Bridging postmodern ethics and practice theory: A framework to study ethics as practice

Dissatisfaction with the dominant universalist, rationalist, and mechanistic modes of conceptualizing ethical decision-making in management and organization studies (MOS) has led to alternative approaches. One promising alternative takes as its point of concern the question of what people actually do when they grapple with ethics in practice. Our contention in this paper is that the latent potential of this alternative line of inquiry has not been adequately realized because scholars have largely engaged with practice in the ordinary sense of doing, neglecting the deeper ontological implications of locating ethics in practice. We present a framework to show how ethical concerns from this alternative perspective, which so far have been largely inspired by postmodernist philosophical ideas, might be reformulated from a practice-based ontological perspective. We believe that this reorientation, guided by our framework, would be fruitful in taking us closer to practice-based ethical insights.