1 ABEN 2013 Conference: D:\Documents\Bernard\Conference papers\2013 ABEN\ABEN2013 Conference McKenna & Rooney.docx ABEN 2013 Conference Bernard McKenna & David Rooney The University of Queensland Business School Institutionalized Ethics and the Deskilling of Wisdom Keywords: wisdom, aporia, wicked problems, non-rational decision making Mischa Maisky is one of the truly great cellists of our time and may one day be acknowledged along with Casals and Rostropovitch as among the greats. Yet in 1970, at the age of 22, for the crime of being Jewish and Latvian, he was imprisoned in a Soviet labour camp for 18 months where he had to shovel cement instead of playing the cello. When asked about that experience, he said: Believe it or not, I actually don't have any feelings of anger or resentment about my past. I don't regret anything that has happened to me because I believe that it's very important to try to find the positive elements in life experiences, even painful ones. 1 This extraordinary capacity for humans, also often seen in the stories of returning POWs 2 and of people like Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi, to not only make sense of appalling injustice in their life but also to ennoble themselves and humanity by the way in which they turned that experience into something truly worthwhile and life affirming (Biloslavo & McKenna, 2013) is what underpins this paper. This is because it involves a search for justice, the acknowledgment of paradox, the ennobling of human life, and pursuing the Good. My question is this: Do modern organizations, institutions, and professions provide the capacity for people who are not Mischa Maisky, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, or Weary Dunlop the possibility of exercising the human potential for doing Good. My short answer is no, qualified to the extent that it increasingly impossible as one’s agency decreases. Most contemporary organisations, particularly capitalist companies boasting a reputation for corporate social responsibility, point to an organisational ethical code as emblematic of its high moral worth. However, we argue that such codes are often the refuge of the lowest order in Vico’s timeless taxonomy of managerial types, the imprudent savant, who moves “in a straight line from general to particular truths” in order to “burst through the tortuous curves of life” (Miner, 1998, p. 57). The arrogant positivist claims made by the ‘New Science’ that Vico was challenging in the eighteenth century are the focus of our critique in 21 st century organisational behaviour. That is, principled reason and fact alone (Benedict, 2001, p. 27) are inadequate. Indeed, we propose instead, that organisations should encourage the development of the wise person (sapientes), who has practical and theoretical wisdom: such wise people “through all the obliquities and uncertainties of human actions, aim for eternal truth, follow roundabout ways … and execute plans which in the long run are for the best, as far as the nature of things allows” (Miner, 1998, p. 56). 1 http://www.cello.org/newsletter/articles/maisky/maisky.htm 2 See, for example the stories of Stan Arneil (One Man’s War) and ‘Weary’ Dunlop (Sue Erbury Weary)