I would frame the problems Barro describes not as "insubordination" but as a breakdown of compartmentalization norms. A healthy compartmentalization norm both trusts and expects people to follow different rules on-the-job vs off-the-job. The expectation part is that while on the job you must follow professional rules and serve the organi…
I would frame the problems Barro describes not as "insubordination" but as a breakdown of compartmentalization norms. A healthy compartmentalization norm both trusts and expects people to follow different rules on-the-job vs off-the-job. The expectation part is that while on the job you must follow professional rules and serve the organizational mission, even if that conflicts with your personal convictions. The trust part is that as long as you do that, your fellow employees and your boss should not police how you act off the job.
I think of compartmentalization norms as an important tool for protecting liberalism, including social/cultural liberalism, in a complex society with deep moral disagreements. Part of the motivation for compartmentalization is justified horror at e.g. Henry Ford's practice of sending inspectors to the homes of Ford employees to make sure they were behaving "uprightly" in their personal lives: the trust part of the norm is what says employers shouldn't do that. And the expectation part of the norm is what lets us say to a pharmacist: feel free to express off the job your personal moral opposition to contraceptive and/or abortifacient medications, but on the job you must dispense those like any others. Or to Kim Davis: feel free to express your personal opposition to same-sex marriage rights off the job, but on the job you must sign same-sex marriage certificates anyway.
Activist employees of the sort who cause Twitter dramas often violate both parts of this norm: they don't expect to have to follow professional rules on the job themselves or to take professional actions that violate their personal convictions, *and* they don't trust co-workers to keep their off-the-job behaviors separate from their professional conduct. Their animating moral convictions are usually very different from those of Henry Ford or an anti-contraceptive pharmacist, but their anti-compartmentalization reasoning is the same, and a healthy compartmentalization norm should push back on that reasoning in the same way.
Yuval Levin would probably say this norm breakdown is rooted in the move from formative to performative institutions: a formative institution naturally checks the expression of personal convictions while a performative one amplifies it. You, I'm guessing, would invoke "the religion that persecutes heretics": i.e. if you believe passionately that yours is the one universal moral Truth with which no decent person can disagree, it gets harder to keep that conviction out of your work life, or to trust that others who do disagree with you can still be good co-workers. Both may be contributing factors, but there may be other more positive ones as well: e.g. this may be an inevitable downside of a world where more people have the financial security to choose jobs based on intangible meaning-making aspects of compensation rather than just the salary and benefits.
I would frame the problems Barro describes not as "insubordination" but as a breakdown of compartmentalization norms. A healthy compartmentalization norm both trusts and expects people to follow different rules on-the-job vs off-the-job. The expectation part is that while on the job you must follow professional rules and serve the organizational mission, even if that conflicts with your personal convictions. The trust part is that as long as you do that, your fellow employees and your boss should not police how you act off the job.
I think of compartmentalization norms as an important tool for protecting liberalism, including social/cultural liberalism, in a complex society with deep moral disagreements. Part of the motivation for compartmentalization is justified horror at e.g. Henry Ford's practice of sending inspectors to the homes of Ford employees to make sure they were behaving "uprightly" in their personal lives: the trust part of the norm is what says employers shouldn't do that. And the expectation part of the norm is what lets us say to a pharmacist: feel free to express off the job your personal moral opposition to contraceptive and/or abortifacient medications, but on the job you must dispense those like any others. Or to Kim Davis: feel free to express your personal opposition to same-sex marriage rights off the job, but on the job you must sign same-sex marriage certificates anyway.
Activist employees of the sort who cause Twitter dramas often violate both parts of this norm: they don't expect to have to follow professional rules on the job themselves or to take professional actions that violate their personal convictions, *and* they don't trust co-workers to keep their off-the-job behaviors separate from their professional conduct. Their animating moral convictions are usually very different from those of Henry Ford or an anti-contraceptive pharmacist, but their anti-compartmentalization reasoning is the same, and a healthy compartmentalization norm should push back on that reasoning in the same way.
Yuval Levin would probably say this norm breakdown is rooted in the move from formative to performative institutions: a formative institution naturally checks the expression of personal convictions while a performative one amplifies it. You, I'm guessing, would invoke "the religion that persecutes heretics": i.e. if you believe passionately that yours is the one universal moral Truth with which no decent person can disagree, it gets harder to keep that conviction out of your work life, or to trust that others who do disagree with you can still be good co-workers. Both may be contributing factors, but there may be other more positive ones as well: e.g. this may be an inevitable downside of a world where more people have the financial security to choose jobs based on intangible meaning-making aspects of compensation rather than just the salary and benefits.