Harm Reduction, Solidarity, and Social Mobility as Target Functions: A Rortian Approach to Stakeholder Theory

Instrumental Stakeholder Theory has begun to suffer from what might be termed “mission drift.” Despite its initial success in creating a foothold for ethics in managerial decision-making, the efficiency arguments which now dominate this research stream have become counterproductive to the original g...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of business ethics 2023-09, Vol.186 (3), p.479-492
Main Authors: Weitzner, David, Deutsch, Yuval
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business and Management
Business Ethics
Capitalism
Decision making
Education
Ethics
Harm reduction
Irony
Management
Original Paper
Philosophy
Pragmatism
Quality of Life Research
Social cohesion
Social mobility
Stakeholders
Theory
Upward mobility
Vocabulary
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Summary:Instrumental Stakeholder Theory has begun to suffer from what might be termed “mission drift.” Despite its initial success in creating a foothold for ethics in managerial decision-making, the efficiency arguments which now dominate this research stream have become counterproductive to the original goal of connecting ethics and capitalism. We argue in this paper that the way forward is by re-centering contingency, conversation, and inefficiency in stakeholder theory. To start this process, there needs to be a reckoning of some unintended impacts of the success of the instrumental stream of stakeholder research. For a contrasting approach, we draw on Richard Rorty’s pragmatism and its foundation of ethical “irony,” a state of continuous doubts about the utility of one’s moral vocabulary. We offer a Rortian approach to stakeholder theory, unearthing the possibility for new corporate target functions in the goals of harm reduction, solidarity, and social mobility, the foundational building blocks of an ironist ethical perspective.
ISSN:0167-4544
1573-0697
DOI:10.1007/s10551-022-05248-1