Organizations do moral wrong. States pursue unjust wars, businesses avoid tax, charities misdirect funds. Our social, political, and legal responses require guidance. We need to know what we're responding to and how we should respond to it. We need a metaphysical and moral theory of wrongful organizations. This book provides a new such theory, paying particular attention to questions that have been underexplored in existing debates. These questions include: where are organizations located as material objects in the natural world? What's the metaphysical relation between organizations and their members? Can organizations be blameworthy for attitudes and character traits, as well as for actions? What about feelings of guilt, remorse, and shame-can organizations feel these emotions and why does this matter? How and why are members implicated in organizations' wrongs? How should organizations' reparative costs be apportioned among members? The book provides provocative answers to these questions. It argues that organizations are material objects with humans as material parts - much like how a pizza is a material object with slices as material parts. This picture helps us make sense of organizations' blameworthiness, including blame for organization-level actions, attitudes, and character traits. What's more, organizations can experience moral self-awareness - a crucial component of guilt, remorse, and shame. Members can be implicated in organizations' actions in numerous ways - and, it is argued, members' level of implication should determine their share of organizations' reparative burdens.

Instances of wrongdoing in and by organizations have featured heavily in news headlines in recent years. Why do organizational participants—employees, managers, senior officials—engage in illegal, unethical, and socially irresponsible behavior? The dominant view of wrongdoing as an abnormal phenomenon assumes that the perpetrator is a rational, proactive actor, working in isolation. However, Palmer develops an alternative approach in this book, examining wrongdoing as a normal occurrence, produced by boundedly rational actors whose behaviour is shaped by the immediate social context over a period of time. The book provides a comprehensive critical review of the theory and research on organizational wrongdoing. By using rich case study material, it illuminates different perspectives, potential explanations, and policy suggestions for the reduction of organizational wrongdoing.

The book provides an analysis of organizational wrongdoing explaining why individuals and groups behave unethically or illegally, using a range of different theories and case studies

Organizational Wrongdoing as the “Foundational” Grand Challenge: Definitions and Antecedents consolidates and extends knowledge on the subject of organizational wrongdoing and highlights potential directions for future research.

Moral duties are regularly attributed to groups. In the media or on the street, we might hear that a specific country has a moral duty to defend human rights, that environmentalists have a moral duty to push for global systemic reform, or that the affluent have a moral duty to alleviate poverty. Do such attributions make conceptual sense or are they mere political rhetoric? And what does that imply for the individual members of these groups? Group Duties offers the first comprehensive answer to these questions. Stephanie Collins defends a Tripartite Model of group duties - so-called because it divides groups into three fundamental categories. First, we have combinations - collections of agents that don't have any goals or decision-making procedures in common. These groups cannot bear moral duties. Instead, we should re-cast their purported duties as a series of duties, one held by each agent in the combination. Each duty demands its bearer to 'I-reason': to do the best they can, given whatever they happen to believe the others will do. Second, there are groups whose members share goals but lack decision-making procedures. These are coalitions. Coalitions also cannot bear duties, but their alleged duties should be replaced with members' several duties to 'we-reason': to do one's part in a particular group pattern of actions, on the presumption that others will do likewise. Third and finally, collectives have group-level procedures for making decisions. They can bear duties. Collectives' duties imply duties for collectives' members to use their role in the collective with a view to the collective doing its duty. With the Tripartite Model in-hand, Collins argues that we can target our political demands at the right entities, in the right way, for the right reasons.

The ethics of care has flourished in recent decades yet we remain without a succinct statement of its core theoretical commitment. This study argues for a simple care ethical slogan: dependency relationships generate responsibilities. It uses this slogan to unify, specify and justify the wide range of views found within the care ethical literature.

A comprehensive overview of the causes, processes and consequences of wrongdoing and misconduct across all levels of an organization.

This intriguing new volume provides an understanding of the various forms of antisocial behavior in the workplace and how they can be identified and managed--if not prevented altogether. Antisocial Behavior in Organizations includes analysis of the role of frustration in antisocial behavior, and discusses issues such as employee revenge, aggression, lying, theft, and sabotage. Whistle blowing, litigation, and claiming are also explored as types of behavior that may be considered antisocial even though their stated goal is perhaps prosocial. The book concludes by making connections between antisocial behavior and organizational climate--addressing the need for modification in the workplace to reduce antisocial behavior. Academics, students, and practitioners in the fields of management, industrial/organizational psychology, sociology, social psychology, legal studies and criminal justice will appreciate this collection of original essays written by well-respected experts.

This book explores how and why an event is a precursor to the emergence of a crisis and how a given crisis affects an organization and its stakeholders. Using existing systems theory blended with innovative use of wave, epidemiological, immunological and psycho-social theories, the author discusses ways to understand the effects of different types of crises while showing how to document and/or quantitatively measure those effects. The book offers new models illustrating how events trigger crises and how they subsequently morph into catastrophes and disasters. Using theories and tools tested in organizational settings to identify contributors to a traumatic event, this book makes a valuable contribution to organizational and crisis management literature.

Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice brings new voices and new approaches to under-developed areas in the philosophical literature on collectives and collective action. The essays in this volume introduce and explore a range of topics that fall under the more general concept of collectivity, including collective ontology, collective action, collective obligation, and collective responsibility. A number of the chapters link collectivity directly to significant issues of social justice. The volume addresses a variety of questions including the ontology and taxonomy of social groups and other collective entities, ethical frameworks for understanding the nature and extent of individual and collective moral obligations, and applications of these conceptual explorations to oppressive social practices like mass incarceration, climate change, and global poverty. The essays draw on a variety of approaches and disciplines, including feminist and continental approaches and work in legal theory and geography, as well as more traditional philosophical contributions.