Abstract
Obedience: a simple term. Stanley Milgram, the famous experimental social psychologist, shocked the world with theory about it. Another man, Pol Pot, the infamous leader of the Khmer Rouge, showed how far the desire for obedience could go in human societies. Milgram conducted his experiments in the controlled environment of the US psychology laboratory of the 1960s. Pol Pot experimented with Utopia in the totalitarian Kampuchea of the 1970s. In this article, we discuss the process through which the Khmer Rouge regime created an army of unquestioningly obedient soldiers – including child soldiers. Based on these two cases, we advance a framework on how obedience can be grown or countered.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Affonço, D.: 2007, To the End of Hell: One Woman’s Struggle to Survive Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge (Reportage Books, London).
Arendt, H.: 1994, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (Penguin, New York).
Bandura A., B. Underwood, M. E. Fromson (1975) “Disinhibition of aggression through diffusion of responsibility and dehumanization of victims”. Journal of Research in Personality 9, 253-269.
Banerjee S.B (2008) “Necrocapitalism”. Organization Studies 29:1541-1563.
Barker, J. R.: 1993, “Tightening the iron cage: Concertive control in self managing teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly 38, 408-437.
Barley, S.R.: 2007, “Corporations, democracy, and the public good”, Journal of Management Inquiry 16, 201-215.
Bar-On D. (1989) “Holocaust perpetrators and their children: A paradoxical morality”. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 29:424-443.
Barth, J.: 1967, Giles Goat Boy, (Anchor, New York).
Benjamin, L.T. and J. A. Simpson: 2009, “The power of the situation: The impact of Milgram’s obedience studies on personality and social psychology”, American Psychologist 64, 12-19.
Bennis, W., D. Goleman and J. O’Toole: 2008, Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor (Jossey Bass, San Francisco).
Blass, T.: 1991 “Understanding behavior in the Milgram obedience experiment: The role of personality, situations, and their interaction”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, 398-413.
Blass, T.: 1996 “Attribution of responsibility and trust in the Milgram obedience experiment”, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 26, 1529-1535.
Blass, T. (Ed): 2001, Obedience to authority: Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm (Lawrence Earlbaum, Mahwah, NJ).
Blass, T.: 2004, The man who shocked the world: The life and legacy of Stanley Milgram (New York, Basic Books).
Bower, B.: 2004, ‘To Err is Human: Influential Research on Our Social Shortcomings Attracts a Scathing Critique’, Science News 166 (7).
Burger J.M. (2009) “Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today”. American Psychologist 64:1-11.
Caldwell, C. and R. D. Dixon: forthcoming, ‘Love, Forgiveness, and Trust: Critical Values of the Modern Leader’, Journal of Business Ethics. doi:10.1007/s10551-0814-z.
Card, R. F.: 2005, “Individual responsibility within organizational contexts”, Journal of Business Ethics, 62, 397-405.
Carney, B.M. and I. Getz: 2009, Freedom Inc. (Crown, New York).
Chandler, D.: 1991, The tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution Since 1945 (Yale University Press, New Haven).
Chandler, D.: 1999, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Westview, Boulder, CO).
Chandler, D.: 2000, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai, Thailand).
Chandler, D.: 2008, A History of Cambodia (4th ed.) (Westview, Boulder, CO).
Chirot, D. and C. McCauley: 2006, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton University Press, Princeton).
Clayton, T.: 1998, “Building the new Cambodia: Educational destruction and construction under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979”, History of Education Quarterly 38, 1-16.
Clegg, S.R.: 2006, “Why is organization theory so ignorant?”, Journal of Management Inquiry 15, 426-430.
Clegg, S.R., D. Courpasson, and N. Phillips: 2006, Power and Organizations. (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA).
Contu, A.: 2008, “Decaf resistance: On misbehavior, cynicism and desire in liberal workplace”, Management Communication Quarterly 21, 364-379.
Covaleski, M.A., M. W. Dirsmith, J. B. Heian, and S. Samuel: 1998, “The calculated and the avowed: Techniques of discipline and struggles over identity in Big Six public accounting firms”, Administrative Science Quarterly 43, 293-327.
