Some notes on ethics of autonomy

When I was just getting started in management, it was the era of Total Quality Management and transformational leadership. Much emphasis was placed on leaders who crafted a clear vision for the firm that everyone working there understood and got in line with.  There were stories of 5 vision points on a card that everyone was expected to memorize--and internalize--and the test was whether you could stop anyone in the place, ask them about the vision and they would recite it back.  I never worked for a place where it seemed anything like that simple.  More often in higher education, people agonized over a lack of vision, and the statements offered as vision seemed to have little effective force. 

My friends outside of large organization life (or inside it) saw such things as thought control.  It sounds distinctly like brainwashing. In fact, people insist on having their own ideas about things, and my question has increasingly been why not cultivate autonomy.  It rings of humanity.  

A quick counter-argument comes from large, instrumental organizations that wield power for some result.  The result is important, and constraint on the use of power is also important.  One example would be an army.  With autonomy, you'd have a chaos of people with guns running around taking matters into their own hands.  That needs to be under control.  Of course, there is a radical pacifist stance (someone like John Day, author of A Persistent Peace) who would make the case that the answer is to dare to imagine abandoning state violence. 

OK, so what about the production of a complicated modern necessity like a car or an apartment building, which requires sophisticated marriages of human labor and capital equipment, complicated supply chains, and the literal power to run machines.  Can't see getting any of that done without regimentation and compliance. As with the armed forces, there is room to question the basic premise, that these are necessities and that they are worth the tradeoffs they entail.  Even if you make the case against cars, or for different kinds of shelter, you are still left with problems of production at scale--a train system is as complicated to produce as cars, even bicycles require factories and roads. Unless you are willing to argue for return to a form of pre-modern existence.  

The way to understand this may be as ethics.  The ethics of freedom--how much freedom is ethically sustainable. At what point do you owe it to others to coordinate your actions with others. And the ethics of compliance--could we could do more to enlist active acceptance of regimentation, and greater recognition of the gift that each member of the organization bestows on the collective by agreeing to comply.  Can we incorporate more elements of contingency, so each individual is more active in making agreement, and in assessing the benefits of the trade offs.  Are rituals of renewal needed?