Abstract
The last quarter of a century has witnessed three separate waves of ethical crises in organizational contexts. The late 1980s and early 1990s brought the Wall Street and Savings and Loan scandals embodied in controversial figures such as Ivan Boesky, Michael Milliken and Charles Keating and the Keating Five. Just over a decade later, a wave of corporate scandal was embodied by figures such as Enron’s Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling, Tyco’s Dennis Koslowski and WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers. These figures became the public faces of the wider crises in corporate ethics they personified, and served as touchstones for both the policy responses and ethical reflection that followed in their wake. This tendency to rely on the figure of individual villains as emblematic of broader ethical crises was perhaps most famously captured in a montage from the 2005 documentary The Corporation, where a series of talking heads from a wide range of networks all used the same metaphor to describe these villains: ‘bad apples’.
The ethical crisis marked by the 2008 onset of the Global Financial Crisis differed significantly from these previous crises. Where ‘bad apples’ metaphor worked well—at least on the surface—with the high-profile villains of the earlier crises, applications of the metaphor were strained at best to capture a new crisis lacking in readily identifiable individual villains (Cheney et al., 2010). In the other crises, the highest-profile bad apples ended up in prison. In this most recent crises, at least in the US, only a few relatively unknown executives ended up being jailed—and even these punishments remained beneath the radar, evidenced by the laments of dissidents such as Occupy Wall Street that nobody had been jailed (Grant, 2011, October 11). Perhaps the only high profile individual to be sentenced to prison in the wake of the crisis was Bernie Madoff, but his crimes—he was arrested in December 2008 for running a classic pyramid scheme under the auspices of his decades-old investment firm—were merely exposed by, rather than contributing to, the crash of the financial system. Unlike the previous crises, this new crisis was so deep and pervasive that it simply could not be pinned to the criminal behaviour of a few villains. While the origin of the Global Financial Crisis was overdetermined by causes ranging from decades of government deregulation to the development of complex, technologically-driven financial instruments, beneath these causes many observers became drawn to the view that ‘the financial crisis was fundamentally one of ethics and values’ (Santoro and Strauss, 2012: 16).
Given such a view, it is not surprising that this crisis, like its predecessors, has provoked wide-ranging reflection about the ethical context in which it occurred. This time, however, the conversation about ethics in relation to financial crisis has expanded beyond explanations of bad apples, or even a view which casts ethically suspect organizations as ‘bad barrels’. A significant number of voices have begun to consider something like a ‘bad orchard’ perspective (Cheney et al., 2010), asking questions about the kind of ethical climate that could give rise to such a widespread systematic failure with such devastating consequences. This review essay considers four recent books making significant contributions to this broader conversation, considering them separately and together for their treatment of our ethical moment: Seven Management Moralities by Thomas Klikauer (2012); Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making by Patricia Werhane, Laura Pincus Hartman, Crina Archer, Elaine Englehardt and Michael Pritchard (2013); Normal Organizational Wrongdoing by Donald Palmer’s (2012) and The Virtues of Leadership by Arménio Rego, Miguel Pina e Cunha and Stewart Clegg (2012).
In examining these books as a set, this essay explores several emerging answers to the question: what is it about the way that we practice and conceive of organizational ethics today that could have given rise to such a crisis? While the GFC lurks like a specter over the analysis of each book, none seeks to directly answer that question, as do other excellent volumes (e.g. Santoro and Strauss, 2012). And they are the better for it—rather than focusing explaining the specific decisions that led to the crisis, these books, in different manners and from different vantages, speak to the larger ethical context in which such decisions emerged. The books collected here offer both prescriptive (Klikauer; Rego et al.) and descriptive (Palmer; Werhane et al.) accounts of contemporary organizational ethics. The books also vary in the degree to which they are hopeful for a more ethical future, and this essay is organized around their hopefulness. First, I examine Klikauer’s searing-but-despairing account of the moral evolution of management. Next, I consider together the two descriptive accounts, Palmer and Werhane et al., which each seek to explain both why ethical lapses occur while pointing to how they might be prevented or at least mitigated. Finally, I explore Rego and colleagues’ normative call for a return to virtue ethics as a way to inspire more ethical behaviour in and by organizations.