De Cock, C., P. Fleming, and A. Rehn: 2007, “Organizing revolution?”, Management and Organizational History 2, 107-114.
Edmondson, A.C.: 1999, “Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly 44, 350-383.
Einarsen, S., Aasland M. S., Skogstad A. (2007) “Destructive leadership behavior: A definition and conceptual model”., Leadership Quarterly 18:207-216.
Elms, A.C.: 2009, “Obedience lite”, American Psychologist 64, 32-36.
Essers, J., S. Bohm and A. Contu: 2009, “Corporate Robespierres, ideologies of management and change”, Journal of Organizational Change Management 22, 129-140.
Fiske, S.T.: 1993, “Controlling other people: The impact of power on stereotyping”, American Psychologist 48, 621-628.
Foucault, M.: 1979, Discipline and Punish (Penguin, Harmondsworth).
Gibson, J. T. and M. Haritos-Fatouros: 1986, ‘The Education of a Torturer’, Psychology Today 20(11), 50–58.
Goffman, E.: 1961, Asylums (Penguin, Harmondsworth).
Goffman, E.: 1967, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. (Pantheon, New York).
Grey, C. and C. Garsten: 2002, ‘Organized and Disorganized Utopias: An Essay on Presumption’, in M. Parker (ed.), Utopia and Organization (Blackwell, Oxford), pp. 9–23.
Hamel, G.: 2007, The future of management. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Hannah, S.T., M. Uhl-Bien, B. J. Avolio, and F. L: Cavarretta: 2009, “A framework for examining leadership in extreme contexts”, Leadership Quarterly 20, 897-919.
Haritos-Fatouros, M.: 1988, “The official torturer: A learning model for obedience to the authority of violence”, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 18, 1107-1120.
Hinton, A.L.: 1998a, “Why did you kill? The Cambodian genocide and the dark side of face and honor”, Journal of Asian Studies 57, 93-122.
Hinton, A. L.: 1998b, Anthropologies of the Red Khmer, Part II: Genocidal Bricolage. Working Paper, Cambodia Genocide Program, Yale University.
Hinton, A.L.: 1998c, “A head for an eye: Revenge in the Cambodian genocide”, American Ethnologist 25, 352-377.
Jackson, K.D.: 1979, “Cambodia 1978: War, pillage, and purge in Democratic Kampuchea”, Asian Survey 19, 72-84.
Jackson, K. D. (ed.): 1989, Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death. (Princeton University Press, Princeton).
Jacques, R.: 1996, Manufacturing the Employee. Management Knowledge from the 19th to 21st Century (Sage, London).
Janis, I.L.: 1982, Groupthink (Houghton Mifflin, Boston).
Kellerman, B.: 2004, Bad Leadership (Harvard Business Press, Boston, MA).
Kelman, H. C., and V. L. Hamilton: 1989, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT).
Kets de Vries, M.F.R.: 2001, “Creating authentizotic organizations: Well-functioning individuals in vibrant companies”, Human Relations 54, 101-111.
Kiernan, B.: 2008, The Pol Pot regime: Race, power, and genocide in Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979(Yale University Press, New Haven, CT).
Leavitt, H.J.: 2007, “Big organizations are unhealthy environments for human beings”, Academy of Management Learning and Education 6, 253-263.
Ly, B.: 2003, “Devastated vision(s): The Khmer Rouge scopic regime in Cambodia”, Art Journal 62, 67-81.
Margolin, J.-L.: 1999, “Cambodia: The country of disconcerting crimes”, In S. Courtois, N. Werth, J.-L. Panné, A. Paczkowski, K. Bartosek, and J.-L. Margolin (Eds). The Black Book of Communism: Crime, Terror, Repression (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA), pp. 577-635.
Meng-Try, E.: 1981, “Kampuchea: A country adrift”, Population and Development Review 7, 209-228.
Meng-Try, E. and S. Sorya: 2001, Victims and Perpetrators? Testimony of Young Khmer Rouge Comrades (Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh).
