Dialogue and scrutiny in organizational ethics (original) (raw)

Corporate morality - towards a philosophical grounding

Philosophy for Business, 2007

For some time, a complex stream of more or less directly connected confidence crises has been confronting both managerial practice and the communities producing and diffusing management knowledge. The first reaction has been to extend and develop the teaching of business ethics. Academic research has turned more vigorously to the question: "what is good managerial behaviour?", trying to investigate how society can support the emergence of more sustainable and responsible systems, norms, incentives and behaviours. This, however, is only a beginning. If new generations of leaders have to be trained with a more responsible and sustainable take on their own role and activities, then we need to have a hard look at the ways in which management knowledge incorporates the ethical dimension.

A Critique of Some Anglo-American Models of Collective Moral Agency in Business

Philosophy of Management, 2013

This last paper argues that three dominant Anglo-American organisational theories which see themselves as "business ethics-friendly," are less so than they seem. It will be argued they present obstacles to collective corporate moral agency. They are: 1) the dominant "soft pluralist" organisational theory of Bolman and Deal, published in 1984 and more recently expressed in Reframing Organisations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, 5th edition, 2013, which is based on "reframing," and which we will call reframing theory (RT); 2) the Business Ethics deployment of Stakeholder Management Theory (SMT) associated with R. Edward Freeman, and several colleagues, dominant in the same period (1984-); and 3) to a much lesser degree, an adapted version of SMT in the Integrated Social Contract Theory (ISCT) of Donaldson and Dunfee (Ties That Bind, Harvard Business School Press (1999)). This paper suggests a return, from RT, SMT, and ISCT, to an older "participative-structuralist" Neo-Aristotelian virtue-ethics based account, based on an analogy between "natural" persons, and organisations as "artificial" persons, with natural persons seen as "flat" architectonically related sets of capacity in complementary relation, and organisations as even flatter architectonic hierarchies of groups of incumbents in roles. This quasi-personal model preserves the possibility of corporate moral agency and some hierarchical and lateral order between leadership groups and other functional roles in the ethical governance of the whole corporation, as a collective moral agent. The quasi-person model would make possible assigning degrees of responsibility and a more coherent interface of Ethics, Organisational Ethics, and Management

Impact of Ethical Issues on the Functioning of Enterprises – A Sociological Analysis

Webology, 2022

The article aims to describe the functioning of the organization in terms of ethics. Goffman's concept called the front stage and the backstage of social reality was selected from a wide range of literature. This metaphor comes from the theater, where the audience has access only to the show performed on stage and not to the backstage and rehearsals. According to Goffman, this mechanism applies to any social environment. It is the front stage that the audience must judge morally. The second area of human activity takes place behind the scenes, in which ethical principles, to put it mildly, are no longer the dominant criterion for assessing people's behavior.

ETHICS ACROSS THE ORGANISATIONAL SPECTRUM

This paper explores the question of whether the identification of many wrongdoings in an organisation requires knowledge of the technical and operating mechanisms of that organisation. If such is the case, many ethical problems cannot be resolved by a generalist. They must be left to people with knowledge of that industry. In attempting to answer the question, the paper examines 11 different types of organisations. It then asks how the ethical issues in those organisations might be resolved. The organisations are veterinarians, pharmacies, media companies, engineering firms, doctors, general businesses, including two sub disciplines, marketing and accounting organisations, nursing institutions, political parties, scientific research organisations, legal firms and information technology companies. Each can be a small professional company, locally based, or a large organisation, possibly international. Each exhibits one or more ethical problems that are not easily resolved by accepted ethical theory. Accepted theory, as further defined in the text, is the mainline ethical theories that would be core components of most ethics texts or courses. The question arises then on how would ethics be taught if the ethical issues require specialised

In Search of Ethics: Probing the Firm-Society Interface

Journal for Convergence, 2007

A series of corporate corruption scandals recently, amongst large, respected global organisations, has led to a questioning of the firm-societal interface. Perhaps most intriguing is the fact that these fraudulent acts were consciously committed by otherwise venerable members of the community. Their persistence in pursuing their corrupt paths suggests that they had found a way to rationalise and socialise their behaviour over time, even though it is unlikely that they would find such behaviour acceptable outside of the workplace.