Critiquing the contemporary ethical climate: Klikauer’s normative despair
Seven Management Moralities. Thomas Klikauer. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
Klikauer’s argument begins with the premise that management, no matter how much it may seek to deflect questions of morality, is an enterprise where ‘direct and indirect choices and actions’ affect others for good and for ill, and is thus ‘awash with moral qualities’ (p. 1). But to be awash with moral qualities is not to be moral, and Klikauer is careful to document the ways in which management has avoided confronting these qualities. At times, Klikauer argues, management brackets questions of morality by relying on moralities whose purpose is primarily to justify managerial prerogative. Additionally, management marginalizes morality and ethics, primarily in the training of managerial professionals, where ethics is predominantly treated as adjunct to the central curriculum. Finally, management often outright ignores questions of morality and ethics through a range of tactics, from casting them outside of the purview of management to conceiving on managers as ‘doers, not thinkers’ (p. 7) with little time or need for ethical or moral reflection.
The task Klikauer sets for himself is to head off this deflection and instead stage for management an encounter with morality. Klikauer expresses his hopes for such encounters, arguing ‘the engagement with morality will empower management to shed ill-conceived, uninformed, and inappropriate considerations by focusing attentions on moral issues’ (p. 3). This engagement with morality, Klikauer argues, ought not to be understood as an encounter with a singular, fixed morality, but rather with a range of moral philosophies. Grounded in a Kohlbergian perspective on the evolution of morality, Klikauer organizes his book around seven ‘stages’ of morality:
Stage 1: The Morality of Obedience and Punishment, where morality is governed by ‘fear, anxiety, and terror’ (p. 66);
Stage 2: The Morality of Selfishness and Egoism, where morality is directed towards the pursuit of personal goals and advantages;
Stage 3: The Morality of Conforming to Social Virtues, where morality is understood according to the adoption of socially defined moral codes defining personal character;
Stage 4: The Morality of Law and Order, where morality is regulated formally, through mechanisms such as rules, laws, and contracts;
Stage 5: The Morality of Utilitarian Welfare, where morality is governed by calculations of the greatest good;
Stage 6: The Morality of Universalism, where morality is grounded in universally-applicable duties;
Stage 7: The Morality of Environmentalism, where morality is understood holistically, extending beyond humanity to embrace life writ large.
For Klikauer, these stages are not defined by any particular moral approach—indeed, throughout the book, he provides often-dizzying lists of thinkers whose works can be classified within a given stage—but rather a central, animating awareness. These awarenesses unfold in a progression that is, in Klikauer’s terms, ‘universal, sequential, ascending, all-inclusive, and irreversible’ (p. 9). Each stage invariably includes some elements of its moral predecessors, while nevertheless representing a progressive increase in moral awareness.
In Chapters 2 through 4, Klikauer engages in a comparative exploration of these moral stages by tracing how various facets of management—from management styles, to justifications of managerial authority, to conceptions of leadership—are, or at least could be, inflected at each stage. In these chapters, Klikauer is at his best, offering wide-ranging and provocative discussions on subjects including management styles, justifications of managerial authority, the varying relationships between rationality/ies and morality, to conceptions of leadership. Additionally, at the conclusion of Chapter 3, Klikauer offers several useful tables (pp. 55–56; pp. 59–60) and summaries (pp. 60–74) pointing readers (hopefully including managers) to a broad range of works on ethics and morality associated with each stage, ostensibly in the hope that these readings will spur the kinds of encounters with moral thinking that transcend management’s traditional blind spots end encourage the potential for moral evolution. In suggesting the potential for such a progression, Klikauer’s optimism is tempered by the recognition that, in significant ways, the practice of management, which he here argues remains relatively confined to Stages 1–3, does not overlap with moral philosophy as developed in Stages 4–7. But despite identifying a point where, more or less, management ends and moral philosophy begins, Klikauer argues that ‘this does not mean that there is or cannot be management that ventures into areas five to seven’ (p. 43). In short, in these chapters, Klikauer compares management to the moral stages in a productive exploration of what he frames as the central Kantian tension between what is and what ought to be.
