Y’know, I totally sympathise with folks calling for major retailers to adopt a zero-tolerance policy against aggressive or abusive customers - I’ve seen first-hand how bad it can get for retail workers - but then I see news stories like the one about those Virginia CVS employees who refused to sell a black man cheese and attempted to justify it with false allegations that he’d behaved threateningly, and I’ve gotta wonder exactly who these hypothetical zero-tolerance policies would end up being enforced against in practice.
Laws and rules in large organizations are sharp weapons that will always be wielded by those with (local) power over those without. Be careful which ones you forge.
This is…true, I guess, but as a principle it’s anti-truth in its impact.
Everything is a weapon that will be wielded by those with power over those without, because that’s what it means to have power. Laws and rules are no exception.
But laws and rules mostly serve to replace discretion (and local power structures) with bureaucracy (and centralized power structures). They constrain the bosses, who have to follow/respect the rules instead of doing whatever the hell they want.
(A zero-tolerance policy, in particular, means “you can’t be lenient towards members of your ingroup” – which can have positive effects, if ingroup-members have been getting away with terrible misdeeds, although all in all I do tend to think that such policies are very bad ideas. Zero-tolerance won’t do much to damage outgroup members, unless it’s replacing or modifying an already-existing concrete policy, because under the discretionary system bosses were already allowed to be awful to the people they didn’t like.)
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I actually have strong feelings about this particular thing, and believe that it is very important to understand.
I work for the US federal civil service, which is one of the most rule-bound and bureaucratic institutions ever to exist. This is associated with a lot of frustrations, inefficiencies, and bad outcomes. But it also has some major advantages, and one of the biggest ones is that petty politics and power-plays basically don’t exist, at least not nearly to the extent that they do in the private sector. What would be the point? Why bother scheming, building factions, trying to make your rivals look bad? It won’t get you anything. No one has the power to reward your politicking with goodies, because all the expectations are very clearly laid out in the rules, and the rules determine how all the rewards get distributed. No one can become a little tyrant, because the big tyrant – Congress, with help from the drafters of the agency codes – has micromanaged everything in advance.