ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the meanings of moral and ethical in the context of defining terms such as management, organization, and business. It elaborates on the dichotomy between moral management and what can be called commercial ethics, with a focus on applicability.
Pointing to a diversity of literature streams, covering the issues of ethicality and morality, it acknowledges the role of business anthropology and organizational studies, focusing on their contributions to the debate about moral and ethical organization. It follows with a discussion about the consequences of treating an organization as a social construct, which include, but are not limited to, an assumption, that stakeholder management and plurality (e.g., of values) are important denominators for what is considered ethical. The second part of the chapter sets the scene for a discussion about moral management in a historical context of management thought development. It is suggested that efforts to define a moral approach to management and organization are confronted with intellectual traps such as a paradigm of flexibly negotiated consensus, predominance of a rule of efficiency, and a dichotomy between particularism and universalism.