In the following chapters, Klikauer stages a series of encounters between management and representatives of schools of thought exemplifying each moral stage. For example, his Chapter 5 discussion of the Stage 1 morality centered on punishment and obedience explores Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiments on authority and Zygmunt Bauman’s penetrating analysis of how some victims of the Holocaust actively participated in their own persecution. In Chapter 10, Klikauer explores holistic moralities that look beyond human interests though the lenses of environmental ethics systems such as the deep ecology of Arne Naess and Murray Bookchin’s social ecology.
Here, however, Klikauer begins to wander from his intention to ‘empower’, using these confrontations with exemplars of moral stages less to inspire new ways of thinking than to demonstrate how management remains stuck at lower levels of moral evolution, with little to no hope of progress. In his Chapter 6 discussion of virtue, Klikauer argues ‘virtue ethics represent nothing but an insolvable dilemma for management. Living up to the demands of virtue ethics would mean that management has to alter its essence so severely that it would cease to be management’ (p. 128); consequently, Klikauer argues, the moral development of management tends to leapfrog Stage 3 before topping out at the formal regulation of Stage 4. Chapter 7 breezes through a variety of utilitarian thinkers including Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick, Moore and Singer before concluding that ‘management negates virtually every single version of utilitarian ethics’ (p. 167). Klikauer is even less sanguine for the most advanced moral stages, with an analysis of the Kantian ethics of duty characterizing Stage 6 leading to the conclusion that ‘management negates ethics and ethics negates management’ (p. 185), and an argument that the holistic concerns of Stage 7 ‘are totally useless to management’ (p. 186). With each progressive stage, Klikauer seems to become less hopeful about the potential for management ‘encounters’ with progressive moralities to focus attention on moral issues, and more despairing of the possibility for the moral evolution of management.
In short, by the end of the book, Klikauer’s hope for management’s ‘engagement with morality’ (p. 3) has seemingly disappeared, replaced by a sense of resignation regarding management’s moral evolution. For example, whereas Chapter 1 spoke of three managerial approaches corresponding to groupings in the moral stages—self-serving management (Stages 1–2), pre-modern management (Stages 3–4) and modern management (Stages 5–7), by Chapter 11’s conclusion, Klikauer is speaking in terms of three moral ‘prime interests’ (p. 217) in relation to each moral stage. Here, management morality corresponds with Stages 1–2, society’s morality with stages 3–5 and moral philosophy with Stages 6–7. And while the normative force, the Kantian ‘ought’, of Klikauer’s analysis pines for those latter stages, Klikauer argues that, at best, management has only begun to adopt the formal morality of Stage 4 in the 21st century—having skipped over the virtue-based morality of Stage 3 at that.
Diagnosing the ethical climate: two descriptive approaches
Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making: Mental Models, Milgram, and the Problem of Obedience. Patricia H. Werhane, Laura Pincus Hartman, Crina Archer, Elaine E. Englehardt and Michael S. Pritchard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013
In contrast to Klikauer’s despairing staging of encounters between management and moral philosophy, Werhane, Hartman, Archer, Englehardt and Pritchard take a far more hopeful approach to organizational ethics, writing: ‘despite the plethora of moral failures we encounter in commerce, politics, and in personal lives … most of these failures are unnecessary and could be remedied or avoided altogether’ (Werhane et al., 2013, Chapter 1, para. 3). The authors’ hope hinges on their central argument that moral lapses—particularly in organizational settings—frequently stem from actors operating from ‘narrow or compromised mindsets’ (Chapter 1, para. 13) preventing them from fully recognizing the moral dimensions of their actions. Adopting a view casting these mindsets as discursive, social constructions, Werhane et al. set out to trace their development, outline their debilitating effects on ethical deliberation and explore the possibilities for alternative mental models that expand moral imagination.
