Rethinking Business Ethics

As recent developments in the corporate world show, business ethics is one of the most important issues for the next future. In order to explore the possibilities of ethical conduct in the corporate world, we develop a theoretical frame that allows us to rethink business ethics. Our main thesis is that ethics does not consist of a set of rules or moral codes imposed from an outside but of practices that are deeply embedded and daily enacted in organizational learning processes. These learning processes, in which ethical behaviour may occur, are shaped by power/knowledge fields and driven by language and discursive practices. Thus, the research project focuses on corporate ethics and their interrelation with organizational learning, power/knowledge and language as processes in which ethical behaviour is enacted. Facing the theoretical challenge that business ethics represent, we focus on organizational learning that evokes and emerges from the field structured by power-knowledge relations and that is actively shaped through discursive practices and language games. It is within this frame that is constituted discursively, structured through power- knowledge and transformed through learning where we situate the possibility of ethical organizational behaviour. In concentrating on the relation between ethics and organizational learning we think that it can lead to innovation and new concepts, products and services but it can also lead to ignorance and violation of moral standards. Thus the question of ethics occurs within this small grey area, in a play that occurs not within, but with, the formal and tacit rules that frame conduct. These theoretical elaborations are supplemented with empirical investigations. They should enable us to understand management`s and consultant`s ethical dilemmas and the usual ways they employ to deal with it. We seek to explore empirically existing codes of ethical behaviour (respectively their non-existence) and their shortcomings in every day business life from a intervener`s and decision maker`s point of view. In analyzing the link between ethics, learning and more generally, change practically we research ethics at the basis of organizational transformations. While coducting our research, we seek to contribute theoretically as well as practically to the advancement of science and practice through publications, an international conference and a workshop with managers and consultants. Above all, this project will allow to rethink ethics and open up possibilties for an ethically responsible behaviour of organizations.

The research project has contributed to the scientific and societal discussion about ethics in the corporate world. The most common action formally taken by organizations to deal with ethical issues is the development and implementation of ethical rules through codes of conduct and value statements, together with the appointment of `ethics officers` who design and enforce them. Our research showed that ethical dilemmas are the norm and organizations should not be surprised if codes of conduct do not work in practice. The project has shown that much contemporary discussion of rules and translation of ethics into practice derives from the premise that universal moral codes can and should be applied to social groups in order to judge and foster ethical conduct. Such conceptions rest on a normativism that assumes that the distinction between `right` and `wrong` can be codified and then applied in order to ascertain whether certain actions or behaviours are deemed ethical or unethical. Deconstructing this modernist assumption the research project suggests an alternative approach to business ethics. From this perspective business ethics need to be embedded in organizational practices and routines. Key to change is a discourse in which organizational members can make sense of behaviour as being ethically charged or not. Throughout the project the research team developed an innovative theoretical framework to understand `ethics as practice`. This allowed to understand ethics differently: rather than using rule-based approaches business ethics was analysed and designed as pragmatic and practical interplay between subjectivity of organizational members, power/knowledge structures, and organizational discourse. In order to substantiate the theoretical findings the project team conducted ethnographic research in different organizations including a German film production team, an Austrian healthcenter, a Liechtenstein multinational company and an Australian governmental organisation. The empirical work lasted from a three weeks participating research to a two year action-research project and resulted in rich data which provide further insights for the `ethic as practice`- approach. Furthermore a close cooperation with the Austrian Chamber of Commerce and several professors from different universities provided the students of the University of Innsbruck as well as Austrian entrepreneurs with the chance to experience how close the development of theory and praxis are related to each other. The research project resulted in several subjects taught at the University of Innsbruck as well as in public lectures. Teaching informed by latest research ensured that students and entrepreneurs discussed, worked on and with the ``ethics as practice``-approach.