2026/01/01 by Mirjam Werner, Joep Cornelissen, Krijn Turkenburg · 1 voice
Decision Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Ethics in Business and Education #Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting #Management and Organizational Studies
paper · doi:10.1177/26317877261423230
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/04/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
What makes some organizations stay the course with their social and environmental commitments while others, in the face of political adversity and shifting stakeholder views, do not? In this paper, we argue that the answer to this question lies in capturing the differences in character between organizations and how their character shapes what organizations consider their moral obligations to be. Building on moral philosophy, we expand on the limited writings on organizational character in the literatures on CSR, business ethics and organizational theory. We use our expanded conceptualization to develop a theoretical typology of organizational characters and elaborate a process model that explains when and how an organization may shift in its moral reasoning and develop a different kind of character for itself. Theorizing organizations as agents with a moral character sheds light on the emergence of organizational purpose and offers implications for ongoing research on purpose, CSR, and ethics within organizational theory, research, and practice.