I've been pondering the reactions to the beating incident that took place in that Baltimore-area McDonald's since the story of it broke over the weekend. It has engendered a lot of thoughtful, and even more less-than-thoughtful commentary as it has circulated through you tube, the blogs, mainstream media and now the e-mail petition circuit.
The incident itself provokes multiple issues for serious consideration and there have been several good diaries presented here. A recurring theme in many people's reactions, including that of the author of the petition linked above, has to do with the inhumanity of the bystanders, some of whom laughed or otherwise encouraged the young women who were doing the beating, but most of whom did nothing. As Adrian Leigh Cowan wrote in the preface to the petition:
How anyone could stand by and allow this to happen is unfathomable to me.
It seems to me, however, there are lots of clues as to how such a thing could and did happen, including a recognition that this kind of behavior in the face of, especially prejudice-based, violence is not uncommon. For many of us it is disappointing, discouraging, heart-wrenching and/or outrageous that it occurred. It should not, however, be unfathomable. And I don't think it is particularly honest to assume a position that juxtaposes the desired response -- to intervene on behalf of the victim --as the "decently human" or at least "humane" thing to do, while simply dismissing the other response -- that of inaction -- as a marker of vileness, or of "inhumanity".
There are multiple kinds of explanations to account for the objectionable behavior: psychological ones, political-ideological ones that have to do with power struggles and prejudices, and sociological-contextual ones. Each of them have great explanatory power and applicability to this incident. The latter ones are those that I keep returning to, however, because for me, they raise a set of implications that I haven't heard or seen anyone connecting to this incident.
In her book Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life, Robin Leidner describes the way that corporate policies regulate employees actions, speech, demeanor and even their very "work selves". McDonald's and their infamous "Hamburger University" is one of her two study sites for exploring the phenomenon. For anyone who has read this book, there is absolutely no surprise that McDonald's employees would not intervene in a violent incident. McDonald's is one of the most Top-down of organizations with regard to scripting employees actions and interactions with customers.
In environments such as this, or with people, especially young people who have been exposed to this kind of training and policy, the standard, or typical "human responses" like the one to intervene when someone is being beaten are counterbalanced by the organizational culture and expectations to behave according to the script. Obviously the corporation and its training programs do not account for the entire human being, but the ability to step out of that persona, or to judge when official policies may justify being ignored (remember in most service organizations, employees are encouraged NOT to intervene instances where violence is threatened or breaks out) requires some form of ethical judgement and a decision-making process that is ethically informed.
What do I mean by ethically-informed decision-making? Simply this, that the response most people looked for, the so-called "humane response" that suggests to employees this particular instance cries out for intervention in order to protect the victim, no matter what policy says--this is by no means a "natural" response. It is a produced response, one produced by a culture of compassion and fairness, by the skills of judgment and evaluation and by a set of values and ethics that not only highlight compassion and fairness but also rely on judgment and evaluation to achieve them. We are trained into it, or out of it as the case may be.
This kind of ethical decision-making is not one of the dominant pillars of corporate employee training programs. Most company training programs, especially in service-oriented jobs, focus on ensuring that employees follow corporate policies, that is this is a top-down process. In work settings where employees are encouraged to follow ethical procedures and make difficult, but ethically-informed decisions about how to interact with and relate to customers (or clients), the ethical curriculum is presented, maintained and even monitored, not so much by the employing entity, but by a professional one, making this kind of a process a peer-based one, rather than a top-down kind of relationship. Think of settings like health care (where large corporations do employ people), law, social work and other human services contexts.
What's interesting (and disturbing) to note is that the environments within which most of us would be encouraged to develop and then practice an ethically-informed approach toward decision-making are less likely to occur as our workplaces become evermore authoritarian and top-down. Professionals who have a code of ethics which govern their professional behavior and interactions receive most of their ethical training and awareness not from their employers but from their peers. Unions at one point served a similar role for working folks, though in a less clearly articulated and formal fashion than the professions did. Our educational systems can no longer handle such a task. While corporate routinization of employee behavior does not produce the bigotry and viciousness displayed by the individual McDonald's employee who filmed the attack, laughed at the victim's condition and then encouraged the perpetrators to leave before the police arrived (other social and cultural factors contribute to those actions), it does invite the kind of inertia and inaction displayed by the rest of the employees in the restaurant. As for the woman who did intervene on the victim's behalf, I find myself torn between admiration for her actions and fear that such behavior, increasingly, is going to be seen as "exceptional".