Werhane et al. begin by outlining what they describe as a ‘weak’ social constructionist position which holds that we can only access reality—and the reality of our own experiences—via ‘socially constructed language and framing models’ (Chapter 2, Section 2, para. 8). These constructions emerge from their historical locations within both the cultures-at-large and specific organizational context from which they emerge. Exploring vivid examples, ranging from the NASA distinction between ‘engineer hats’ and ‘manager hats’ that contributed to the Challenger disaster to the misapplication of the Grameen banking model in the 2011 Indian microfinance scandal, Werhane et al. demonstrate how mental models often lie at the heart of moral failures by encouraging routinized responses, crowding out moral considerations, or overlooking the lessons of experience.
Chapter 3 explores these effects through the auspices of the infamous Milgram obedience experiments of the 1960s. In a manner reminiscent of the frequent revisiting of the similarly infamous Hawthorne experiments (e.g. Gillespie, 1991), Werhane et al. offer a treatment of the original Milgram experiments, along with their various extensions, interpretations and reinterpretations, connecting the various accounts of obedience (and disobedience) that emerge with prominent ethical failures in organization, from the different discourses employed by managers and engineers to interpret the same data at NASA, to the contrast in the WorldCom between Cynthia Cooper, who chose to blow the whistle, and Betty Vinson, who did not—and who paid a criminal price as a result. For Werhane et al. the distinction lies not so much with actors who are morally virtuous or suspect, but rather in the discursive resources which frame the options available to those actors.
To explore how such discursive resources constrain actors’ moral and ethical imaginations, in Chapters 4 and 5 Werhane et al. outline a five-step model for ethical decision making, exploring how morally-limiting mental models confound the process at each step along the way. Our mental models, the authors argue, often inhibit our ability become aware of ethical situations (e.g. blind spots), our facility with gathering relevant information that would help us understand the dilemma (e.g. ideology), our faculty to identify alternatives (e.g. faith in intuition), our capacity for considering others’ needs (e.g. confirmation bias) and our aptitude at evaluating alternatives and making final, ethical decisions (e.g. learned helplessness). Along the way, Werhane et al. demonstrate how these mental models interfere with these steps through the use of vivid illustrations that are also prominent and familiar.
In acknowledging these limitations, however, the authors find hope for more ethical decision-making, arguing that awareness ‘is the first step toward assuming greater responsibility’ (Chapter 6, Section 2, para. 2). Here, for instance, we can productively encounter the lessons of the Milgram experience, reflecting on our own vulnerabilities to uncoerced obedience, in a manner that can call into question our tendency to assume that we are morally virtuous actors while yet maintaining our capacity to act confidently and morally. Chapter 6 demonstrates how a variety of constructs from moral philosophy and psychology—ranging from David Hume’s sensible knave to Philippa Foote’s increasingly prominent Trolley Case—can shake up our mental models and expand our moral imaginations.
Chapter 7 concludes by applying these arguments in extended treatments of three case studies. The first two—analyses of the Penn State cover up of the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal and the ethical lapses contributing to the Wall Street meltdown that ushered in the Great Recession in 2008—explore in detail how morally-constricting mental models can lead to ethical lapses with profound implications. The final case, however, strikes a more hopeful tone, exploring how the Belmont Commission, which, tellingly, responded in part to ethical concerns about the Milgram experiments themselves, came together to collaboratively develop not only formal guidelines but new mental models for ethical biomedical and behavioural research.
