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What role could or should moral imagination play in managerial and corporate decision-making? This book focuses on three simple questions: why do ordinary, decent managers engage in questionable behavior? Why do successful companies ignore the ethical dimensions of their processes, decisions, and actions? And what motivates a successful company such as McDonald's, which closed its 800 restaurants in Russia, to depart from a large and very profitable market? Working from the assumption that all human experience is socially constructed and incomplete, this book argues that a critical missing element in many instances of alleged managerial or corporate wrongdoing is a simple phenomenon: moral imagination. In this fully updated edition, three new chapters and topical case studies, such as Boeing and Google, allow readers to bring process philosophy and systems insights into organizational and managerial thinking. A valuable resource for scholars, students and corporate decision-makers.
List of contents
1. Introduction; 2. Why do good people and great organizations do bad things?; 3. Social constructivism and the very idea of a conceptual scheme; 4. The Rashomon effect; 5.Moral imagination; 6. Moral reasoning and moral imagination; 7. Systems thinking, process philosophy and moral imagination; 8. Next stages: reformulating the paradigm of western industrial global capitalism through moral imagination; 9. Moral imagination in technological development Amanda McCroskery and Ben Zevenbergen.
About the author
Patricia H. Werhane is Professor Emeritae in the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and DePaul University, and the author or editor of 36 books and 150 articles and book chapters. She was the founding editor of Business Ethics Quarterly and the Executive Producer of two video series on poverty alleviation and on founding thinkers in business ethics and corporate responsibility. She was a Rockefeller Fellow at Dartmouth College, Andersen Fellow at Cambridge University, and Fulbright Scholar at All Hollows Collage, Dublin.David J. Bevan directs Postgraduate Courses in Action Learning at St Martin's Institute of Higher Education, Malta, and is author of over 50 articles in critical management and business ethics. He is a Visiting Professor at King's College London where he obtained a PhD in Social Accounting with a background in philosophy and higher education. He has served on the management faculties of international universities and currently serves the editorial boards of several management and ethics journals, and edits two book series for Springer.
