Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Accountability is responsive behavior, not merely answering to superiors

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tagsja-picks, define, definitional_content, trade, singleton, xref, causal_relationships, category/definitional-content
aliases@lipsky_street-level_2010, loc. 1156

4 min read

Accountability is responsive behavior, not merely answering to superiors

Evidence

Managerial officials believed they had tacit approval from above to participate in the antitrust activities. This absolved them of a sense of personal responsibility for their actions. Some felt constrained by their position in the chain of command to report that their supervisors were clandestinely supporting antitrust activities: “I had no power to go higher. I do not report to anyone except my superiors” (Herling, 1962). Still others knew about the price-fixing and bid rigging but remained silent because higher authorities might be covertly approving these very illegal activities. They feared that reporting the activities upward could cost them their jobs or advancement in their careers. Many employees simply worked hard at keeping themselves uninformed about what was going on. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1395 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Another former white supremacist described how someone who was working to deradicalize him took him to a café run by former gang members as part of his deradicalization process. While they were eating, he said: … I remember the girl that waited on us was a black girl and she was like my typical stereotype of what I pictured black gangbanger girls looked like… . And I remember she kept staring at me like she wanted something from me, but it was like an angry stare. And I couldn’t understand it. And I remember at first, I was really uncomfortable. And I remember [name] was like, “The first step to healing is to acknowledge how you’ve hurt other people. So I did you a favor, homie. I know that you would not be ready for that step yet so I went ahead and told her who you were. She knows you’re KKK, or trying to get out… . She’s well aware of you… . And she’s expecting you to come over there and talk to her like a human being.” … I remember, he was not taking no for an answer. He’s like, “Go talk to this girl. She’s on her break standing there waiting for you to talk to her.” And I was like, “Oh my god.” I was scared. For the first time, I was scared of what I didn’t understand. And I remember I walked up to her and I started to say, “Hi, I’m [name] …” And I started to bawl my eyeballs out. Like baby sob. And she grabbed me and she hugged me and she said, “It’s okay, man. It feels good to let it out.” And I was like, “I am so sorry.” And I just started—like, I’m getting emotional right now because that was a really important part of my recovery from hate, and [name] made that happen. — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America, 430 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Routine frontline judgments are political acts that allocate social benefits and harms. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 623; Hierarchical subordinates displace responsibility by presuming tacit approval from above — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1395; Confident authority in assessments can relieve decision-makers of accountability — Holm Gero HĂĽmmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice: How to Communicate…, 54 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

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Backlinks