Organizational wrongdoing in the real world: a response to Stephanie Collins’s Organizations as Wrongdoers

In Organizations as Wrongdoers ,1 Associate Professor Stephanie Collins puts forward a sophisticated, thought-provoking, and carefully argued ‘metaphysical and moral theory of wrongful organizations’.2 Collins’s book as a whole is committed to taking seriously how contemporary organizations actually operate in the real world and, for this amongst other things, it should be highly commended; not enough analytical political philosophy adopts such an orientation despite the enormous value in doing so. My main aim in this essay, then, is to demonstrate how even closer engagement with the real world – by engaging with, and mediated by, the disciplines of sociology and social theory in particular – would significantly strengthen Collins’s analysis. Organizations as Wrongdoers is divided into three parts. Part I sets out Collins’s central metaphysical argument: ‘members [and only members] are material parts of organizations’.3 Part II, building on the arguments in part I, is Collins’s account of organizational blameworthiness. Part III considers the implications of organizational blameworthiness for members. Sections 1 and 2 of this essay engage with some of Collins’s key arguments and moves in part I of her book, whereas the focus of Section 3 is part III.