Mismanagement, “Jumpers,” and Morality : Covertly Concealed Managerial Ignorance and Immoral Careerism in Industrial Organizations

This book is a longitudinal multi-site anthropological study of automatic cotton gin plants, exposing the roots of amoral corporate leadership and explaining recent business scandals by managers’ low-moral choices while advancing to top-level jobs. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to management and leadership scholars of all social sciences and for historians, and especially for co-operative scholars. It addresses the topics with regard to sociology and management studies and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of trust, leadership, management, and organisation control.

Executives’ morality and ethics became major research topics following recent business scandals, but the research missed a major explanation of executives’ immorality: career advancement by "jumping" between firms that causes ignorance of job-pertinent tacit local knowledge, tempting "jumpers" to covertly conceal this ignorance. Generating distrust and ignorance cycles and mismanagement, this choice bars performance-based career advancement and encourages immoral careerism, advancing by immoral subterfuges. Such careerism is a known managerial malady, but explaining its emergence proved challenging as managerial ignorance is covertly concealed as a dark secret on organizations’ dark side by conspiracies of silence.

Managerially educated and experienced, Dr. Shapira achieved a breakthrough by a 5-year semi-native anthropological study of five "jumper"-managed automatic processing plants and their parent firms. This book untangles common ignorance and immoral careerism, concealed as dark secrets by executives who "rode" on the successes of mid-level "jumpers" who high-morally risked their authority and power by admitting ignorance and trustfully learned local tacit knowledge. The opposite choice tendencies accorded power, authority, and status rankings, which made practicing immorality easier the higher one’s position, suggesting that the common "jumping" between managerial careers nurtures immoral executives similar to those exposed in the recent business scandals.