Ethical Vitality: Identity, Responsibility, and Change in an Australian Hospital

Abstract

This article reports and reflects on a narrative ethnographic account of organizational change in a large public hospital in Australia. We describe how the conduct and identity positions of people in the hospital were related to three prevalent discourses; one of authoritarian professionalism, one of collaboration and open disclosure, and one of inspection and retribution. We suggest that the presence of multiple and competing organizational discourses on which to base decisions, highlighted the need for managers to take a personal stake in deciding their own conduct. We propose the notion of ethical vitality as a means of registering the ways that ethical responsibility can only come alive in organizations when people take, and are in a position to take, a reflexive responsibility for their conduct. On this basis, we suggest that the presence of multiple ethical norms and rules in organizations, on a plural model, might actually make people in organizations more rather than less ethically responsible

Keywords:

• ethics
• responsibility
• identity
• organizational change
• discourse

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Rick Iedema for knowledgeable and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

3. We are using the term discourse, following Foucault,[4] as the taken for granted ways that people are collectively able to make sense of experience. Discourse categorizes experience by dividing it into meaningful units. Such divisions, however, are “always themselves reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, institutionalized types; they, in turn are facts of discourse … [that] … have complex relations with each other, but they are not intrinsic, autochthonous, and universally recognizable characteristics.”[5] Discourses provide the means with which reality, including ethical reality, can be understood—each is “a framework and a logic of reasoning that, through its penetration of social practice, systematically forms its objects.”[6] It is such frameworks that become instantiated in written and spoken, verbal and non-verbally communicated texts constitutive of organizational social realities.[7,8] Discourses are central to the social construction of reality and the negotiation of meaning in local contexts—they provide the means through which experience might be ordered and sense made.[9,10] Further, discourse is a powerful way through which social reality is shaped—an enactment of power that can be constraining as well as enabling.[11]

5. Ibid., p. 4.

18. Parker, op. cit., 289.

19. Letiche, H. op. cit. p5.

20. Roberts, J. op. cit. 5.

25. Parker, op. cit. 5.

35. Keenoy et al., op. cit. 4.

41. Ibid., 8.

43. Iedema et al., op. cit.

48. Iedema et al., op. cit.

49. Schatzki, op. cit., 9.

52. Weick, op. cit.

59. Derrida, 1992, op. cit., 14.

61. Clegg et al., op. cit., 5.

66. Schatzki, op. cit., 9.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid.

74. Grant et al., op. cit.