Redefining Accountability in a Network Society:

Mollie Painter-Morland, PhD

mpainter@depaul.edu

“The accountable corporation”

Santa Clara

2005

Overview:

• From grids to networks

• Who are we?

• How do we know anything about “right” and “wrong”?

• Addressing the dynamics of the network society

• Towards a new understanding of accountability

Elements of accountability

Epistemology

Agency

Who are we?

How do we make statements about the “truth”?

What do we know about right and wrong?

From grids to networks:Mark Taylor

Grid-like worldview• World functions as

mechanism• Closed• Intrinsically stable• Rule-driven• Facts versus values• Direct cause and effect

Complex adaptive systems• Organic systems• Open systems• Operate far from

equilibrium• Parts within whole

connect in multiple ways > serial and parallel

• Non-linear

3 challenges in a network society

• Decentralization, deregulation, dematerialization

• Cause and effect relationships become difficult to plot

• “Knowledge” is incomplete and involves creating risks of “blind spots’

• Moral “truth” is not “out there” to be rationally identified, or a rule-based order

• Moral agents are players that influence the outcome, but does not determine it > ethics is not applying “rules” within a mechanistic system

• Multiple interactions > local, small things have global effects

• Knowledge is not about facts, but of “knowing” what the appropriate relational response is

• Knowledge often brings ignorance

Our dilemma within a network society

Agent is part of network of relationships and part of various roles and practices

Local events have global effect> cause and effect not directly established

Moral truth is relationally established

Perspectives on who we are as decision-makers within a network

society

• No longer agents follow God’s instructions• Not quite the “rational” agent: Kant• Hermeneutics versus Structuralism

Interpreting moral agent

Subject determined by rules

Danger is subjective interpretation

Danger: determinism

How do we know what we know?

• In Kantian scheme: a priori truths• In hermeneutic scheme: Interpretative play

> danger of relativism• In structuralist scheme: Rule-driven

environment, morality is what makes the system works best > danger of determinism

MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral agency

Telos/ Goal

Foundationalist truth

Do we still know what we are talking about when it come to

morality?• MacIntyre (1988): moral agents are without

telos > our coping mechanism is to create artificial end of utility

• Moral agents are also without foundationalist truth > we cope by creating artificial notion of human rights

• MacIntyre (1999) identifies danger of compartmentalization

Recent responses

Foucault: • Techniques of genealogy: historically constituted

subjectivity • Unpacks power-relationships as constitutive of

knowledge: you often know what you know because of who you are in the hierarchy

• Identity does not refer to a fixed essential self, nor is one’s identity in complete flux

Jesuit concept of “heroic leadership”, you sometimes lead, you sometimes follow

Not big, complex dilemmas, basically asking: “Who are you in THIS situation?

• Practices of the self: Jesuit practices of self-awareness

Contemporary responses (continued)

Petersen: • Develops notion of the “moral fabric”: we all share

certain universal responses, i.e. tacit knowledge that is part of being human, but also context-specific knowledge or “social grammar”

• Emphasizes the biological and social influences in social systems and practices

• Moral judgment entails conditioned responses, yet he allows for innovation and change though self-awareness

Implications for accountability

• Accountability “for” needs to be expanded to accountability “towards”, or “in terms of”

• 3 dynamics within a network society:

1) Deregulation and decentralization > the shift from representational to relational

2) No direct cause and effect

3) Knowledge and risk are intricately connected

The HOW and the WHAT of accountability

Content and

Process

The WHAT of accountability• Relational, but not relativist

truth: the issue of culture• Values as emergent

properties of complex adaptive systems

• Anti-hierarchization and silos

• Importance of trust• Tacit knowledge and social

grammar • Understanding risk as

intimately bound up with knowledge

• The right climate, created by ethical “episodes”, contributes to the emergence of ethical culture

• Moral “truths” refer to appropriate relational responses

• Values as emerge as those aspects that say who we are and what we care about

• Entrusting what we care about to every single person

• Every individual is contributing to the culture as it is emerging and is accountable for it

• No “passing the buck”• By “knowing”, we forget certain

things: accountability means to remind yourself

The HOW of accountability• Establishing self-reflexivity

• Always ask: What is our social order making me unaware of?

• Create participative organizations with a certain “social grammar”

• Addressing fear

• Ethics education as engagement

• Being less risk-averse

• Understand networks as non-totalizing structures that function as a whole

• Creating self-aware individuals and corporations and create multiple feedback loops

• Constantly questioning: what am I not being told?

• Ethics as practice instead of recalling of “truths”

• Everyday vignettes discussing who the individual “is” in each case

• Recasting fear as being concerned about the things we care about

• Recasting risk and responsibility as opportunity

• Creating “clusters of “accountability”

Conclusion:

• Redefining accountability in a network society means:

1) Understanding who we are as relational beings and corporations in society

2) Understanding that accountability is not “out there”, but that it is being created “in here”

3) Accountability is an emergent property of certain practices that have to be nurtured