Wicked Entrepreneurship: Defining the Basics of Entreponerology

Defining the Basics of Entreponerology

Richard J. Arend

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137503312
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137503329
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

This book explores 'wicked entrepreneurship', or the proliferation of evil that harms our economic and social transactions, as the greatest socio-economic problem of our time and offers strategies to identify and address this phenomenon.

1

Part I’s Who—The Characteristics of Perpetrators and Victims, and How They Can’t Be Used

Abstract: This chapter identifies the focal party involved in the phenomenon—the perpetrator. It explores the pertinent dimensions that define their decision making. It goes beyond the ‘bad apples’ categorization, to explore the possible sources of the badness and the alarming probability that these perpetrators tend to be upwardly mobile. It also argues that even with the possible identification of such apples, the phenomenon cannot be eliminated.

Arend, Richard J. Wicked Entrepreneurship: Defining the Basics of Entreponerology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137503329.0005.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

(Machiavelli)

On the basis of the preconditions of the focal phenomenon, insights into the who (in terms of identification and confrontation) may be gleaned from an understanding of the possible ways that ‘their’ calculation of whether to ‘do the evil’ differs from that of other citizens. There are several factors that may alter that calculus, including:

differences in information (regarding probabilities, rewards, punishments, etc.):

they may have bad sources of information (emerging from ‘bad barrels’—Zimbardo, 2007)

they may have bad ‘information processing skills’—arising from cognitive dissonance (i.e., augmented filtering of information that biases news), laziness, or pathological heuristics

differences in utility functions that evaluate the worth of the possible rewards and punishments involved:

arising from framing issues (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), like their choice of decision-making anchor (i.e., reference point)

arising from differences in opportunity costs (i.e., the relative attractiveness of their next best alternative thing to do) or from differences in the way that they can leverage their abilities and possible outcomes of the current choice to ‘do the evil’

differences in the risk tolerances that are used to assess the probabilities involved (e.g., of getting caught)

differences in the strategies in ‘doing the evil’—based on differences in networks, power, abilities to corrupt others, and so on—that could affect rewards and punishments

differences in aspects of the ‘greater context’ in which these individuals find themselves when making their decisions—in the timing, institutions, social tolerance, geography, potential victims, and so on

These differences may be attributed to certain causes that are identifiable, and then potentially treatable. Both the ‘bad apple’ (person-based) cause and the ‘bad barrel’ (context-based) cause are considered prior to debating the value of the real-world identification of such causes.

A ‘bad apple’ can arise for many reasons, some of which are not directly bad—as they do not involve a premeditated intention to do harm. For example, various forms of mental illness—of unusual brain wiring and chemistry (e.g., neurobiology)—could lead to significant differences in thinking that could then alter the calculus in the choice of ‘doing the evil’.¹ Such reasons are ‘neutral’—in terms of morality—because the decision maker does not possess fair faculties for processing the choice, and so is not fair to blame for that lack of possession. There may also be reasons that are ‘good’—where there are good intentions for choosing to ‘do the evil’; for example, where there is a sincere belief (correct or not) that short-term pain for the victims will be outweighed by the benefits to society in the longer term (e.g., a ‘greater good’ rationale lampooned in the movie Hot Fuzz).

The most ‘satisfying’ reason for bad apples is the most direct—that is, that the source involves a rational person with the intention of doing harm to others. Given such choices to do harm are known to lead to the severest forms punishment, why would a rational person proceed nonetheless? Well, intelligence agencies have studied why people ‘turn’ on their home countries, and have identified a handful of basic human drivers that are involved. Besides personal tangible rewards (i.e., the drivers of greed and lust) there are also the intangible and personal rewards that could drive a rational person to choose to ‘do the evil’—for example, the reward that comes from revenge against a target that itself has done an unpunished wrong. It is a strong driver of action—the ‘eye for an eye’ desire to see a greater justice served. If the ‘doer of the evil’ feels that the new deception is payback for being deceived in the past by the new intended victims—which is a distinct possibility given the phenomenon described here does involve unpunished deception—then the question of badness is less clear.² If the bad apple is simply choosing to harm because of a greater utility from personal gains of money or from seeing innocent others suffer, then the question of badness is quite clear.