Chapter 8 ends the book with another provocative and hopeful case: a brief treatment of how Bayer Corporation applied moral imagination to find a way past a seemingly irresolvable ethical dilemma. Bayer’s crop science division had purchased an Indian seed company, only to later discover that many manufacturers of a hybrid cotton seed relied on child labour. Caught between its own zero tolerance policy towards child labour (a stance complicated by the relative acceptance of child labour amongst the farmers who relied on such labour and the families who relied on the income it provided), and its bottom-line need for a presence in the hybrid cotton seed industry, Bayer instead developed a creative solution that focused on first significantly reducing the need for child labour by providing cost-saving resources to farmers and education for children, and then requiring farmers to pledge not to use child labour. For Werhane et al., the Bayer case is a powerful illustration of how applying different mental models to seemingly intractable ethical dilemmas can point to creative solutions and more ethical outcomes.
Normal Organizational Wrongdoing: A Critical Analysis of Theories of Misconduct in and by Organizations. Donald Palmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012
For Donald Palmer, the path to such outcomes lies not in the minds of individual actors and decision makers, but in the very nature of the organizations they inhabit. As the title of his book suggests, Normal Organizational Wrongdoing seeks to offer an account of organizational ethics that moves beyond views casting wrongdoing as aberrant and abnormal. Instead, Palmer aspires to explore why individuals participate in collective acts of wrongdoing (that is, he is not interested in isolated, individual acts of corruption), arguing that we need accounts capable of coming to terms with the pervasiveness and persistence of wrongdoing by organizations.
Palmer begins by outlining two contrasting perspectives: one viewing organizational wrongdoing as abnormal, and the other, Palmer’s preferred perspective, as normal. The abnormal perspective, Palmer argues, is most common, and it views wrongdoing as behaviour that represents a departure from the norm that is ‘extraordinary in a malevolent way’ (p. 7). For the abnormal view, this malevolence might be located at the individual (e.g, ‘bad apple’) or organizational (e.g. ‘bad barrel’) levels; what holds the abnormal perspective together is its implicit assertion that acts of organizational wrongdoing are rare. This view, Palmer argues, is important—there are, clearly, cases of aberrant, abhorrent behaviour by organizations. But it is also necessarily incomplete, as much organizational wrongdoing is far more mundane—or at least emerges from more mundane origins.
To account for such commonplace origins, Palmer crystallizes a growing body of research that conceptualizes wrongdoing as a normal organizational phenomenon. This work is characterized by several distinct assumptions:
Because competitive organizations necessarily find themselves operating ‘close to the line separating right from wrong’ (p. 8), wrongdoing and right-doing are often close to indistinguishable;
Wrongdoers are often themselves ‘ordinary’ people, free from pathologies or hyper-developed negative traits;
Wrongdoing is often supported by the very same organizations structures and processes that produce and encourage right-doing;
Far from rare, organizational wrongdoing is ubiquitous, with a history as persistent as it is pervasive.
From this vantage, organizational wrongdoing is not (simply) the outcome of rare acts by malicious individuals, but rather an everyday outcome of the ‘normal’ business of organizations.
After distinguishing between perspectives identifying organizational wrongdoing as abnormal and normal, Palmer then outlines two distinct, but related, approaches to the causes of wrongdoing. The first approach, which Donald labels as dominant, attributes wrongdoing to perverse causes. Here, wrongdoing emerges as the mindful, rational calculation of intentional wrongdoers making discrete decisions relatively uninfluenced by their social contexts. While this popular and satisfying account certainly explains many acts of wrongdoing, Donald argues that, like view of organizational wrongdoing as abnormal with which it is associated, such an account is also limited. Instead, Donald advocates an alternative accounting of the causes of wrongdoing that paints the action of wrongdoers who act in ways that are not mindful or rational and develop gradually or incrementally in ways that are highly influenced by social context and not particularly intentional.
