a variety of contexts calling for rigorous ethical reflection in our contemporary world.