Morality Ethics And Responsibility In Organization And Management

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, and regular corporate scandals, there has been a growing concern with the moral and ethical foundations of business. Often these concerns are limited to narrow accounts of governance codes, regulatory procedures or behaviour incentives, which are often characterized by neoliberal bias underpinned by western masculine logics. This book challenges these limited accounts of ethics and responsibility. It looks at the writing of Gayatri C. Spivak who takes globally networked markets, people and ideas and provides tools to rethink subjectivity, ethics and corporate governance. Eschewing strict hierarchical notions of authority and identity, Spivak’s work invites us to consider who speaks for whom and for what in organizational contexts. Relationality is also to be found in the radical politics and feminist ethics of Judith Butler who continues to draw on and develop her account of performativity to interpret contemporary organizations, management and work. While popular accounts of corporate ethics often concern themselves with the aims and actions of those at the top of organizations, Lauren Berlant focuses on the struggles of those at the bottom of the new social structures created by contemporary forms of capital. Finally, the book also considers ecological challenges through the work of Val Plumwood, who spent a lifetime considering the threats and responsibilities we face in environmental terms, and developed a feminist ecological philosophy for understanding social and species differences. This book will be relevant to students and researchers across business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology.

This book highlights the interconnectedness of integrity with philosophical history, leadership, managerial decision-making, and organizational effectiveness in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., time theft in organizations and family business). Well-known researchers in business ethics from all around the world reframe the literature on integrity in business and management and develop updated and more comprehensive models of integrity. Integrity in Business and Management connects integrity to both ancient thought and the modern philosophy of pragmatism, but also explains how contemporary societal trends may shape the way we think about integrity. The final chapter warns against oversocialized conceptualizations of integrity and argues for a clear differentiation between personal integrity and moral integrity. Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields of business ethics and organizational leadership, Integrity in Business and Management explicates and critiques prior models of managerial integrity in a wide variety of disciplines, covering economics, moral philosophy, business ethics, organizational behavior, sociology, history, and psychology and offers a helpful set of readings in advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses of business ethics, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, and leadership to stimulate discussions about personal integrity, moral integrity, and organizational leadership.

Ethics and Organization provides a rich and valuable overview of an increasingly important issue for management and organizations in contemporary society. Debates about equal opportunities, environmental responsibility, consumer redress and corporate governance have given ethics a prominent place in the study of organizations in their social and natural environments. Within the organization, new management styles that seek to energize employees by manipulating their beliefs have highlighted the moral-ethical principles at issue in contemporary management. At the same time debates around postmodernism and relativism have moved ethics to a new centrality in contemporary social theory. Ethics and Organization addresses the questions that these and other developments raise for the study of management and organizations, from a multidisciplinary perspective. The book will be of value to advanced level students and academics engaged in analyzing the moral, political and ethical dimensions of organization theory and organizational practice.

Individuals are generally considered morally responsible for their actions. Who or what is responsible when those individuals become part of business organizations? Can we correctly ascribe moral responsibility to the organization itself? If so, what are the grounds for this claim and to what extent do the individuals also remain morally responsible? If not, does moral responsibility fall entirely to specific individuals within the organization and can they be readily identified? A perennial question in business ethics has concerned the extent to which business organizations can be correctly said to have moral responsibilities and obligations. In philosophical terms, this is a question of "corporate moral agency." Whether firms can be said to be moral agents and have the capacity for moral responsibility has significant practical consequences. In most legal systems in the world, business firms are recognized as "persons" with the ability to own property, to maintain and defend lawsuits, and to self-organize governance structures. However to recognize that these "business persons" can also act morally or immorally as organizations would justify the imposition of other legal constraints and normative expectations on organizations. In the criminal law, for example, the idea that an organized firm may itself have criminal culpability is accepted in many countries (such as the United States) but rejected in others (such as Germany). This book presents contributions by leading business scholars in business ethics, philosophy, and related disciplines to extend our understanding of the "moral responsibility" of firms.

Morality and ethics are at the heart of business practice, but the concepts themselves are usually assumed, rather than investigated. The chapters in this book refuse such easy answers, and force the reader to confront their own assumptions about ethics, provoking conclusions that are both disturbing and exciting. Martin Parker, University of Leicester, UK This timely book provides a collection of critical explorations and discussions of managerial ethics and their moral foundations. It is concerned with theoretical, conceptual and practical matters, and thus provides an open and broad approach to a very dense field of enquiry. Ethics and Organizational Practice challenges established theory in management studies and, in particular, provides a post-foundational argument to conventional business ethics. The contributors cover topics from corporate social responsibility and individual morality to primatology, psychopathology and corruption. They provide a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional exploration of managerial ethics and its moral foundation, presenting a critical understanding of the conditions of ethics in modern organizations. The book presents a philosophically informed critique of simplified notions of managerial and organizational ethics, making it an excellent resource for postgraduate students and scholars of business ethics, critical management, corporate social responsibility, international business and organizational psychology.

Management Ethics: Integrity at Work redefines what it means for a manager to function with integrity in the private and public sectorsùdomestically and globally. It integrates the latest theoretical work in both descriptive and normative ethics, and incorporates legal, communication, quality, and organizational theories into a conceptual framework that improves managerial judgment in the handling of moral complexity at work. The authors use their organizational ethics consulting and academic research experience to provide practical assessment and decision-making tools that convert ethics theories into sound action steps. The book examines three key dimensions of management integrityùjudgment, process, and developmental dimensionsùand applies them to individual chapters devoted to the subprocesses of ethical planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. The authors focus their theories and tools on 28 ethics minicases related to each management function in seven allied management application clusters: accounting, auditing management; finance, investment management; marketing, advertising management; business management, business law, human resource management; technology, quality operations, organizational behavior management; public, nonprofit, health care management; and international, environmental, public policy management. Management Ethics: Integrity at Work builds management integrity by linking and enhancing both ethics and management competence in responsible planning, organizing, leading, and controlling for use by professionals and students in the private and public sectorsùdomestically and globally.

The recent financial crisis has awakened a renewed sensibility to ethics in business and management, and an increasing interest in a better understanding of how ethics and economics are intertwined. Managers and executives must understand not just the moral value of ethical behaviour, but also how this can strengthen and benefit the organization.

Shows how managers can approach the ethical dilemmas they face in an uncomfortably complex world.