Patricia Werhane

This special issue is devoted to highlighting thinkers who have been overlooked within business ethics and who have important contributions to make to our field. We make the case that, as scholars of a hybrid discipline that also aims to address important issues of business practice, we need to look continually for new sources of insight and wisdom that can both enrich our discourse and improve our ability to generate ideas that have a positive impact on business practice. In this introductory essay, we discuss our rationale for creating this special issue, summarize the articles contained within, and close with thoughts on its significance for the field going forward.

This article will defend a very simple thesis. In a diverse globalized world with expanding economic opportunities, pandemic risks such as the global COVID-19 virus, and the Black Lives Matter movement, we will need to revisit and revise our mindsets about free enterprise, corporate governance, and most importantly, leadership. That we can change our mindsets and world view is illustrated by studies of primate behavior, in particular, the Forest Troop savanna baboons, and the kind of leadership necessary in a global political economy, even given the pandemic, is, interestingly often exemplified by women.

Developing themes from the first volume of this collection, in this second edition we again bring together papers that either exemplify the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, or that allow us to do so in and through the conversations they create. The pieces were chosen based on their relevance to similar themes as discussed in the first volume. The first, most central theme of this volume remains ‘leadership’, which in and of itself continues to develop into an academic field ever more audacious in its ambitions and multidisciplinary in orientation. Many new and exciting perspectives regarding the importance of relationality in leading have crystalized in recent years and offer rich perspectives for rethinking organizational life. The second theme is gender, which finds its academic force in feminism and gender studies, but has become an important part of organization studies, labor relations, political theory, to name but a few, and is also increasingly central to the study of leadership practices. In highlighting their importance, we hope to set the stage for understanding the normative implications of how gender and leadership discourses intersect. We also continue our interest in systemic thinking and complexity theory. A Golden thread that runs through all of these fields, and certainly weaves together the broad variety of perspectives in this volume, is the notion of relationality. Taken together, this variety of theoretical perspectives informed the selection of the papers in this volume.

In this collection, the editors again bring together papers that either exemplify the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, or that allow us to do so in and through the conversations they create. The chapters were chosen based on their relevance to similar themes as were discussed in the first volume. By reviewing historical developments in the literature around gender and organization, and by drawing on recent scholarship that disrupts the traditional masculine imaginaries that plague leadership constructs, this book challenges us to radically revise our gendered thinking about leading in organizations. The authors included in this volume offer alternative, interdisciplinary perspectives on the gender constructs that inform the organizing that takes place in business and society. The book delves deeply into how ‘relationality’, as concept and practice, can help us frame a more inclusive approach to gender within contemporary organizations.

This book celebrates the work of Patricia Werhane, an iconic figure in business ethics. This festschrift is a collection of articles that build on Werhane’s contributions to business ethics in such areas as Employee Rights, the Legacy of Adam Smith, Moral Imagination, Women in Business, the development of the field of business ethics, and her contributions to such fields as Health Care, Education, Teaching, and Philosophy. All papers are new contributions to the management literature written by well-known business ethicists, such as Norman Bowie, Richard De George, Ronald Duska, Edwin Hartman, Michael Hoffman, Mollie Painter-Morland, Mark Schwartz, Andrew Wicks, and others. The volume is comprised of articles that reflect on Werhane’s work as well as build on it as a way to advance further research. At the end of the festschrift, Pat Werhane provides responses to each chapter. The first chapter of the book also includes the overview of Patricia Werhane’s work and her academic career. The book is written to appeal to management scholars and graduate students interested in the areas of Business Ethics, Modern Capitalism, and Human Rights. Patricia Werhane is one of the most distinguished figures in the field of business ethics. She was a founder of the field, she is one of its leading scholars, and she has had a profound impact on the world of business practice. Among her many accomplishments, Pat is known for her original work on moral imagination, she is an acclaimed authority on employee rights in the workplace, and she is one of the leading scholars on Adam Smith. Having been active in Academia for over 50 years, Werhane is a prolific author of over a hundred articles and book chapters, and the author or editor of twenty-seven books, including Adam Smith and his Legacy for Modern Capitalism, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making, and co-authored books Organization Ethics in Health Care, Alleviating Poverty Through Profitable Partnerships, Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making, Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience, and Research Approaches to Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility.

