Discourse and descriptive business ethics

Watson (2003: 168) claims that ‘although increasing academic attention is being paid to business ethics, the ways in which ethical consideration come into activities and decisions of organizational managers have been examined in a very limited way’. This article contributes by suggesting an interesting way to study moral managerial decisions is studying these decisions in their discursive context. This paper examiners why and how discourse analysis can aid descriptive business ethics. In this article, first it will be claimed that the internal dynamics within organizations render methodological individualism in business ethics hard to defend. Therefore, describing the moral side of a company by describing the moral part of managerial decision-making provides just a fragment of the whole picture. Somehow, the business context wherein managerial decisions are made also contains important moral information. Causalities that transcend individuals are proposed as a unit of analysis in empirical moral research, namely discourse. It is suggested that an interesting method for describing (moral) decisions of managers is looking at the way managers talk about their reality. After describing what is meant by discourse in this article, it is suggested how discourse analysis could be used in descriptive business ethics. Special attention will be paid to genealogical discourse analyses, and to the study of storylines and metaphors to reveal moral sides of managerial decision-making. Studying (moral) managerial decisions