Erwan Lamy

The 2008 financial crisis was not merely a moral crisis. It was also, and perhaps above all, an epistemic crisis. By exposing the intellectual irresponsibility of credit rating agencies and, more broadly, of financial actors, it showed that a system can collapse when it fails to produce, transmit, and respect properly justified information. It is from this diagnosis that, in line with virtue epistemology, an ethics of epistemic virtues applied to business emerged, pioneered by Boudewijn de Bruin. This approach proposes placing virtues such as epistemic humility, courage, justice, and generosity at the center of market practices. But it faces several difficulties: conceptual vagueness, limited normative guidance, the difficulty of training agents, and the weight of structural incentives to deviate from virtuous behavior. The NEVA model seeks to address these problems by articulating epistemic faults, virtues, and responsibility within an operational framework.

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue discussing the usefulness of philosophy in managerial practice. We present the papers included in this special issue and identify keynote directions for further research. The initial intention of the call for papers was to promote this topic on research agendas by offering a platform for discussing if, why, and how philosophy can complement and enhance management practice. Now that this special issue has been published, we see a broader significance: the arguments explored here are a starting point for more in-depth studies of the connections that can occur between specific philosophical concepts, theories, methods on the one hand, and concrete managerial practices on the other.

The necessity of epistemological theorisation for management science is questionable. However, epistemology can be useful if the following distinction between three kinds of epistemology, usually overlooked, is taken into account: epistemology as a structured academic discipline, epistemology as an intellectual exercise produced outside academic epistemology, and finally the epistemology specific to each researcher. When this distinction is not made, epistemology can become counterproductive and impede scientific work.

How can we make businesspeople more concerned about the truth of the information they spread or allow to circulate? In this age of ‘fake news’, ‘business bullshit’ and ‘post-truth,’ the issue is of the utmost importance, especially for business trustworthiness in the internet economy. The issue is related to a kind of epistemic responsibility, that consists in accounting for one’s own epistemic wrongdoings, such as making a third party believe something false. Despite growing interest in epistemic misbehavior in the literature of business ethics, the question of epistemic responsibility has been neglected. The aim of this paper is therefore to address this gap, by proposing a notion of epistemic responsibility for business, that may help regulate undesirable epistemic behavior, such as the spreading of false information. To define this notion of epistemic responsibility, I have introduced the concept of epistemic fault. Being epistemically responsible consists in being disposed to account for alleged epistemic faults. This notion of epistemic fault relies on a theoretical framework which combines a typology of eight ‘epistemic values’, a normative stance regarding these values, and a dispositional approach to epistemic virtues and vices. I use this theoretical framework to integrate the various accounts of epistemic virtues and vices found in the literature into a single explanatory scheme. Combined with the notion of epistemic responsibility itself, such an integrative framework should facilitate the practical application of an operational epistemic ethics in business, i.e., the development of virtuous epistemic practices.

Social entrepreneurship is a precarious activity that must always strike a delicate balance between commercial principles and social concerns. There is no shortage of discussion concerning the possible solutions that could help to maintain this balance, and social entrepreneurs are striving to reconcile conflicting aims on a daily basis, but the economic roots of this precariousness remain. Based on an analysis of these root causes, we propose a new radical approach to this precariousness, “radical” in the etymological sense of the term “root”. We start by identifying what determines the dilemma that lies at the heart of the precariousness of social entrepreneurship in present-day economic institutions. This enables us to identify the institutional conditions that might allow us to overcome it. The first condition is linked to the conservation of money in individual trade, which might be alleviated. To determine the second condition, we introduce the notion of the endogeneity of the institutional solutions to the dilemma. The lesser the involvement of the actors concerned by its formulation, the less endogenous is the solution. On this basis, we suggest institutional reforms that could prompt entrepreneurs to organize themselves in support of the actions of the most socially oriented entrepreneurs, thus safeguarding their sustainability.

Les sciences de gestion ne sont pas dans la science, mais dans le désir de faire science, le désir d’une science fantasmée. Cela apparaît dans leur obsession pathologique pour une « méthode scientifique » chimérique. Rien ne doit dépasser, tout doit être propre et lisse, alors que c’est l’approximation qui est au cœur du travail scientifique. Les sciences de gestion ratent ainsi quelque chose de fondamental dans la démarche scientifique en état incapable de saisir son imperfection. Comme les sciences médiévales, elles sont au contraire habitées par une mystique de la perfection. Il n’est pas possible de s’en extraire individuellement. Mais une philosophie des sciences de gestion pourrait aider à collectivement sortir de cet état