This paper builds on London and Hart’s critique that Prahalad’s best-selling book prompted a unilateral effort to find a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Prahalad’s instrumental, firm-centered construction suggests, perhaps unintentionally, a buccaneering style of business enterprise devoted to capturing markets rather than enabling new socially entrepreneurial ventures for those otherwise trapped in conditions of extreme poverty. London and Hart reframe Prahalad’s insight into direct global business enterprise toward “creating a fortune with the base of the pyramid” rather than at the BoP. This shift in language requires a recalibration of strategic focus, we argue, and will necessitate implementation of “moral imagination” to formulate new mental models that can frame the possibility of local entrepreneurs working collaboratively and discursively with development partners drawn from civil society, corporate, and government sectors. Successful partnerships will arise from interactive processes of emergent, co-creative learning within a shared problem domain or “community of practice”. We call attention to three related pluralist framings of situated learning within such communities of practice: decentered stakeholder networks; global action networks; and a focus on “faces and places” as a cognitive lens to humanize and locally situate diverse inhabitants within base of the pyramid partnership projects.

In this paper we reconsider Adam Smith’s ethics, what he means by self-interest and the role this plays in the famous “invisible hand.” Our efforts focus in part on the misreading of “the invisible hand” by certain economists with a view to legitimizing their neoclassical economic paradigm. Through exegesis and by reference to notions that are developed in Smith’s two major works, we deconstruct Smith’s ideas of conscience, justice, self-interest, and the invisible hand. We amplify Smith’s insistence, through his notions of the virtues, that as human beings, and by analogy, organizations, we are intrinsically social, rather than selfish and or egoistically self-centered. Thus, we have responsibilities to and because of others. We conclude that such a managerialist preoccupation with shareholder value is challenged, if not completely refuted, by taking seriously the social character of Smith’s complex vision of commerce

Over the last decade, and culminating in the 2008 global financial meltdown, there has been an erosion of trust and a concomitant rise of distrust in domestic companies, multinational enterprises, and political economies.In response to this attrition, this article presents three arguments. First, we suggest that trust is the “glue” of any viable political economy, and we propose that the stakes of violating public trust are particularly high in light of the asymmetry between trust and distrust. Second, we identify a constellation of key barriers to overcoming distrust that companies face in the current environment: (1) corporate mind-sets that promote a preoccupation with quantification, hierarchical leadership models, and “blind trust” in authority; (2) the anonymity of core stakeholders; (3) the agency of the media as a driver of the political economy; and (4) firm-centric models of stakeholder relationships.Third, we argue that, notwithstanding these challenges, these phenomena are not fatal and can be addressed through a holistic transformation in corporate culture. Such a transformation might include a shift to collaborative leadership models and replacing authority models with responsibility, a “names and faces” approach to stakeholders through cases and stories, more egalitarian communication exchanges with external stakeholders, and a reprioritization of the firm as a vital element among others within a system rather than the central core of a network.We conclude that the value of trust at the individual, institutional, national, and global levels cannot be overstated. Without a reinvigoration of trust in our political economies, at all levels, the future of an economically vibrant planet is indeed bleak.

This volume brings together a selection of papers written by Patricia Werhane during the most recent quarter century. The book critically explicates the direction and development of Werhane’s thinking based on her erudite and eclectic sampling of orthodox philosophical theories. It starts out with an introductory chapter setting Werhane’s work in the context of the development of Business Ethics theory and practice, along with an illustrative time line. Next, it discusses possible interpretations of the papers that have been divided across a range of themes, and examines Werhane’s contribution to these thematic areas. Patricia H. Werhane is a renowned author and innovator at the intersection of philosophy and Applied Business Ethics. She is professor emerita and a senior fellow at the Olsson Centre for Applied Ethics at Darden and was formerly the Ruffin Professor of Business Ethics. She is also professor emerita at DePaul University, where she was Wicklander Chair in Business Ethics and director of the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics. A prolific author whose works include Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making and Organization Ethics for Health Care, Werhane is an acclaimed authority on employee rights in the workplace, one of the leading scholars on Adam Smith and founder and former editor-in-chief of Business Ethics Quarterly, the leading journal of Business Ethics. She was a founding member and past president of the Society for Business Ethics and, in 2001, was elected to the executive committee of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. Before joining the Darden faculty in 1993, Werhane served on the faculty of Loyola University Chicago and was a Rockefeller Fellow at Dartmouth College and Senior Fellow at Cambridge University.

