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Sub-theme 51: Organizational Ethics at a Crossroads

Convenors:
Gazi Islam
Grenoble Ecole de Management, France
Tanusree Jain
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Martin Kornberger
WU – Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria

Call for Papers

Organization Studies and Ethics literatures have long maintained a separate but synergistic relationship to each other. Because ethical perspectives rely on behavioural and structural descriptions of organizations, they often invoke tacit theories of organizing as the conditions of possibility of ethical behaviour. Conversely, theories of organizing rely on notions of coordination, formal and informal norm creation and values that contain implicit or explicit ethical aspects. Nevertheless, the rapprochement between ethics and organization studies has been long in the making, and especially in context of contemporary questioning of organizations’ impact, relevance and relation to the good life, it is worth tightening and elaborating on the relation between these areas.
 
Doing so may explore crossroads between both literatures. From the perspective of ethics, most work has drawn either on the analytical normative perspectives drawn from philosophy, or the behavioural-empirical aspects of ethical practice drawn from behavioural sciences. Much rarer are examinations of the “social” of ethics, that is, the relational normative and organizational process that render ethical practice possible and intuitive, and through which normative orders are built. Pulled between universalistic ethical systems abstracted from social context, and individualistic behavioural perspective putting context on a secondary plane, ethics has generated challenging normative (and sometimes moralizing) demands for individuals to do the right thing, while empirically cataloguing their ongoing failures to do so. What is missing are mid-level ideas about how to coordinate and organize ethically, supporting ethical action within materially grounded organizational realities.
 
Taken from the perspective of organization studies, the lack of engagement with ethics leads to a blind spot regarding the moral reasoning that underpin why and how people organize, and for what ends. Black-boxed as “normative” or “legitimating” work, ethics is described in its “outer” form as a force that influences action, without considering what makes such legitimations or norms compelling from within the lived experiences of actors. Studying ethics in terms of discourses, beliefs or routines, organization theory has described the effects of ethics as instrumental parts of social systems but not ethical deliberation as part of the reasoned and experience life groups. To understand organizations ethically is to understand how they form the background against which lives become meaningful and valued, and that normative and legitimacy processes are not simply pressures that cause action, but reasons that animate action.
 
In this sub-theme we want to progress a discussion that interrogates how actors at the interface of organization studies and ethics analyse and make sense of the many “ethical” crossroads they encounter. We envision these crossroads from the prism of time and space, with an emphasis that goes beyond the what to focus on the how and the why i.e., the motives and processes through which ethics and ethical dilemmas play out through actors’ lived experiences in organizations, and that result in translation and differential adaptation of norms, directives and/or routines arising from salient as well as distinctive subjective experiences.
 
Some crossroads that we want to explore in our sub-theme include:

  • At the crossroads of meta-regulation and regulation by law: Ethics of stakeholder governance

  • At the crossroads of ethical reflection and moralization in organizations

  • At the crossroads of religious and political ideologies: Unpacking polarization in organizations

  • At the cross-roads of imperatives for organizational transparency and accountability and the realities of entangled webs of diluted responsibility in distributed agency

  • At the crossroads of humans, non-human species, bots and cyborgs: Ethics of diversity and inclusion in the postmodern workplace in a world of different kinds of actors/actants

  • At the cross-roads between scholarly communities that explore the intersection between ethics and organization studies through diverse lenses and methods

  • Last but not the least at the cross-roads between theoretical endeavours to understand organizational ethics and practical demands to intervene in concrete power struggles
     

Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, and member of the research laboratory IREGE (Research Institute for Management and Economics), France. He is co-Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of ‘Business Ethics’. Gazi’s current research interests revolve around the contemporary meanings of work, and the relations between identity, group dynamics and the production of group and organizational cultures.
Tanusree Jain is an Associate Professor of Corporate Sustainability at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark, and member of CBS Sustainability and Communication, Organization and Governance Cluster at CBS. Her multi-disciplinary research situated at the intersection of Corporate Governance and Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility draws on insights from a wide range of disciplines, and hence aligns well with the broader research ethos at EGOS. Tanusree is a Section Editor of the Corporate Governance and Ethics stream at the ‘Journal of Business Ethics’.
Martin Kornberger is Professor for Ethics in Management at WU – Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria, and a Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden. In his research he explores strategies for collective action and new organizational architectures. Martin’s latest book is “Strategies for Distributed and Collective Action: Connecting the Dots” (Oxford University Press, 2022).