ABSTRACT

This chapter describes stories from working adults about organizational moral learning (OML) and organizational moral ignorance (OMI). The diversity of stories, work activities, and topics provided also support the idea that the concepts of OML and OMI are useful in explaining a wide range of organizational ethics. The stories of OML focus on organizational adaptations that were generated by members' intuiting that an ethical opportunity for rightdoing exists and should be pursued. They also focus on organizational adaptations that were generated by members' ethical concerns that current wrongdoing, or the possibility of wrongdoing, needs to be stopped or avoided. The stories of OMI indicate failure by social systems to adapt to members' communication about their moral intuiting. Similar to stories of OML, storytellers experienced a lot of negative emotion regarding their moral concerns; however, unlike OML storytellers, OMI storytellers' negative emotions were not resolved through organizational changes or adaptations but were exacerbated or numbed through feelings of powerlessness or helplessness.