Date / Heure
Date(s) - 12 octobre 2016
12 h 15 min - 14 h 00 min
Haridimos Tsoukas
Professor of Organisation Studies
University of Cyprus & University of Warwick
Date: Mercredi 12 octobre 2016
Heure: 12h15-14h
Lieu: HEC Montréal (3000 Chemin de la Côte Ste-Catherine)
Salle: Standard-Life (1er étage, section bleue)
Conférence donnée en anglais
Presentation in English
Apportez votre lunch, café et jus seront servis!
Résumé/Abstract
Strategy-as-practice (SAP) research has usefully built on earlier strategy process research by taking into account the social embeddedness of strategy making. While such an approach has generated rich insights, it has curiously left unexplored the moral dimension of practice. In this paper, we show how the potential of SAP research may be more fully realized if the moral dimension of practice is conceptualized through virtue ethics. After reviewing the main tenets of virtue ethics, focusing especially on, and further developing, MacIntyre’s work, we argue that prudence is the chief virtue for the strategic management of organizations. Moreover, by according virtues, understood as character traits or dispositions to act, a central place in the functioning of firms, virtue ethics enables a better understanding of practical choice: the choices agents make are modular, insofar as agents’ character traits (their virtues) act like modules implicitly preselecting which possibilities agents will explicitly deliberate. In particular, we apply insights from virtue ethics on the development of capabilities, and organizational skills and knowledge. We argue that organizational capabilities are morally suffused performances, and that production skills are more richly understood if their moral dimension is acknowledged.