Organizationally structured deniability keeps executives from knowing wrongdoing

Evidence

Smart officials do not engage in profitable suspect activities knowingly. They do so tacitly with an organizationally structured system of deniability for the upper echelon. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1579

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the vault’s existing claims about authoritarian bureaucracies and corporatized rationalization of harmful policy; this is the organizational-structure version of the moral disengagement mechanism. — connects to: Corporate structure deadens and subsumes hopeful individual managers — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 144
• DEFINE: Names the mechanism at work here: ‘organizationally structured system of deniability’ as a form of moral disengagement for upper echelons.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1579