In the organizational context, officers and executives are meant to be agenty, while enlisted/NCO and non-executives are not.
Maybe this is the theory, but in practice it doesn’t turn out this way at all. It’s been my observation that officers who mess up do not have to face consequences as severe as soldiers do. In fact there have been investigations into military operations that have confirmed this.
Similarly, in the corporate hierarchy, senior executives can run their companies into the ground and still get bonuses (as happened in the 2008 financial crisis) whereas low-level employees would be faced with termination of employment.
However, it is true that in general soldiers are not taken to be as responsible for war crimes as commanding officers are. However, this again comes down to scope. A soldier can only ever order the murder of a handful of men; a general can order the slaughter of a million.
I have to agree with you that it only makes sense to have a single hierarchy.
Officers are held accountable to a lower degree by their own army. They are held accountable to a higher degree by other armies. That is completely consistent with agency; they are the corporeal manifestation of the abstract concept of “the army”. When someone says “The US Army made the decision to launch an attack”, they mean “The officers of the US Army made the decision to launch an attack”. If officers are punished by the army, the army is punishing itself, because the officers are, as far as the decision-making is considered, the army. This, not merely scope, is why officers are treated differently as far as war crimes are concerned, and why criminal prosecutions tend to focus on CEOs, not on all the low-level employees that actually put the fraud into practice.
Also, organizations tend to give people higher up in the hierarchy more of a vested interest in the organization. This means they have more at stake, which in turn means that when they mess up, they end up with more than a lower-level employee in an absolute sense, but less in a relative sense. For instance, an executive might be promised a bonus of up to $10 million. The executive might mess up and still get $1 million, and that looks like they’re being rewarded for screwing up because they’re getting, in an absolute sense, more money than an ordinary employee who did their job perfectly, but relatively speaking, the executive just lost 90% of their bonus. Of course, “Don’t complain about my $1 million bonus; I lost out on $9 million that I could have gotten” doesn’t tend to go over very well.
Militaries have internal conflicts and punish their senior officers. This goes not just for the army but for other branches of the military (not sure why you’re putting so much emphasis on armies).
The bonuses for the 2008 financial crisis were in many cases higher than the executives had recieved in prior years.
Doesn’t that follow from the agenty/non-agenty distinction? An agenty actor is understood to make choices where there is no clear right answer. It makes sense that mistakes within that scope would be punished much less severely; it’s hard to formally punish someone if you can’t point to a strictly superior decision they should have made but didn’t. Especially considering that even if you can think of a better way to handle that situation, you still have to not only show that they had enough information at the time to know that that decision would have been better (“hindsight is 20/20”), but also that such an insight would have been strictly within the requirements of their duties (rather than it requiring an abnormally high degree of intelligence/foresight/clarity/etc.).
Meanwhile, a non-agenty actor is merely expected to carry out a clear set of actions. If a non-agenty actor makes a mistake, it is easy to point to the exact action they should have taken instead. When a cog in the machine doesn’t work right, it’s simple to point it out and punish it. Therefore it makes a lot of sense that they get harsher punishments, because their job is supposed to be easier. Anyone can imagine a “perfect” non-agenty actor doing their job, as a point of comparison, while imagining a perfect “agenty” actor requires that you be as good at performing that exact role, including all the relevant knowledge and intelligence, as such a perfect actor.
Ultimately, it seems like observing that agenty actors suffer less severe punishments ought to support the notion that agentiness is at the least believed to be a cluster in thingspace. Of course, this will result in some unfair situations; “agenty” actors do sometimes get off the hook easy in situations where there was actually a very clear right decision and they chose wrong, while “non-agenty” actors will sometimes be held to an impossible standard when presented with situations where they have to make meaningful choices between unclear outcomes. This serves as evidence that “agentiness” is not really a binary switch, thus marking this theory as an approximation, although not necessarily a bad approximation even in practice.
That’s not the point though; the point is that agenty actors are understood to be doing higher work as reflected in their position in the hierarchy, and thus are expected to be smarter than their lower counterparts, and be able to make better decisions. That expectation should logically carry higher responsibility and accountability with it, otherwise what distinguishes a soldier from an officer?
You’re conflating responsibility/accountability with things that they don’t naturally fall out of. And I think you know that last line was clearly B.S. (given that the entire original post was about something which is not identical to accountability—you should have known that the most reasonable answer to that question is “agentiness”). Considering their work higher, or considering them to be smarter, is alleged by the post to not be the entirety of the distinction between the hierarchies; after all, if the only difference was brains or status, then there would be no need for TWO distinct hierarchies. There is a continuous distribution of status and brains throughout both hierarchies (as opposed to a sharp distinction where even the lowest officer is significantly smarter or higher status than the highest soldier), so it seems reasonable to just link them together.
