Thought Experiments and Philosophy in Organizational Research

Organization theory seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand, there are arguments that the field is too preoccupied with theory, leaving its work abstract and practically irrelevant. On the other hand, there are arguments that the field is overly empirical and too methods-driven, which hampers the creation of ideas that resonate with constituencies beyond the organization studies community. How to resolve this apparent conundrum? In this essay we argue that neither more theorizing nor more forensic data-driven work might address the problem; rather, and perhaps surprisingly, we propose that a philosophical stance might offer a remedy.

Business Ethics as Practice

In this article we develop a conceptualization of business ethics as practice. Starting from the view that the ethics that organizations display in practice will have been forged through an ongoing process of debate and contestation over moral choices, we examine ethics in relation to the ambiguous, unpredictable, and subjective contexts of managerial action. Furthermore, we examine how discursively constituted practice relates to managerial subjectivity and the possibilities of managers being moral agents. The article concludes by discussing how the ‘ethics as practice’ approach that we expound provides theoretical resources for studying the different ways that ethics manifest themselves in organizations as well as providing a practical application of ethics in organizations that goes beyond moralistic and legalistic approaches.

Rethinking the Sharing Economy:The Nature and Organization of Sharing in the 2015 Refugee Crisis

Our article focuses on a non-standard sharing example that harbors the potential to disrupt received wisdom on the sharing economy. Although, originally, entering the field to analyze, broadly from a governance perspective, how the 2015 refugee crisis was handled in Vienna, Austria, we found that the non-governmental organization Train of Hope—labeled as a ‘citizen start-up’ by the City of Vienna officials—played an out- standing role in mastering the crisis. In a blog post during his visit in Vienna at the time, and experiencing the refugee crisis first-hand, it was actually Henry Mintzberg who suggested reading the phenomenon as part of the ‘sharing economy’. Continuing this innovative line of thought, we argue that our unusual case is in fact an excellent op- portunity to discover important aspects about both the nature and organization of sharing.

Organizational Ethics, Decision Making, Undecidability

In this paper we develop a conceptualisation of organizational decision-making as a practice that is, necessarily, ethical. The paper starts with a discussion of the notion of decision-making as it relates to organizational rationality and the relationship between management and control. Drawing on Derrida’s discussions of undecid- ability and responsibility, we suggest that as well as being able to consider organizational decision-making as an instance of (albeit bounded) rationality or calculability, it can also be regarded as a process of choice amongst heterogenous possibilities.