Organizations and history – Are there any lessons to be learned from genocide?

Abstract

The authors argue that genocide is not a phenomenon marginal to the world of management and organizations, but one from which these disciplines stand to learn a lot and one to which they must contribute their own insights. Genocide is a highly organized process, requiring bureaucratic resources to initiate, sustain and, often, cover it up. It generates resistance and compliance, it makes use of material and social technologies, it is imbued with its own cultural values and assumptions and calls for its own morbid innovations and problem-solving. Genocide requires the collaboration of numerous formal organizations, including armies, suppliers, intelligence and other services, but also informal networks and groups. At the same time, the authors argue that genocide cannot be studied outside historiography and that doing so leads to all kinds of gravely mistaken conclusions, even when theorised by distinguished scholars like Arendt and Bauman.