Moral Imagination and Management Decision Making. - Review - book review

Administrative Science Quarterly, March, 2001 by Archie B. Carroll

Patricia H. Werhane. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 146 pages. $35.00.

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 adopted and adapted some of their ideas in an article aiming to identify some directions in which the business ethics field needs to move in transitioning from amoral to moral management (Carroll, 1987). In that context, moral imagination was but one of the moral reasoning skills managers needed to develop to become what I termed "moral managers." Werhane cites both these sources as she develops her ideas of what moral imagination means.

After acknowledging inspiration received from Johnson's (1993) Moral Imagination, Werhane goes on to define moral imagination as "the awareness of various dimensions of a particular context as well as its operative framework and narratives. Moral imagination entails the ability to understand that context or set of activities from a number of different perspectives, the actualizing of new possibilities that are not context-dependent, and the instigation of the process of evaluating those possibilities from a moral point of view" (p. 5). According to Werhane, many of the ethical mistakes managers make are due to a paucity of moral imagination. She comments on the "narrow perspective" (their mental models) that many managers have of their situations. They lack a sense of the variety of possibilities and consequences of their decisions and the ability to "imagine" a wide range of issues, consequences, and solutions. If these managers had a more developed sense of moral imagination, they would be better able to as sess their situations, to evaluate present and new possibilities, and to create decisions that are not parochially embedded in a restricted context or confined point of view. Without moral imagination, however, mistakes are reiterated.

Though deleterious corporate actions are frequently attributed to greed, Werhane argues that most corporate managers are not without sensibilities, nor are they primarily motivated by greed or self-interest. What is missing, she argues, is a highly developed moral imagination that permits them to be aware of, to evaluate, and to change the mental models that often constrict their behavior. Moral imagination is more than just an enhanced sensitivity to ethical issues in the business context. It embraces awareness of the mindsets that govern decision making, the development of reasoning skills to evaluate and moderate these mind-sets, and creativity to contemplate imaginable alternative solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas.

In addition to the superb development of the theory of moral imagination, an undeniable strength of this book lies in its strategic use of recent business examples. From Malden Mills to GE, from the Ford Pinto explosions to the Challenger explosion, from the Dow Corning breast implant controversy to the Salomon Brothers bond-trading episodes, Werhane weaves actual examples of classic business ethics controversies with her theory development and narratives. The book should serve as a rich resource for empirical investigators interested in the dynamics of management decision making in the realm of ethical issues in business.