The Ruffin Series of the Society for Business Ethics

Volume 1, 1998

New Approaches to Business Ethics

Deborah Vidaver-Cohen
Pages 123-148

Moral Imagination in Organizational Problem-Solving
An Institutional Perspective

This essay responds to Patricia Werhane's 1994 Ruffin Lecture address, "Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-making in Management," using institutional theory as an analytical framework to explore conditions that either inhibit or promote moral imagination in organizational problem-solving. Implications of the analysis for managing organizational change and for business ethics theory development are proposed.