Ethics

3 Pages 853 Words

The most recent addition to the Ruffin Series in Business Ethics, edited by R. Edward Freeman, is this significant contribution on moral imagination by Patricia Werhane, who is the Peter and Adele Ruffin Professor of Business Ethics at the Darden Graduate School of Business, University of Virginia. She is uniquely suited to write on this topic, as she has served as editor of Business Ethics Quarterly for ten years, authored many books on business ethics, and has had extensive experience in theory building and research in the area of ethical decision making. Books in this series are aimed at three audiences: management scholars, business ethicists, and business executives. Through a judicious balance of concepts, theory, and examples, Werhane writes in a way that reaches each of the audiences, especially the academic audience. The book strikes me as primarily targeted at scholars who are concerned with the ethics education of managers and executives, which is consistent with the other books in the Ruffin Serie s. As a result, the book is extremely useful to scholars in management and business ethics who are seeking a more thorough, theory-based look at ethics concepts. Since the book is laced with recent and relevant examples, it is useful from both a theoretical and applied perspective.
Werhane states her objective to be an exploration of the role of moral imagination in management and corporate decision making. In particular, she aims to provide some fresh insights on two important questions: Why do ordinary, decent managers engage in questionable behavior? and Why do successful companies ignore the ethical dimensions of their processes, decisions, and actions? Her basic argument is that the phenomenon of moral imagination holds the answers to these questions, and she follows others in writing on moral imagination. I first became aware of the concept, as it applies to business ethics, in a book by Powers and Vogel (1980), and I adopte...