Palmer is careful to note that while the ‘normal’ nature of much organizational wrongdoing leads him to a certain sympathy for many wrongdoers, the normalcy of their behaviour ought not be construed to condone their actions and the consequences of those actions. Instead, he seeks to offer a series of eight distinct accounts of everyday wrongdoing, each illustrated by vivid, engaging case studies. Chapters 4 and 5 explore dominant approaches to normal organizational wrongdoing, through explanations grounded, respectively, in theories rational choice and organizational culture. In Chapter 6, Palmer explores evolutions in ethical decision theory as a bridge between dominant and alternative approaches, with traditional, philosophical approaches framing ethical decision making as a rational activity and contemporary, psychological approaches uncovering the at-best bounded capacity for individuals to act ethically. The chapters that follow move away from accounts posing wrongdoers as mindful, rational actors, instead offering perspectives grounding wrongdoing in the bounded rationality imposed by complex administrative systems (Chapter 7), social pressures arising in discrete situations (Chapter 8), power dynamics (Chapter 9) and the aftermath of accidents (Chapter 10). In Chapter 12, Palmer explores how external actors—‘social control agents’ such as the state—create wrongdoing by defining right and wrong behaviour through rules, regulation, and policies influencing the behaviours of individuals in organizations.
While the thrust of Palmer’s analysis is a descriptive analysis of why organizational wrongdoing—normal and abnormal—occurs, he nevertheless ends with a nod towards more prescriptive steps that can be taken to prevent wrongdoing. Here, Palmer acknowledges key limitations of the two approaches associated with dominant accounts of organizational wrongdoing: governance reform and moral rehabilitation. These approaches, Palmer argues, are limited in two key ways. First, such solutions attack the ‘substance of organizations’ that are ‘responsible for much of what is right in organizations and often generate wrongdoing as a by-product of their positive effects’ (p. 274). Second, by focusing on the behaviours of others, such solutions often make the unfortunate assumption that those concerned with wrongdoing are not capable of wrongdoing themselves—a conclusion that Palmer is at pains to demonstrate in his analyses of examples throughout his book as ultimately unsupportable when organizational wrongdoing is seen as ‘normal’. Instead, Palmer turns, briefly, to both cognitive and social psychology for critical research suggesting how organizational members can prevent (and be empowered to prevent) their own wrongdoing. Cognitive psychology, Palmer argues, can make people aware of their own cognitive limits as they effect their capacity for ethical decision-making, encouraging responses to either reduce or mitigate the effects of those limits. Additionally, Palmer advocates adopting Cialdini’s (2001) notion of a ‘gut check’—responsiveness to the physiological reactions we have to moral matters—to explore whether or not social influence is exerting undue pressure on our ethical decisions.
Envisioning a more ethical future: The normative hopefulness of Rego et al
The Virtues of Leadership: Contemporary Challenges for Global Managers. Arménio Rego, Miguel Pina e Cunha and Stewart Clegg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012
While Palmer (2012) and Werhane et al. (2013) find hope in their descriptive accounts of why ethical lapses occur, Arménio Rego, Miguel Pina e Cunha and Stewart Clegg anchor their hopes for a more ethical organizational future in a normative call for a return to virtue ethics. Whereas Klikauer argues that notions of morality and virtue ethics have remained largely absent from contemporary management, Rego et al. (2012) instead point to notable, contemporary examples of managerial virtue as exemplars of the authors’ faith in the power of a more virtuous global leadership. Inspired by the growing body of work under the rubric of Positive Organizational Scholarship (Cameron and Spreitzer, 2012), Rego et al. contend that a renewed emphasis on virtue in global leadership has the potential to induce ‘heliotropic effects’ encouraging more and more virtuous behaviour as global leaders set ‘parameters, tone, examples’ (p. 17) adopted both by those reporting to and modelling themselves after them. Rego et al. hope that a focus on positive, virtuous behaviour can induce ‘virtuous cycles’ that might replace, or at least counter, the ‘vicious cycles’ that have precipitated past widespread ethical lapses, the most recent of which being the Global Financial Crisis.