A bad barrel—a toxic or pathological decision-making context—may turn a good apple bad or make a bad apple worse. When the chooser of ‘doing evil’ is acting in good faith on another’s orders, as a deceived agent, then the barrel—the principal, director, or employer of that agent—is to blame. Brainwashing agents with propaganda that dehumanizes the victims would be sufficient to affect the calculus in deciding to ‘do the evil’. When the principal is easy to identify (e.g., as the employer of the agent, or the ultimate enjoyer of the gains from ‘doing the evil’) then addressing such phenomena is more straightforward. When the bad barrel is not easy to identify—for example, when it arises from a larger cultural context, say, where deception is the norm (where the rules of any game are known to differ from those in our current context)—then addressing the phenomena can be quite difficult. And, as economies open themselves to a more diverse set of values of the participants, such outcomes—where there may be a race to the bottom through exploitations of any past trust—are unattractive possibilities, as would be filtering participants based on culturally discriminating grounds alone.

Assume it is possible to identify the bad apples or the bad barrels. The question of whether such a possibility—of perfect bad apple and bad barrel identification—is valuable hinges on the costs (e.g., of investigation, prosecution, etc..), the benefits (e.g., stopping the bad apples from acting further, clawing back some of their tangible gains to pay victims, etc.), and the risks (e.g., of mistakes of punishing the wrong apples), compared to those of alternative means of addressing the phenomenon (e.g., better monitoring of the transactions, more regulations, etc.). Even when the identification of bad apples and barrels is possible prior to the bad acts taking place, questions arise as to: whether any policies that would filter out such apples and barrels preemptively would be seen as unacceptable due to being seemingly discriminatory; and, if the knowledge of such filters were to disperse, whether these could then be ‘gamed’. (If there were some personality profile one had to fill out prior to being considered to participate in a transaction, if a bad apple knew the ‘red flag’ answers, these would not be answered honestly—which would be consistent behavior for a bad apple. At that point, layers of transactions are added with the similar feature that deception is difficult to remove ex ante.)

Perhaps one of the most disturbing realities about accepting that both ‘bad apples’ and ‘bad barrels’ exist (and likely will always exist) is that those bad apples are most likely to experience upward mob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Why This Book, and What Is Entreponerology?
• 0  Part Is PreconditionsCruel Wicked Entrepreneurship and the Conditions for Its Existence
• 1  Part Is WhoThe Characteristics of Perpetrators and Victims, and How They Cant Be Used
• 2  Part Is WhenThe Timing of Evil Transactional Behavior, and Why Such Evil Will Always Exist
• 3  Part Is WhatThe Stakes Involved and What Value and Harm Are Transferred in the Phenomenon
• 4  Part Is WhyThe Motivations Driving the Perpetrators of Evil
• 5  Part Is HowThe Brutal Mechanics of Deceptive Transactions
• 6  Part Is StabilityWhy Economic Inefficiencies Are Not Quickly Eliminated
• 7  Part Is WhereThe Characteristics of a Corruptible System
• 8  Part Is ExamplesCases of the Phenomenon, from Local to International in Effect
• 9  Part Is Possible SolutionsA Typology and Analysis of Methods to Address the Phenomenon
• 10  Part Is MeasuresAssessing Whether There Is a Problem, and How Bad It Is, and for Whom
• 11  Part Is ConclusionsThe Good News, the Bad News, and the Need for More News
• 12  Part IIs Complex Wicked Entrepreneurship An Evil Context at the Heart of Innovative Activity
• 13  Part IIIs Cool Wicked Entrepreneurship Completing the Analytical Triad, and Some Possible Good Arising from the Evil
• Appendix 1: When Markov Chains Fail in the Digital World
• Appendix 2: A Typology of Wicked Business Models
• Bibliography
• Index