Michael F. Mascolo, Allison DiBianca Fasoli, David Greenway

Abstract: Discussions of morality in businesses and organization tend to center around the rights and freedoms of organizations and/or customers, or around the importance of socially responsible business practice. Rights-based deliberations are often invoked to justify the pursuit of self-interest, either by the business or customer. Calls for socially responsible practices function to constrain the self-interest of organizations, or otherwise prompt businesses to “give back” to the communities they serve. In either case, genuinely moral motives are often seen as secondary to what is assumed to be the primary goal of business – the pursuit of profit.  We reject the common sense view that business and moral practice operate as separate spheres of activity. In so doing, we offer a relationalist conception of morality and moral development in everyday life. From a relationalist view, moral standards arise not from nature, God, the mind, or society. They emerge in embodied relational activity that occurs between people. Moral relationalism embraces neither moral universalism nor relativism, but instead views moral standards as a continuously emergent but constrained properties of discursive action that occurs between people as they negotiate and negotiate questions of “what ought to be” in physical and socio-cultural contexts.  In this paper, we first show how the full range of moral standards arise in different forms of social relations between people. We then apply the moral relationalist framework to an analysis of the inescapable role of moral judgment in all business practices. In so doing, we suggest that business decision-making should be continuously informed by the tensions that arise between and among at least three moral frameworks: rights, virtue and care.  We illustrate the moral relationalist approach to business through in-depth analyses of the moral mindsets of three entrepreneurs who integrate moral concerns into their business practices in different ways.

Tags: rights, virtue, Mascolo, DiBianca Fasoli, Greenway, care, moral development, moral relationalism