The Moral Organisation

Abstract

What makes a ‘moral organisation’ is a vexed question, which I approached through the attitudes of the participants in my study to their employers. I asked a series of questions covering whether the organisation had a responsible attitude to its stakeholders; whether the organisation was concerned with moral issues; whether it worked well, internally, what the risks were for the organisation and whether it had taken precautions against such risks. Although the question about internal operations elicited some answers which are more relevant to management policy than to ethical questions, those answers show that some prima facie operational issues, such as treatment of staff, have an ethical dimension which the organisations may need to address when striving for improvement. Section 1 describes the responses to these questions. Section 2 considers the recent organisational fashion for empowerment of staff and its ethical consequences and Section 3 discusses the value of procedures as guarantors of ethical conduct. Section 4 returns to the more general question of what makes an organisation moral. There will be some recapitulation of points made in earlier chapters in the context of this discussion of organisations.