Rego et al. (2012) adopt a global framework in their call for a return to virtue, arguing that the various features and attendant pressures of the global economy demand such a return. Cataloging both the complexities of the global context (marked by dimension such as multiplicity, interdependence, ambiguity, flux) and the mindsets (intellectually, psychologically, socially) this complexity requires of leaders in Chapter 2, they argue that a set of core virtues (and key strengths associated with each virtue) are precisely what global leaders need to be successful. To identify these virtues, they rely on the catalog developed by positive psychologists Peterson and Seligman (2004), who identified six virtues drawn from a broad range of traditions, each associated with a number of discrete, measurable character strengths. These virtues—wisdom and knowledge, courage, justice, humanity, temperance and transcendence—providing the animating framework for Rego et al., as they spend the bulk of their book defining each virtue and its attendant character strengths, demonstrating positive examples of each from contemporary organizational practice.
Rego et al. classify these virtues into three broad categories, with a chapter devoted to each: cognitive and energizing virtues (wisdom/knowledge and courage; Chapter 3), amiability and citizenship virtues (justice and humanity; Chapter 4) and transcendent virtues (temperance and transcendence; Chapter 5). For each virtue, attendant character strengths—courage, for instance, is marked by bravery, persistence, integrity and vitality—are discussed at length, defined in terms of measurable behaviours and illustrated by vivid, inspiring examples. For instance, love, a character strength associated with the amiability and citizenship virtue of humanity, is defined by behaviours such as developing intimate bonds and making sacrifices in favour of others. Rego et al. offer an array of examples of corporations and leaders whose behaviours exhibited love, from the mentoring efforts of the Indian company Infosys’ ‘Chairman and Chief Mentoring Officer’ Narayana Murthy, to Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella’s decision to offer income-based pricing on his company’s innovative anti-cancer drug Gleevec. Throughout, however, Rego et al. are careful not to turn their examples into saints; the same discussion of love, for instance, explores the difference between the ‘rhetoric’ and the ‘reality’ (p. 108) of often-lauded Body Shop CEO Anita Roddick’s ‘love’ for her franchisees. Instead, their focus is consistent with their desire to acknowledge that ‘all human beings, including business and organization leaders, have the potential for good and evil deeds’ (p. 19), while at the same time focusing on the capacity for good deeds in the hope that that focus will inspire further good.
Rego et al. are well aware that their argument celebrating virtue in global leadership may come across as naïve, and pose several pre-emptive responses to the critique. First, they argue that theorizing ethical behaviour is not a neutral act, but rather one with self-fulfilling dimensions that ultimately influence real world behaviour: ‘if we represent organizations as characterized only by cut-throat competition, greed, and selfishness, we end up fertilizing the soil on which venality flourishes’ (p. 19). Second, they argue that rather than obscuring power relations, a focus on virtue can direct our attentions toward the positive deployment power in organizations. Power, they argue, is ‘conceptually agnostic’ (p. 23); it is not inherently good or bad. Finally, in a twist on the normative/descriptive tension running through this set of books, they argue that a focus on virtue is hardly naïve, pointing to evidence that ‘virtues like gratitude and forgiveness have evolutionary bases, arise by natural selection, and are intrinsic to human nature’ (p. 28). Rather than inevitably being a drag on the bottom line, they argue, we should pay careful attention to those cases in which virtuousness actively contributes to the economic performance of organizations.
To this end, Rego et al. spend the final two chapters of their book exploring the prospects for a renewed focus on virtue. They are careful to note that the simple application of single virtues is insufficient—ethical behaviour in a complex global environment requires considered reflection on how challenges call for the application of combinations of virtues. After all, they argue, ‘when virtues and strengths are not combined, their effects may be perverse’ (p. 159). Their prescriptions lie heavily on the promise of research into the application of virtues in global leadership. Chapter 6 is devoted entirely to outlining a research agenda focused on studying both the effects of virtuous behaviour and the prospects for cultivating virtues in global leaders. Chapter 7 begins by hinting at more direct proposals, such as symbolic compensation for virtuous behaviour, but ultimately collapses back to the ‘recursive’ effects of social science on organizational behaviour (p. 178). In other words, Rego et al. hope that their work, and similar investigations, can draw attention to positive behaviour by global leaders, in the hopes that such attention will inspire further, future behaviour, generating a virtuous circle where they hope, eventually, that ‘those who ignore virtue do so at their own peril’ (p. 183). By focusing on positive behaviour, Rego et al. aspire to reach a point where such behaviour becomes the norm.
