Managerial Responsibilities on the Micro Level

I t is possible to think of the responsibilities of corporate managers on either the macro level--accountable to w h o m o r the micro level--accountable for what. Discussions of managerial responsibilities on the macro "to whom" level have been ongoing for years, certainly since Berle and Means (1936) first noted the replacement of company owners by professional managers, without reaching a widely accepted conclusion. Perhaps instead of continuing those discussions it would be well to move back a step, or down a notch, and begin to consider the micro, "for what" responsibilities of management. What activities should corporate managers be held accountable to perform, and to perform well? Before starting to discuss the activities we can reasonably expect the managers of business firms to perform, and perform well, let me make a few comments about the problem of reaching a widely shared conclusion on the responsibilities of management at the macro level. It is a basic tenet of commercial law that managers are accountable primarily to the owners of the business. It is a basic principle of neoclassical economics that managers are accountable solely to the stockholders of the firm. People who adopt the very logical thought s tructures-the "ways of looking at the w o r l d ' o f either the legal system o r the market paradigm are not easily going to give up one of their most crucial underlying assumptions. We may d isagree-and by "we" I mean the normative ethicists and social philosophers who are contributing articles to this special edition of Business Horizons---but that does not mean that we will be able to convince attorneys o r economists. Most of us in this issue believe that the macro responsibilities of corporate managers have to be extended to the society of which the company is a part, rather than be limited to a small segment of owners within that society. Most of us think that a substantial numbet of compelling arguments have been presented in support of that view (Stone 1975, Velasquez 1982, DeGeorge 1982, Hosmer 1984, McCoy 1985, Bowie 1991). Most of us recognize, however, that we have not convinced advocates of the rule To get managers to act ethically, we must hold them accountable on an ethical level of management.