Something to readGetting ahead
Moral Mazes
A sociologist's book on how corporate managers get ahead, from fieldwork inside three companies
Why it’s worth your time
Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes explains why a promotion decision can feel unconnected to the work you did, from inside the companies where he watched it happen. A sociologist, he spent years in the early 1980s interviewing managers at three large American firms. Seeing the unwritten rules he found can make an outcome feel less personal, and help you decide what to do about it.
How promotions get decided in big companies
The book · About 5 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
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- Read the opening history, then the fieldwork.
The book opens with how large corporations and a professional class of managers took shape. The interviews from the three companies follow, and that's where the rules about loyalty, credit and blame come out.
- Sketch the two levels above you.
Write down your manager and their manager, what each is judged on this year, and how secure each seems. Mark anything you're guessing. Then ask your manager one question about the level above them in your next 1:1.
You“What's your manager most focused on this quarter, and where could my work help with that?”
Good moments for this: when credit for a shared project goes somewhere unexpectedwhen a new boss arrives above your managerwhen you join a large company
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Asked in 2006 about flatter, decentralized companies, Jackall said he hadn't done extensive fieldwork in them, but guessed from many conversations that personal ties might matter even more there. A startup with no layers can still have a circle around the founder.
What might make this harder
Jackall studied big hierarchies, so shrink the sketch. Write down what the founder or owner answers to, such as investors, a few big customers or the bank, and ask about that instead.
Questions people ask
What is Moral Mazes about?
A 1988 study by the sociologist Robert Jackall of how managers in large American companies think, decide and get ahead. Built from years of interviews at a textile firm, a chemical company and a public relations agency, it argues that loyalty, image and timing shape careers as much as results.
What is a patrimonial bureaucracy?
The term Jackall uses for a hierarchy with formal rules that's also run through personal ties, so people are loyal to individuals as much as to roles. In his companies, groups of managers who rose together tended to bring each other along.
Why do people with weaker results sometimes get promoted?
Results matter, but in Jackall's account who backs you and how your results get read up the chain can matter as much. It helps to ask who takes part in the decision where you work and what they look at, and to keep your own dated record of what you delivered.
What it says, and how it holds up
The way promotions get explained at work tends to sound like a merit system: deliver, get noticed, move up. Robert Jackall went into three large American companies in the early 1980s, a textile firm, a chemical company owned by a conglomerate and a public relations agency, to see how managers actually decided what was right and who rose. He called what he found a patrimonial bureaucracy: formal rules and a chain of command, run through loyalties to people more than to offices. A manager's fortunes, as Jackall found them, tended to track the boss's. When a leader came out on top, he reached back to the group he'd come up with, and people outside it became expendable, especially in a time of cutbacks.
Much of the rest follows from that. Managers looked up and around for cues about what to think and how to act, Jackall said in a 2006 interview with the European Management Journal. Moral questions got turned into practical ones. Short-term results counted most, because that's what bosses asked for. The software engineer Lorin Hochstein, reviewing it on his blog, retells one case: managers kept patching an aging battery at a plant because no one wanted to own the decision to replace it, until it failed and the bill ran past $100 million in 1979 dollars. Avoiding a decision can be the rational move for the person, even when it costs the company far more.
The Association of American Publishers gave it its top business and management book award for 1988, and a twentieth-anniversary edition in 2010 added Jackall's account of what led to the financial crisis. Reviewing that edition in 2012, Gabriel Henriques, then a doctoral researcher at ISCTE in Lisbon, found it still valuable to the study of organizations, and noted Jackall's answer to critics who said corporate codes of conduct had restored ethics: Enron had one too. Worth weighing as you read is what the fieldwork was. It rests mainly on three companies, which Jackall called his primary field sites, with managerial ranks that Jackall himself described as almost entirely male, and it's an interpretation of how managers saw their world, not a survey of every workplace.
If the loyalties Jackall describes are what decide who rises where you work, and you'd rather be judged on results, it may be worth asking whether to stay before asking how to play. Jackall pointed out that his managers chose the maze for its rewards; it's fair to decide those rewards aren't worth it to you, and to look for a team or company where results seem to carry more weight.
Other perspectives
Different takes on the same question. You don't have to pick a side.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.