Conclusion
As a set, these books are representative of a invigorated approach to organizational ethics, one with great potential to move beyond the staid, add-on approach considering ethics—when it does consider ethics—from the tripartite approaches of the teleological, deontological and virtue traditions. Instead, as a body these books suggest the vitality of new directions in both normative and descriptive approaches to ethics in organizational settings.
In terms of the two books adopting normative approaches to contemporary organizational ethics, Klikauer’s despairing account strikes a discordant note when set against the other books in this collection. After all, we’ve been through the cycle of ethical crises and reflection before, and heard similar hopes for new treatments and practices of ethics, only to witness a new wave of scandals. By highlighting the seemingly impenetrable gap between the broad human potential for moral and ethical evolution and the limited possibilities for realizing that potential inherent to management, Klikauer offers an important warning about being too hopeful for a more broadly ethical future.
On the other hand, the central claim of Rego et al. about how we theorize the ethical behaviour of managers that reads almost as if it is a direct response to Klikauer’s pessimism: ‘If we keep on disseminating pessimistic assumptions about the nature of individuals and organizations, we will contribute to the perpetuation of bad management and leadership practices’ (p. 19). In other words, according to Rego et al., there is a self-fulfilling dimension to theory—the theories we use to see the world naturally exert a great influence on the way the world appears to us. So if our theories of ethical behaviour in management see only unethical behaviour, our focus will be on the unethical. If our theories see little hope for change, we will despair of a brighter, more positive future. The danger of this approach, however, is that it returns our attention to apples and barrels, rather than orchards—in fact, explicitly so: the authors’ hopes are pinned on the trickle-down effects of more ethical, high-profile leaders.
The two books offering descriptive approaches, in their focus on the conditions for ethical action, provide a vantage more focused on orchards than apples or barrels, with Werhane et al. focused on the mental and Palmer on organizational conditions leading to wrongdoing. Both books drive home the central point that the capacity for unethical behaviour is a basic human feature, and that it does not take an especially sinister figure to engage in acts of wrongdoing with significant consequences. There is, however, a basic hopefulness in this recognition, grounded in the possibility for cultivating mental models and organizational conditions that foster the basic human capacity for ethical behaviour instead. The authors of both books offer useful suggestions for individuals to reflect on their own ethical behaviour, grounded in a clear understanding of their ethical potential, for good and for ill.
Taken individually, the books vary in their reach. Klikauer focuses on developing exhaustive (and exhausting) lists as he develops and compares management to each stage of moral evolution. His early chapters in particular are useful both for outlining potential moralities, and for directing readers to resources exploring those moralities in greater detail, and for that reason his book could find a home in some larger institutional collections. The other three books will find a larger audience. Each outlines clear theoretical contributions, demonstrated clearly through the discussion of rich, vivid and provocative examples, in a manner that will engage researchers, students and practitioners alike.
Taken together, the books gathered here do not simply call for a renewed emphasis on traditional approaches to ethics following crisis. Instead, they are suggestive of a reinvigorated and robust set of approaches to ethics in the wake of another wave of scandals. Such a view is particularly important coming after scandals without clear villains. If ethical lapses are particularly endemic to the system of contemporary capitalism, we need views of ethics that get beyond evaluating the discrete actions of rogue actors. From comparing management to the stages of moral evolution, to surveying the mental and organizational conditions for ethical behaviour, to exploring how global leaders might encourage ethicality through virtuosity, the books here offer a series of distinct, productive avenues through which to contemplate a more ethical organizational future.