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Who Calls It? Actors and Accounts in the Social Construction of Organizational Moral Failure

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Abstract

In recent years, research on morality in organizational life has begun to examine how organizational conduct comes to be socially constructed as having failed to comply with a community’s accepted morals. Researchers in this stream of research, however, have paid little attention to identifying and theorizing the key actors involved in these social construction processes and the types of accounts they construct. In this paper, we explore a set of key structural and cultural dimensions of apparent noncompliance that enable us to distinguish between four categories of actors who engage in constructing the label of moral failure: dominant insiders, watchdog organizations, professional members, and publics. The analysis further clarifies which category of actor is more likely to succeed in constructing the label of moral failure under which circumstances, and what accounts they are likely to use, namely scapegoating, prototyping, shaming, and protesting.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Organizational Behaviour, Human Resources, and Management, School of Business, MacEwan University, 10700 - 104 Avenue, Edmonton, AB, T5J 4S2, Canada

    Masoud Shadnam

  2. School of Management, University of Bath, Building 8 West, Quarry Rd, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK

    Andrew Crane

  3. Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Park End Street, Oxford, OX1 1HP, UK

    Thomas B. Lawrence

Authors
  1. Masoud Shadnam
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  2. Andrew Crane
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  3. Thomas B. Lawrence
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Correspondence to Masoud Shadnam.

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Shadnam, M., Crane, A. & Lawrence, T.B. Who Calls It? Actors and Accounts in the Social Construction of Organizational Moral Failure. J Bus Ethics 165, 699–717 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-4089-6

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