Corporate structures insulate top executives while scapegoating compliant middle managers.

Evidence

With decentralization into divisions and divisional profits key to advancement, tacit directives to use unlawful means of increasing profits carried weight. The head of the transformer division complied faithfully with the company’s covert policy, only to find that his own company considered him expendable. … In addressing the assembled managers, the chairman of the GE board of directors absolved corporate executives of any responsibility. He proclaimed, with righteous indignation, that any violators of federal antitrust law were on their own in defending themselves against criminal indictments. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1402

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s social-conservatism/authoritarianism claims about how institutions diffuse responsibility for harm — same displacement dynamic Bandura theorizes. — connects to: Corporate vices are engendered by structure, not by individuals — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 142; Corporate structure deadens and subsumes hopeful individual managers — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 144
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1402