One thing which might help to explain the difference is the concept of “agentiness”, not linked to certain levels of difficulty of roles, but rather to the type of actions performed by those roles. If true, then the distinguishing feature between an officer and a soldier is that officers have to be prepared to solve new problems which they may not be familiar with, while soldiers are only expected to perform actions they have been trained on. For example, an officer may have the task of “deal with those machine gunners”, while a soldier would be told “sweep and clear these houses”. The officer has to creatively devise a solution to a new problem, while the soldier merely has to execute a known decision tree. Note that this has nothing to do with the difficulty of the problem. There may be an easy solution to the first problem, while the second may be complex and require very fast decision making on the local scale (in addition to the physical challenge). But given the full scope of the situation, it is easy to look at the officer and say “I think you would have been better off going further around and choosing a different flank, to reduce your squad’s casualties; but apparently you just don’t have that level of tactical insight. No promotion for you, maybe next time”. To the soldier, it would be more along the lines of “You failed to properly check a room before calling it clear, and missed an enemy combatant hiding behind a desk. This resulted in several casualties as he ambushed your squadmates. You’re grounded for a week.” The difference is that an officer is understood to need special insight to do his job well, while a soldier is understood to just need to follow orders without making mistakes. It’s much easier to punish someone for failing to fulfill the basic requirements of their job than it is to punish them for failing to achieve an optimal result given vague instructions.
EDIT: You’ve provided good reason to expect that officers should get harsher punishments than soldiers, given the dual hierarchy. I claim that the theory of “agentiness” as the distinguishing feature between these hierarchies predicts that officers will receive punishments much less severe than your model would suggest, while soldiers will be more harshly punished. In reality, it seems that officers don’t get held accountable to the degree which your model predicts they would, based on their status, while soldiers get held more accountable. This is evidence in favor of the “agentiness” model, not against it, as you originally suggested. The core steps of my logic are: the “agentiness” model predicts that officers are not punished as severely as you’d otherwise expect, while soldiers are punished more severely; therefore, the fact that in the real world officers are not punished as harshly as you’d otherwise expect is evidence for the “agentiness” model at the expense of any models which don’t predict that. If you disagree with those steps, please specify where/how. If you disagree with an unstated/implied assumption outside of these steps, please specify which. If I’m not making sense, or if I seem exceedingly stupid, there’s probably been a miscommunication; try and point at the parts that don’t make sense so I can try again.
Maybe this is the theory, but in practice it doesn’t turn out this way at all. It’s been my observation that officers who mess up do not have to face consequences as severe as soldiers do. In fact there have been investigations into military operations that have confirmed this.
Similarly, in the corporate hierarchy, senior executives can run their companies into the ground and still get bonuses (as happened in the 2008 financial crisis) whereas low-level employees would be faced with termination of employment.
However, it is true that in general soldiers are not taken to be as responsible for war crimes as commanding officers are. However, this again comes down to scope. A soldier can only ever order the murder of a handful of men; a general can order the slaughter of a million.
I have to agree with you that it only makes sense to have a single hierarchy.
Officers are held accountable to a lower degree by their own army. They are held accountable to a higher degree by other armies. That is completely consistent with agency; they are the corporeal manifestation of the abstract concept of “the army”. When someone says “The US Army made the decision to launch an attack”, they mean “The officers of the US Army made the decision to launch an attack”. If officers are punished by the army, the army is punishing itself, because the officers are, as far as the decision-making is considered, the army. This, not merely scope, is why officers are treated differently as far as war crimes are concerned, and why criminal prosecutions tend to focus on CEOs, not on all the low-level employees that actually put the fraud into practice.
Also, organizations tend to give people higher up in the hierarchy more of a vested interest in the organization. This means they have more at stake, which in turn means that when they mess up, they end up with more than a lower-level employee in an absolute sense, but less in a relative sense. For instance, an executive might be promised a bonus of up to $10 million. The executive might mess up and still get $1 million, and that looks like they’re being rewarded for screwing up because they’re getting, in an absolute sense, more money than an ordinary employee who did their job perfectly, but relatively speaking, the executive just lost 90% of their bonus. Of course, “Don’t complain about my $1 million bonus; I lost out on $9 million that I could have gotten” doesn’t tend to go over very well.
Militaries have internal conflicts and punish their senior officers. This goes not just for the army but for other branches of the military (not sure why you’re putting so much emphasis on armies).
The bonuses for the 2008 financial crisis were in many cases higher than the executives had recieved in prior years.
I quite agree. In my post I am simply wondering why the dual hierarchies exist, not whether the systems work as they should.
