Governing Ethics: Notes toward a model of ethical practice in decision-making by social enterprise boards of directors The role of specific governance features among boards such as democratic decision-making, participation,... [ view full abstract ]
Governing Ethics: Notes toward a model of ethical practice in decision-making by social enterprise boards of directors
The role of specific governance features among boards such as democratic decision-making, participation, and co- production, are all morally constitutive of the work of social enterprise. However, following Niebuhr, boards may be particularly vulnerable to the inability to consider interests other than their own in determining problems of conduct or preferring the advantages of others to their own. Groups, on this analysis, have less ability to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, and less ability to comprehend the needs of others. This leaves boards operating with unrestrained egoism.
Because the ethics of individuals is different in both scope and kind from the ethics of groups, individual ethical standards among directors cannot be transferred effectively to social enterprise organizations. However, the author observes that ethical evaluation of governing board members is rarely diligent, comprehensive, or effective.
This research is aimed at making progress toward a model for “ethical practice” in decision-making by social enterprise governing boards. Particular attention will be paid to how the assumptions about and projections of virtuous character among members of boards effects governing. The research will suggest ethical standards for boards to deploy as they frame, make, and evaluate their governing decisions in ethical terms.
Moving from individual virtue to a vigorous organizational ethic embodied in governing practices is promising of success and consistent with social enterprise aspirations. According to MacIntryre (1981), a practice is “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and good involved, are systematically extended.”
This research will suggest ethical “practices” for governing social enterprises. Following MacIntyre a practice is morally constituted by a community over time as the right or correct means to a morally desired end. In this sense, a practice implies that certain ends (goals) cannot be conceived except in terms of the means for achieving them.
MacIntyre argues that there are two kinds of goods attached to practices. One kind, external goods, are goods attached to the practice “by the accidents of social circumstance”. These can be achieved in any number of ways. Internal goods are the goods that can only be achieved by participating in the practice itself.
This paper will suggest ways for governing boards to frame, make, and evaluate their governing decisions in ethical terms by moving from individual virtue to a vigorous organizational ethic embodied in governing practices.
