Ethics in Decision-Making
Clegg, Stewart Martin Kornberger & Carl Rhodes. (2007). Organizational ethics, decision making, undecidability, ethical decision-making. The Sociological Review, 55:2.
According to Stewart Clegg, Martin Kornberger and Carl Rhodes' article, "Organizational ethics, decision making, undecidability, ethical decision-making" from the Sociological Review, ethical decision-making is not optimized with either an outcome-driven consequentialist approach nor a rule-bound deontological approach. "We suggest that rules for ethical decision making, rather than ensuring ethical outcomes, can work to insulate organizations from moral responsibility" (Clegg, Kornberger, Rhodes 2007: 393). Because of recent ethical scandals, there has been a drive to seek a heavily prescriptive and rule-bound approach to ethics, but the authors believe that "ethics is best considered in terms of the way that organizations are sites for ethical difficulties, dilemmas...
Theorizing ambivalence in ethical decision-making is the ambitious goal of the article. The article uses the French literary theorist Derrida's approach to deconstruction to make sense of the seeming insurmountable paradox in ethics -- the need to be flexible to the needs of the situation, but to still have some coherent moral core.
The solution of 'going by the rules' is often offered because of the difficulties and complexities of managerial decision-making in large organizations. Managers cannot perfectly calculate the 'correct' decision. In contrast to the ideal of perfect rationality, contemporary organizational theorists tend to see organizations as 'garbage cans' or mixes of personal and organizational ethical orientations. It is often uncertain what will 'tumble out' decision-wise, even when there are efforts to have policies in words. In the face of such randomness, a personal ethical orientation…
