ABSTRACT
Compliance stems in part from the human need for order. It accounts of human behavior also help in understanding how ordinary people become engaged in administrative evil. When compliance is wedded to organizations and institutions within a culture of technical rationality, the chapter begins to present the social and political dynamics that can result in eruptions of evil. Organizations, social institutions, and even countries can be holding environments for both good and evil purposes. The Stanford prison experiment in compliance conducted in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University shows how people can comfortably adopt behaviors that are destructive to others. While the subjects of the Stanford experiment were caged in a mock prison, people in the modern world are caged by the less visible, but no less powerful, constraints of technical rationality. Within a culture of technical rationality, a model of professionalism that drives out ethics and moral reasoning offers fertile soil for administrative evil to emerge.
