Ethics in decision making

Ethics in Decision-Making

Clegg, Stewart Martin Kornberger & Carl Rhodes. (2007). Organizational ethics, decision making, undecidability, ethical decision-making. The Sociological Review, 55:2.

According to Stewart Clegg, Martin Kornberger and Carl Rhodes' article, "Organizational ethics, decision making, undecidability, ethical decision-making" from the Sociological Review, ethical decision-making is not optimized with either an outcome-driven consequentialist approach nor a rule-bound deontological approach. "We suggest that rules for ethical decision making, rather than ensuring ethical outcomes, can work to insulate organizations from moral responsibility" (Clegg, Kornberger, Rhodes 2007: 393). Because of recent ethical scandals, there has been a drive to seek a heavily prescriptive and rule-bound approach to ethics, but the authors believe that "ethics is best considered in terms of the way that organizations are sites for ethical difficulties, dilemmas and deliberations (Clegg, Kornberger, Rhodes 2007: 394). Theorizing ambivalence in ethical decision-making is the ambitious goal of the article. The article uses the French literary theorist Derrida's approach to deconstruction to make sense of the seeming insurmountable paradox in ethics -- the need to be flexible to the needs of the situation, but to still have some coherent moral core.

The solution of 'going by the rules' is often offered because of the difficulties and complexities of managerial decision-making in large organizations. Managers cannot perfectly calculate the 'correct' decision. In contrast to the ideal of perfect rationality, contemporary organizational theorists tend to see organizations as 'garbage cans' or mixes of personal and organizational ethical orientations. It is often uncertain what will 'tumble out' decision-wise, even when there are efforts to have policies in words. In the face of such randomness, a personal ethical orientation and sense of justice is required. "In Derrida sees decision-making as irretrievably implicated with issues of personal responsibility and ethics" (Clegg, Kornberger, Rhodes 2007: 398).

For Derrida, rules are not useful and future-oriented utilitarian calculus is impossible. To simply follow the rules enters into the 'madness' of rationality, and echoes the protests of Nazi war criminals that they were just following orders and therefore their crimes were excused. A sense of personal responsibility and investment in every decision that has potential ethical consequences is required, and no human being, regardless of his or her level of the organizational hierarchy, can abdicate responsibility. Organizational acts that use authority, routine, and above all bureaucracy are usually the least ethical rather than the most (Clegg, Kornberger, Rhodes 2007: 403). This statement seems supported by recent history, in which some of the least ethical actions (the accounting fraud at Enron, 'robo-signing' for foreclosures after the housing crisis) were done as a matter of routine, according to the set procedures of the organization.