The second major case is more equivocal. Werner Von Braun was technical director of the project to build the V2 rocket, and he explicitly adopted the policy of using SS-provided slave labour at the various production sites. Mittelbau-Dora was the last, and worst, of the SS concentration camps, built to supply slave labour for the Mittelwerk factory, which Von Braun often visited and from which he selected prisoners for special technical tasks. The factory produced 6,000 rockets and 20,000 deaths in two years. More humans were killed in the making than in the explosions. Other Nazi officials associated with the camp were tried at Nuremberg after the war, but the US whisked Braun and 117 members of his team, half of them party members and all familiar with the slave labor camps, to the US. ‘Better our Nazis than the Russian’s Nazis’, the saying went. Here, they were sanitized and their records hidden, given charge of the US missile program, well-paid and lionized for their role in arming the US against the USSR. The case is equivocal because, in the case of the slave labor camps, Von Braun could have said ‘just following orders, where the failure to do so might have meant punishment’, or that he was serving a higher good, the fatherland. In the case of the US government protecting and using him, there was a ‘higher good’ of getting better missiles than its enemy, the USSR, could get. The goals of the system, rather than its administrative evil, would seem to be implicated. A weaker case is made about the subsequent trajectory of the missile program and, then, the space program, under Von Braun. A defensive organizational culture was created by the Von Braun team and it turned ‘destructive’ under the leadership of Dr William Lucas, leading to the Challenger tragedy. The history here is quite interesting and offers a quite different view of the events leading to the Challenger accident than that of Diane Vaughan’s (1996) ‘normalization of deviancy’ account. But, as the authors admit, the ‘identification of administrative evil is problematic’ in the Challenger account.

I can think of other examples where the designation of ‘necessary evil’ may be more appropriate than administrative evil. Workers in US atomic weapons plants were knowingly exposed to unnecessary radiation, but safer procedures would slow down the war effort, it was said at the time. President Eisenhower was informed that soldiers placed a few thousand feet from an atomic test blast would be seriously irradiated, but he approved of the experiment because fighting communism demanded sacrifice (test animals would tell us just as much and, in any event, it appears that there was little follow-up of the exposed troops, so this compounded the evil with bungling). The authors mention the Tuskegee experiments on Afro-American prisoners, internment of Japanese Americans in World War II and other cases to remind us that ‘American public administration also possesses a well-developed capacity for administrative evil’ (xxviii). But most of these are easily rationalized in terms of some ‘higher good’ (the Tuskegee case could have been so rationalized initially, but not later on; the cruel experiments continued even after a cure for syphilis had been found). For something that is not capable of such rationalization and, thus, a pristine example of administrative evil, we have to turn to a case they barely mention and so not analyze – the US tobacco industry. The scientists and upper management knew full well the suffering they were inflicting on others as they sought to increase addiction rates. The penalties for refusing to cooperate were minor: job loss by people with marketable skills. But most important, they could not rationalize this in terms of any higher national or scientific good. It took a rare individual, a whistle-blower, to break out of the administrative routine that for decades produced and rewarded this evil.

For this reviewer, an unfortunate subtext of the book is the undiscriminating attack upon technical rationality, efficiency, bureaucracy and the like. It is claimed that these are de-humanizing, destructive of human values and dignity and, thus, administrative rationality begat administrative evil. Of course, they do not suggest we try the alternatives – non-rationality in administration, inefficiency or non-technical rationality, if there be such a thing. Nor do they address the costs that might attend an absence of technical rationality. It is all too easy to pull a somewhat post-modern sheet over the body of administrative good and declare it dead on the evidence of the Holocaust and, thus, dismiss the administrative urge towards human rights that has begun to assert itself in the world, or to fail to compare the human rights record of the US, where technical rationality reigns, with that of Russia, China, Afghanistan and so on, where it is absent. The countries with the best human rights records – thus, presumably the lowest level of administrative evil – are the most technically rational, the Scandinavian countries. Given the advance of science and rationality and bureaucracy, things can only get worse, by their logic. The ‘scientific-analytic mind-set and technical-rational approach to social and political problems enables a new and frightening form of evil – administrative evil’ (p. 4). Since our very public service ethics and professional ethics are anchored in this mind-set, these ethics are useless in the face of administrative evil (p. 4). In part, ‘modern public administration is founded on and sustained by systematic dehumanization, exploitation, and even extermination’ (p. 52). A vast unmasking is the only solution offered.

This indiscriminate attack does a disservice to the genuine contributions of the book, which is to document the situation where not even a ‘necessary evil’ explanation will suffice to explain the evil that organizations can effect. The Milgram experiments (administering harmful electric shocks in the interests of science) and the Stanford Prisoner experiment (within six days normal students assigned to be guards were de-humanizing and grossly maltreating those assigned to play the role of prisoners) stick in our craw and need explanation. How could the revelations of these experiments (or the behavior of the scientists and managers of the tobacco companies, or doctors in the Tuskegee experiments), be a part of the human experience? The Holocaust, atrocities in Africa and Central Europe, the destruction of Grozny, Chechnya, need explanations with the power to match their horror.

The authors get close; it will be an organizational explanation, not one of thuggery, criminality, greed, power, lust and stupidity, all qualities of individuals, not of organizations. Their essential insight is that organizational practices are at the root of a good part of these crimes (though I would think not the tribal warfare with primitive weapons in Rwanda). Organizations construct mental worlds for us, and selective cognitive processes are set in motion which screen out other cognitions. But I think they err in blaming ‘scientific-analytic mind-sets’; magical thinking and superstitions, as well, can be called into play to over-ride ethical concerns that are otherwise present. Rationality does not necessarily dehumanize people; irrationality is at least as good a candidate. Rationality can humanize as well as dehumanize. World relief effors are a part of our technical-rational ethos.

We need tighter arguments, harder thinking, more analytical categories to capture the diversity of examples, than we get here. Blanket condemnations of rationality strain credulity. The psychological research cited in chapter 1 seems pitifully inadequate to the task of explaining the Stanford prison experiments. Some attention must be given to the possibility that the leaders of evil organizations simply had evil goals, and got them carried out, rather than pulling the social constructionist sheet over them and blaming techno-rationality (I would put the Catholic hierarchy during the inquisition here, along with big tobacco.) While the ‘necessary evil’ justification is most often a conscious rationalization and deception, it deserves more respect and more analytic attention than they are willing to give it. But, all in all, though the book is vague and only retorical at times, at many other times, and especially with the Holocaust example, the notion of administrative evil is an analytical beginning as well as a wake-up call. It is a conundrum that no standard organizational theory I know of has been willing to confront, and this is a courageous book.