In the introduction, Jackall writes that he "went into these organizations to study how bureaucracy—the prevailing organizational form of our society—shapes moral consciousness"[1] and that the book is "an interpretive sociological account of how managers think the world works.

[3] Moral Mazes is based on several years of fieldwork during which the author conducted interviews with managers in several large corporations in the early 1980s.

The book argues that bureaucracy in large American corporations: "regularizes people's experiences of time and indeed routinizes their lives by engaging them on a daily basis in rational, socially approved, purposive action; it brings them into daily proximity with and subordination to authority, creating in the process upward-looking stances that have decisive social and psychological consequences; it places a premium on a functionally rational, pragmatic habit of mind that seeks specific goals; and it creates subtle measures of prestige and an elaborate status hierarchy that, in addition to fostering an intense competition for status, also makes the rules, procedures, social contexts, and protocol of an organization paramount psychological and behavioral guides.

The very ambiguity of their work and its assessment leads to the feeling on the part of the managers that "instead of ability, talent, and dedicated service to an organization, politics, adroit talk, luck, connections, and self-promotion are the real sorters of people into sheep and goats".

This new class then changed the organizational culture of American business, emphasizing decisions centered on money-based measures such as profit and loss (see also rational choice theory).