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Organization Studies
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Introduction to the Special Issue. In Search of Organizational Virtue: Moral Agency in Organizations

Richard P. Nielsen

Boston College, USA and ALBA, Greece, richard.nielsen{at}bc.edu

This editorial provides an introduction to the themes of this ‘Special Issue on Organizational Virtue and Moral Agency in Organizations’. MacIntyre, in After Virtue (1981), critically observed that, under the severe pressures of narrowly focused, system-driven, utilitarian financial and bureaucratic calculation, it can be very difficult both for organizations and individuals in their organizational lives to realize and express moral agency and virtue. The articles contained here trace the development of MacIntyre’s analysis of this possibility and consider how organizational pressures against moral agency can be an important problem. In addition, the special issue considers how both philosophical and social-behavioral science approaches reveal similar problems and diagnoses. Further, there is discussion of how the possibilities of and constraints on virtue vary and are more and less severe in different types of organizational systems and situations. The special issue also considers what degrees of freedom, and even methods, organizational members may have available to them in different types of constrained organizational circumstances.

Key Words: ethics • virtue • agency • organizations • business

Organization Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, 317-321 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0170840606062424
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