Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Organization Studies and Ethics literatures have long maintained a separate but synergistic relationship to each other, at the crossroads of the social and the ethical (Islam & Greenwood, 2021; Rhodes, 2023). Ethical inquiry often plays out within the arena of organizations, relying on their behavioural and structural configurations as the playing field that makes moral action possible. Among a myriad of organizational processes, ethical stakes are involved in forms for organizing collective action (Kornberger et al., 2025), shaping structures for governance (Veldman et al, 2023), shaping organizational practices (Clegg et al., 2007) or providing justifications for managerial action (Kurdoglu & Islam, 2024). At the same time, organizations are sites where rules are made, enacted, contested, and sometimes gamed. Here, power determines who sets the rules, who enforces them, what counts as score and who gets to play. Theories of organizing depend upon the tacit rulebooks of coordination, norm-creation, and value negotiation that give ethical meaning to collective play, including when actions are considered in terms of ethical norms or are relegated to legal or other functional departments (Ben Khaled & Gond, 2023). As organizations confront growing questions about their purpose and contribution to the good life, the time seems ripe to revisit the rules of engagement between ethics and organizing — to study not only how organizations play in (un)ethical ways, but also how ethics itself becomes organized as a game of norms, strategies, and moral learning (Kornberger and Leixnering, 2025).

Building on the EGOS 2027 theme, we invite contributions that interrogate the politics of organizational ethics as play. What happens when “doing the right thing” becomes a strategic move, a moral performance, or a gamified metric? How do ethical codes, compliance systems, or sustainability frameworks both discipline and enable moral imagination and learning? When do games of ethics devolve into moralization, hypocrisy, or cynical play? And what might a more playful ethics look like—one that values creativity, ambiguity, and experimentation without collapsing into moral relativism?

We invite scholars to investigate literatures in organization studies and various strands of ethics, including philosophical, anthropological and sociological accounts. From the perspective of ethics, most work has drawn either on the analytical normative perspectives drawn from philosophy, or the behavioural-empirical aspects of ethical practice drawn from behavioural sciences (Seele, 2018). Much rarer are examinations of the “social” of ethics (Islam & Greenwood, 2021; Shadnam, Bykov & Prasad, 2021), that is, the relational normative and organizational process that render ethical practice possible and intuitive, and through which normative orders are built. Pulled between universalistic ethical systems abstracted from social context, and individualistic cognitive-behavioural perspective putting context on a secondary plane (Islam, 2020), ethics has generated challenging normative (and sometimes moralizing) demands for individuals to do the right thing, while empirically cataloguing their ongoing failures to do so. What is missing are mid-level ideas about how to coordinate and organize ethically, design moral rules that support responsible action within materially grounded organizational realities.

Taken from the perspective of organization studies, the lack of engagement with ethics leads to a blind spot regarding the moral reasons and concerns that underpin why and how people organize, and for what ends. Black-boxed as “normative” or “legitimating” work, ethics is described in its “outer” form as a force that influences action, without considering what makes such legitimations or norms compelling from within the lived experiences of actors. Studying ethics in terms of discourses, beliefs or routines, organization theory has described the effects of ethics as instrumental parts of social systems but has focused less on ethical deliberation as part of the reasoning of collectives. To understand organizations ethically is to understand how they form the background against which organizational action becomes meaningful and valued, and that normative and legitimacy processes are not simply pressures that cause action, but reasons that animate action.

Manifesting at a meso-level, in this proposed stream we want to progress a discussion that interrogates how actors at the interface of organization studies and ethics analyze and make sense of moral rules, including the breaking of rules that seem immoral. Some of the themes that we seek to explore include:

• Ethics of governance, regulations, and rules and their impact on organizational action (such as ESG)  

• Codes of conduct and other organizational instruments to ensure ethical behavior

• Certifications, accreditations, and other forms of standardization that are part and parcel of the institutionalized efforts to encourage ethical behavior (such as for instance B Corp certificates)  

• At the level of politics and ideology, interrogating the role of organizations in ongoing polarization across society

• Rule breaking and whistleblowing as an ethical stance

• Algorithmic rules (e.g., AI) and the ethics of hacking, code-breaking, and other forms of resistance 

• Rules and methods of scientific inquiry into organization ethics, their powers and (unintended) consequences for scholarship
   

• Ben Khaled, W., & Gond, J.-P. (2020). How do external regulations shape the design of ethical tools in organisations? An open polity and sociology of compliance perspective. Human Relations, 73(5), 653–681.
• Clegg, S., Kornberger, M., & Rhodes, C. (2007). Business ethics as practice. British Journal of Management, 18(2), 107–122.
• Islam, G. (2020). Psychology and business ethics: A multi-level research agenda. Journal of Business Ethics, 165(1), 1–13.
• Islam, G., & Greenwood, M. (2021). Reconnecting to the social in business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 170, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04775-7
• Kornberger, M., & Leixnering, S. (2025). Moral Learning in Organizations: An Integrative Framework for Organizational Ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 201(2), 253-264.
• Kornberger, M., Meyer, R. E., Martí, I., Frey-Heger, C., Cornelissen, J., & Gatzweiler, M. (2025). Collective action in crisis? Introduction to the special issue. Organization Studies, 46(7), 919–939.
• Kurdoglu, R. S., & Islam, G. (2024). Eristic legitimation of controversial managerial decisions. Journal of Management Studies, 61(7), 3260–3294.
• Rhodes, C. (2023). The ethics of organizational ethics. Organization Studies, 44(3), 497–514.
• Seele, P. (2018). What makes a business ethicist? A reflection on the transition from applied philosophy to critical thinking. Journal of Business Ethics, 150(3), 647–656.
• Shadnam, M., Bykov, A., & Prasad, A. (2021). Opening constructive dialogues between business ethics research and the sociology of morality: Introduction to the thematic symposium. Journal of Business Ethics, 170, 201–211.
• Veldman, J., Jain, T., & Hauser, C. (2023). Virtual special issue on corporate governance and ethics: What’s next? Journal of Business Ethics, 183(2), 329–331.