Milgram, S.: 1963, Behavioral Study of Obedience', Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, 371–378.
Milgram, S.: 1965, “Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority”, Human Relations 18, 57-76.
Milgram, S.: 1974, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (Harper and Row: New York).
Monaghan, P.: 2004, ‘Verbatim’, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, p. A11.
Ordoñez, L.D., M. E. Schweitzer, A. D. Galinsky, and M. Bazerman: 2009, “Goals gone wild: The systematic side effects of overprescribing goal setting”, Academy of Management Perspectives 23, 6-16.
Orwell, G.: 1949, 1984 (Penguin, London).
Padilla A., Hogan R., Kaiser R. B. (2007) “The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments”. Leadership Quarterly 18:176-194.
Pfeffer, J.: 2009, “Renaissance and renewal in management studies: Relevance regained”, European Management Review 6, 141-148.
Phim, T. S.: 1998, Anthropologies of the Red Khmer, Part I: Terror and Aesthetics. Working Paper, Cambodia Genocide Program, Yale University.
Pirson, M. A. and P. R. Lawrence: forthcoming, ‘Humanism in Business – Towards a Paradigm Shift’, Journal of Business Ethics.
Popkin, S. L.: 1970, The Rational Peasant (University of California, Berkeley, CA).
Pot, P. 1977, Long Live the 17th Anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Speech delivered on September 29, 1977. http://padevat.info/2009/03/01/the-pol-pot-speech-introduction. Retrieved 30 September 2009.
Robin, C.: 2004, Fear: The history of a political idea (Oxford University Press, Oxford).
Rummel, R.J.: 1994, “Power, genocide, and mass murder”, Journal of Peace Research 31, 1-10.
Scott, J.: 1979, “Revolution in the revolution”, Theory and Society 7(1-2), 97-134.
Seaman, T.: 1999. Briefing paper on child soldiers in Cambodia. Phnom Penh: Cambodian League for Promotion and Defence of Human Rights.
Sewell, G.: 2008 “Panopticism”, In S.R. Clegg and J.R. Bailey (Eds) International Encyclopedia of organization studies (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA), pp. 1215-1217.
Shawcross, W.: 1979, Sideshow (Touchstone, New York).
Shenkar, O.: 1996, ‘The Firm as a Total Institution: Reflections on the Chinese State Enterprise’, Organization Studies 17(6), 885–907.
Short, P.: 2004, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare (John Murray, London).
Singer, P.W.: 2003, Corporate warriors: The rise of the privatized military industry. (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY).
Singer, P.W.: 2005, Children at War. (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA).
Sorkin, A.R.: 2009, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of how Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System – and Themselves (Viking, New York).
Tan, L.H.: 1984, “The Khmer Rouge: Beyond 1984?”, Index on Censorship 13(1), 3-5.
Taylor, K.: 2004, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control (Oxford University Press, Oxford).
Um, K.: 1998, “The broken chain: Genocide in the re-construction and de-struction of Cambodian society”, Social Identities 4, 131-154.
Vannak, H.: 2003, The Khmer Rouge Division 703: From victory to self-destruction. Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia.
Vickery, M.: 1984, Cambodia 1972-1982 (Southend Press, Boston).
Yathay, O. : 1989, L’Utopie Meurtrière: Un Rescapé du Génocide Cambodgien Témoigne (Complexe, Bruxelles).
Zimbardo, P.: 1982, “Pathology of imprisonment”. In D. Krebs (ed.), Readings in social psychology, contemporary perspectives, 2nd edition (Harper & Row, New York), pp. 249-251.
Zimbardo, P.: 2007 The Lucifer effect : How good people turn bad (Ryder, London).
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the Journal editorial team and to Sandro Mendonça for comments and suggestions. Miguel Cunha gratefully acknowledges support from Nova Forum.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pina e Cunha, M., Rego, A. & Clegg, S.R. Obedience and Evil: From Milgram and Kampuchea to Normal Organizations. J Bus Ethics 97, 291–309 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-010-0510-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-010-0510-5