The Institutional Work of Ethics: How Business Ethics Consultants Build Ethical Infrastructure

ABSTRACT As organisations increasingly turn to external experts for moral guidance, critics warn that this trend risks “outsourcing” business ethics. Evaluating this concern, however, requires a clearer understanding of what those experts actually do. Drawing on 17 semi‐structured interviews with business ethics consultants, this study investigates how they operationalise their roles under conditions of tension. We synthesise the structural lens of Ethical Infrastructure with the agentic perspective of Institutional Work to analyse how consultants engage with ethical systems. We identify three interconnected roles that consultants perform to embed business ethics: the Moral Framework Architect, who designs regulative structures and workflows; the Organisational Epistemic Agent, who facilitates cognitive sensemaking and internal capacity building; and the Pragmatic Political Actor, who navigates factional resistance and secures legitimacy. This study contributes to the business ethics literature by providing an updated understanding of the roles and practices performed by ethics consultants. It further bridges the static, structural orientation of Ethical Infrastructure with the dynamic, practice‐based perspective of Institutional Work. Our findings suggest that effective ethics consulting does not simply deliver answers to ethical challenges but involves a complex bundle of Institutional Work.