Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 10, 1999

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting

Who Owns the Knowledge Creation Processes of Learning Organizations?
A Pragmatic Ethical Exploration

This paper applies the theory of ethical pragmatism to argue that participants in the organizational process of knowledge creation have the right to negotiate a “stake” in the ownership of intellectual property. This extends the Donaldson & Preston (1995) argument that the normative core of stakeholder theory rests in a “pluralistic bundle” of socially constructed property rights.