The Invisibility of Ethical Dilemmas - Q3

Participation Prerequisites

No formal prerequisites for participation. Students should be interested and prepared to engage closely with academic texts.

Course Content

Ethical dilemmas are common in organizations but often remain unrecognized until they become public scandals. This seminar approaches ethics from an organizational sociology perspective to illuminate how ethically ambivalent practices can develop and persist out of sight. Rather than portraying individuals as isolated “bad apples,” we analyze interactional and organizational dynamics that make ethical issues difficult to see, discuss, and address.

Throughout the course, we build a conceptual toolkit to examine

1. how interactional dynamics mask problematic practices (symbolic interactionism); 
2. how routines dull moral sensitivity and normalize deviance; 
3. how organizations decouple public commitments from operational practices;
4. how some illegitimate practices can be functional for organizations (functional deviance); 
5. and how field logics valorize specific forms of (symbolic) capital, potentially justifying ethically problematic behavior.

The course emphasizes independent reading and critical discussion. Students practice extracting arguments from research articles, relating theory to empirical cases, and debating the strengths and limits of different perspectives. In-class activities and guided discussions help students connect abstract concepts to organizational situations they may encounter.

Intended Learning Outcomes and Competencies

Upon successful completion, students will be able to:

• Explain and distinguish core perspectives used in the course (symbolic interactionism, normalization, decoupling, functional deviance, symbolic capital).
• Identify organizational conditions under which ethical issues remain invisible or become normalized.
• Apply theoretical frameworks to empirical cases and contemporary examples.
• Communicate analyses clearly, using appropriate conceptual vocabulary.

Form of Examination

Literature

This course works best for those who enjoy reading or who would like to develop their critical thinking through reading. For each session, there will be required readings that you are expected to prepare for class. Therefore, before our first session, please review one of the two articles below. Read the first couple of pages, i.e., the abstract, the introduction, and the theoretical background. Ask yourself whether the argument and study setup are understandable and convincing, whether you’d like to know more about the details, and whether you’d want to critically discuss the merits of the argument. 

• Laguecir, A., & Leca, B. (2019). Strategies of visibility in contemporary surveillance settings: Insights from misconduct concealment in financial markets. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 62, 39–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2018.10.002
• Schoeneborn, D., & Homberg, F. (2018). Goffman’s Return to Las Vegas: Studying Corruption as Social Interaction. Journal of Business Ethics, 151(1), 37–54. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3245-0