In commerce, many moral failures are due to narrow mindsets that preclude taking into account the moral dimensions of a decision or action. In turn, sometimes these mindsets are caused by failing to question managerial decisions from a moral point of view, because of a perceived authority of management. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted controversial experiments to investigate just how far obedience to an authority figure could subvert his subjects' moral beliefs. In this thought-provoking work, the authors examine the prevalence of narrow mental models and the phenomenon of obedience to an authority to analyse and understand the challenges which business professionals encounter in making ethical decisions. Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making proposes processes - including collaborative input and critique - by which individuals may reduce or overcome these challenges. It provides decision-makers at all levels in an organisation with the means to place ethical considerations at the heart of managerial decision-making.

In this paper we set out to explore the claims that corporate social responsibility (CSR) itself is little more than a complementary extension of the project of coloniality initiated by the Enlightenment (e.g. Banerjee 2019). We will not dispute that claim. Rather we will develop three points. First, we will apply a non-linear, systems approach to demonstrate how we all, of any color, ethnic origin or historical location are all part of an interconnected interrelated sets of systems—what some thinkers call a complex adaptive system or systems (e.g., Miller and Page 2007) so that dismissing or degrading any particular ethnic, gender, or racial group is dismissing part of our history and origin. Secondly, we will argue that Enlightenment, coloniality, as well as neo-coloniality, and decoloniality sprung up from the Enlightenment projects themselves. Thus, the very critiques of Enlightenment, accurate as they may be, evolved from that perspective and have to be taken into account even in those critiques. Third, what appears to be an “either-or” – that is, that commerce should stick to business and not engage in political activities (forms of neocolonialism) or accept these business-political activities despite critiques – is not a simple choice. Rather, conceding that commerce and political systems cannot be nicely separated, we will provide some principles or ways to evaluate these activities, seemingly ubiquitous particularly in emerging economies.

When there are disasters in our society, whether on an individual, organizational or systemic level, individuals or groups of individuals are often singled out for blame, and commonly it is assumed that the alleged culprits engaged in deliberate misdeeds. But sometimes, at least, these disasters occur not because of deliberate malfeasance, but rather because of complex organizational and systemic circumstances that result in these negative outcomes. Using the Boeing Corporation and its 737 MAX aircraft crashes as an example, this ethical analysis will examine some of the organizational problems that led to changes in management in Boeing and ultimately resulted in the fatal accidents. We will examine ethical blind spots within the company that led to the deadly accidents, and we will study the kinds of circumstances that are particularly acute in organizations such as Boeing, and which contributed to the malfunctions in the 737 MAX and the two resulting crashes. The Boeing 737 MAX example is not a singular case, but rather shares similarities with other engineering disasters such as the Challenger and Columbia explosions, and the ignition switch failures at General Motors each of which seem to have been at least partly the result of organizational shortcomings involving a compromise in commitment to safety. These parallels lead us to conclude that organizational malfeasance poses a serious ethical challenge for engineers and their organizations. We will conclude with some tentative suggestions for avoiding such tragic incidents in the future.

Michael Walzer is one of the most distinguished political philosophers and social critics of this century. His ideas have had great import and influence in political philosophy and political discussion, yet very few of his ideas have been incorporated explicitly into the business ethics literature. We argue that Walzer’s work provides an important conceptual canvas for business ethics scholars that has not been adequately explored. Scholars in business ethics often borrow from political theory and philosophy to generate new insights and develop new substantive contributions. Many valuable theoretical resources are already used extensively—particularly Aristotle, Kant, Marx and a variety of utilitarian philosophers. Walzer offers another set of resources to bring to the conversation of what business ethics is and how business ethicists add value. This paper provides an opportunity to delve further into Walzer’s writings, particularly themes that are tied to business ethics, and to illustrate how his ideas can be extended to reshape our understanding of the field and develop new perspectives on ethical issues in commerce.

We propose that firms that engage in morally imaginative sensemaking will manage society's changing ethical expectations more effectively than those engaging in habituated sensemaking. Specifically, we argue that managers engaging in habituated sensemaking will tend to view changes in expectations as threats and respond to them defensively. In contrast, morally imaginative managers will tend to see these same changes as opportunities and address them by proactively or interactively engaging stakeholders in learning processes. We contribute to the literature on moral imagination by highlighting the value of moral imagination relative to conventional sensemaking, and by positioning moral imagination as an ongoing mode of sensemaking. While we recognize that managers' capacity to continuously address changing ethical expectations using moral imagination is constrained by cognitive limitations, we posit that morally imaginative sensemaking may economize on cognitive resources over time by enabling managers to avoid managing ethical issues unproductively based on habit. We also contribute to the issues management literature by calling attention to two underlying factors, managerial sensemaking mode and firm enterprise strategy, that drive companies' approaches to issues management.