[port11]

A corporation is made of people, but its ethos is the product of decision-making. If a corporation is consistently, say, unethical, is it because they hire only unethical individuals? Or because unethical people somewhere along the chain of command make unethical decisions?

[otterley]

I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at with this question. It seems to still conflate corporate-level decisions with boots-on-the-ground work.

Are you suggesting that whatever decisions their upper-level management makes that you consider unethical irreversibly and irrevocably taints all the difficult and honorable work that their engineers and operations people are performing?

[port11]

I’m saying their lower-level employees are probably honest, hard-working people like everyone else. But the detachment that comes from a large corporate structure makes the higher-ups decide things that aren’t as honourable.

“Corporations are made up of people” is a strange way to excuse the reality that the ‘bad’ things that corporations do are often decided by top management.

[otterley]

Ah. I didn’t intend to excuse the decisions of upper management when I said that. My intent was to counter the notion that a corporation and its workers can’t be analyzed independently.

A corporation is just a business formation, and businesses are made of individual people working for it. Those people’s motivations and efforts can, and often should, be evaluated separately from the decisions of management.

[port11]

We agree, thank you for the clarification. Have a nice day!