Description
Book SynopsisThere is an urgent need to understand how private and public organisations can play a role in promoting human values such as fairness, dignity, respect and care. Globalisation, technological advance and climate change are changing work, organisations and systems in ways which foster inequality, alienation and collective risk. Against this backdrop, organisations are being urged to make their contribution to the common good, take account of the interests of multiple stakeholders, and respond ethically as well as efficiently to complex challenges which transcend traditional organisational and state boundaries.
Ethics, Meaningfulness, and Mutuality poses critical questions related to organisational design by challenging limits to current thinking, such as the neglect by political philosophers of markets, firms and stakeholders, or by organisational theorists of business ethics. In so doing, the book advances our understanding of the theory and practice of ethical organising. Spe
Table of Contents
Preface
OVERVIEW
The sustainability imperative
Motivating humanity
A human capability for ethical world-building
Meaningfulness and mutuality
Towards a philosophy of ethical world-building
Organisations and organising
Overview of chapters
CHAPTER ONE: THE REALM OF VALUES
Relational Conception of Values
Eudaimonic reflection and cosmopolitan morality
Organisational values
Values-work
Values in ethical organising
Moral free space
Liberal value pluralism
Moral progress
Moral imagination
Meanings, understanding, and knowledge
Common knowledge
Changing values
CHAPTER TWO: THE MEANINING OF VALUE
Value and the sustainability imperative
The meaning of value
Forms of value
Value worth creating
Worth
Integrative worth and publicness
Ethical worlds
The life value model
Materialist ethics
Framing life value organisations
Elements of the life value model
CHAPTER THREE: MEANINGFULNESS AND MUTUALITY
The value of meaningfulness
Meaningfulness – objective, subjective, hybrid
Sources of meaning and public meaningfulness
Practical reasoning
Ethics of care
Domination and alienation
Mutuality as an organising principle
Roots of mutuality
Mutuality and reciprocity
Constrained and expansive mutuality
Dimensions of mutuality
Ethical orientations – fairness, care, flourishing
Voice in ethical world-building
Structures and institutions
Metis – overcoming muteness and harnessing mutancy
CHAPTER FOUR: COLLECTIVE ACTION – INTEGRITY, PURPOSE, WORK
Normatively-desirable collective action
Collective moral agents
Integrity
Emotions and reasons
Morally worthy organisations
Philosophy of purpose
Organisational purpose
Aspects of purpose and purposing
Work – complex contribution
Agonistic republicanism
Consensus and conflict
Agonism – constructive conflict
Republicanism – responsible difference-making
CHAPTER FIVE: JUDGING, RESPONSIBILITY, AND AN ETHIC OF CARE
Judging as thinking and feeling
Objects
Concern for objects
Bringing objects into view
Responsibility to create collective moral agents
Duties to organise
Responsibilities to ‘see’ others
Ethic of care
Materialist ethic of care
Becoming a self-determining being
Ethic of care and systems of social cooperation
Separations of distance, culture, and power
Supply chains as systems of social cooperation
CHAPTER SIX: A PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICAL ORGANISING: JUSTICE, CAPABILTIIES, MEANINGFULNESS
Capability justice
Social constructivism and justice
Seeing ourselves as world-builders
Constructing basic structures
Contesting ethical worlds
A Capability for ethical world-building
Individual capabilities
Collective capabilities
Organisational capabilities
Life capabilities
Ethical organising at the base-of-the-pyramid
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE SOCIETY OF MEANING-MAKERS: DIGNITY, EMPATHY, POWER
The society of meaning-makers
All affected
Mutuality in the society of meaning-makers
Creating the moral community
Distributed power system
Organisational power
Relational power
Discursive authority
CONCLUSION: TOWARDS AN EMPIRICAL RESEARCH AGENDA
Bibliography
Index
