I've seen that happen but it won't happen in the shop I'm working in now because... I wrote the standards, I have the authority to enforce them, and never need to fight about it because the managers all know better (I've died and gone to heaven :-P). Make no doubt about it that when we have a real live "urgency" that we get the job done much more quickly but we still don't take any shortcuts. We still do a code review, we still do QA, we might still do a UAT test, and then it goes to production and everything about it has followed the same route as all other code (including documentation, source controlled, etc) but much more quickly because everyone knows that when it's their turn up to bat, they drop everything else to get the job done now.

Very fortunately and to use your good words, there's no way for an unscrupulous manager to fault me or anyone else (I DO protect the Developers and they protect me) because we always follow the given steps like a well oiled machine... just in a more dedicated fashion for "urgencies". What's really cool is that we probably could get away with murder but everyone (including the managers, thank goodness) watches out for each other and the project. It's absolutely the best team (Devs, DBA, Managers, NetOps) I've ever worked with.