Doesn’t that follow from the agenty/non-agenty distinction? An agenty actor is understood to make choices where there is no clear right answer. It makes sense that mistakes within that scope would be punished much less severely; it’s hard to formally punish someone if you can’t point to a strictly superior decision they should have made but didn’t. Especially considering that even if you can think of a better way to handle that situation, you still have to not only show that they had enough information at the time to know that that decision would have been better (“hindsight is 20/20”), but also that such an insight would have been strictly within the requirements of their duties (rather than it requiring an abnormally high degree of intelligence/foresight/clarity/etc.).
Meanwhile, a non-agenty actor is merely expected to carry out a clear set of actions. If a non-agenty actor makes a mistake, it is easy to point to the exact action they should have taken instead. When a cog in the machine doesn’t work right, it’s simple to point it out and punish it. Therefore it makes a lot of sense that they get harsher punishments, because their job is supposed to be easier. Anyone can imagine a “perfect” non-agenty actor doing their job, as a point of comparison, while imagining a perfect “agenty” actor requires that you be as good at performing that exact role, including all the relevant knowledge and intelligence, as such a perfect actor.
Ultimately, it seems like observing that agenty actors suffer less severe punishments ought to support the notion that agentiness is at the least believed to be a cluster in thingspace. Of course, this will result in some unfair situations; “agenty” actors do sometimes get off the hook easy in situations where there was actually a very clear right decision and they chose wrong, while “non-agenty” actors will sometimes be held to an impossible standard when presented with situations where they have to make meaningful choices between unclear outcomes. This serves as evidence that “agentiness” is not really a binary switch, thus marking this theory as an approximation, although not necessarily a bad approximation even in practice.
That’s not the point though; the point is that agenty actors are understood to be doing higher work as reflected in their position in the hierarchy, and thus are expected to be smarter than their lower counterparts, and be able to make better decisions. That expectation should logically carry higher responsibility and accountability with it, otherwise what distinguishes a soldier from an officer?
You’re conflating responsibility/accountability with things that they don’t naturally fall out of. And I think you know that last line was clearly B.S. (given that the entire original post was about something which is not identical to accountability—you should have known that the most reasonable answer to that question is “agentiness”). Considering their work higher, or considering them to be smarter, is alleged by the post to not be the entirety of the distinction between the hierarchies; after all, if the only difference was brains or status, then there would be no need for TWO distinct hierarchies. There is a continuous distribution of status and brains throughout both hierarchies (as opposed to a sharp distinction where even the lowest officer is significantly smarter or higher status than the highest soldier), so it seems reasonable to just link them together.
One thing which might help to explain the difference is the concept of “agentiness”, not linked to certain levels of difficulty of roles, but rather to the type of actions performed by those roles. If true, then the distinguishing feature between an officer and a soldier is that officers have to be prepared to solve new problems which they may not be familiar with, while soldiers are only expected to perform actions they have been trained on. For example, an officer may have the task of “deal with those machine gunners”, while a soldier would be told “sweep and clear these houses”. The officer has to creatively devise a solution to a new problem, while the soldier merely has to execute a known decision tree. Note that this has nothing to do with the difficulty of the problem. There may be an easy solution to the first problem, while the second may be complex and require very fast decision making on the local scale (in addition to the physical challenge). But given the full scope of the situation, it is easy to look at the officer and say “I think you would have been better off going further around and choosing a different flank, to reduce your squad’s casualties; but apparently you just don’t have that level of tactical insight. No promotion for you, maybe next time”. To the soldier, it would be more along the lines of “You failed to properly check a room before calling it clear, and missed an enemy combatant hiding behind a desk. This resulted in several casualties as he ambushed your squadmates. You’re grounded for a week.” The difference is that an officer is understood to need special insight to do his job well, while a soldier is understood to just need to follow orders without making mistakes. It’s much easier to punish someone for failing to fulfill the basic requirements of their job than it is to punish them for failing to achieve an optimal result given vague instructions.
EDIT: You’ve provided good reason to expect that officers should get harsher punishments than soldiers, given the dual hierarchy. I claim that the theory of “agentiness” as the distinguishing feature between these hierarchies predicts that officers will receive punishments much less severe than your model would suggest, while soldiers will be more harshly punished. In reality, it seems that officers don’t get held accountable to the degree which your model predicts they would, based on their status, while soldiers get held more accountable. This is evidence in favor of the “agentiness” model, not against it, as you originally suggested. The core steps of my logic are: the “agentiness” model predicts that officers are not punished as severely as you’d otherwise expect, while soldiers are punished more severely; therefore, the fact that in the real world officers are not punished as harshly as you’d otherwise expect is evidence for the “agentiness” model at the expense of any models which don’t predict that. If you disagree with those steps, please specify where/how. If you disagree with an unstated/implied assumption outside of these steps, please specify which. If I’m not making sense, or if I seem exceedingly stupid, there’s probably been a miscommunication; try and point at the parts that don’t make sense so I can try again.