Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article has two aims. First, to offer a critical review of the literatures on two wellknown single-component solutions to the problem of a gap between moral knowledge and moral action: moral identity and moral emotions. Second, to take seriously the rising interest in Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics and character development within the social sciences: approaches that seem to assume that the development of phronesis (practical wisdom) bridges the gap in question. Since phronesis is a multicomponent construct, the latter part of this article offers an overview of what those different components would be, as a necessary precursor to operationalising them if the phronesis hypothesis were to be subjected to empirical scrutiny. The idea of a neo-Aristotelian multicomponent solution to the “gappiness problem” invites comparisons with another multicomponent candidate, the neo-Kohlbergian four-component model, with which it shares at least surface similarities. Some space is thus devoted to the proposed theoretical uniqueness of a phronesis-based multicomponent model vis-à-vis the neo-Kohlbergian one. Our main conclusion is that – weaknesses in its developmental psychological grounding notwithstanding – operationalising the phronesis model for the purposes of instrument design and empirical inquiry would be a feasible and potentially productive enterprise.

Aristotle's philosophical insights into ethics, wisdom and practice have drawn the attention of scholars. In the current professional context where ethics are often compromised, this debate assumes a necessary urgency. This subject is highly relevant to business schools, given the general neglect of this quality in executive management development. Our research involved an analysis of contemporary literature on phronesis in the management scholarship, practice and teaching domains. Our definition of phronesis identifies themes and paradoxes distilled from this literature. Stories are by nature multi-layered and paradoxical, embracing ambiguity and contradiction, so we incorporate narrative as essential to our enquiry. While it appears to be easily grasped, phronesis is complex, nuanced and paradoxical, seen as an unorganised set of characteristics in the management scholarship domain. We argue that the neglect of phronesis in modernity flows from the challenging nature of developing it, itself the consequence of its indistinctness. It calls for Einstein's words \"I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity\". This article argues that developing this virtue as a form of practical wisdom, should be an integral part of executive management development if we are to cultivate morally responsible leadership. A typology of managerial phronesis will encourage contextually appropriate leadership excellence based on the virtue-attributes of managers-as-scholars. The typology we propose is based on a Grounded Theory synthesis of relevant literature. We adopt a phenomenological stance. Through incorporating Grounded Theory second order themes, we offer a grainier understanding of the qualities of managerial phronesis.

The ancient virtue of practical wisdom has lately been enjoying a remarkable renaissance in management literature. The purpose of this article is to add clarity and bring synergy to the interdisciplinary debate. In a review of the wide-ranging field of the existing literature from a philosophical, theological, psychological, and managerial perspective, we show that, although different in terms of approach, methodologies, and justification, the distinct traditions of research on practical wisdom can indeed complement one another. We suggest a conciliatory conception of the various features of practical wisdom in management. This we take as a point of departure for a discussion of the significant implications of the subject for the theory and practice of management and for the direction of further research in the field.

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of various discourses relevant to developing a construct of collective phronesis, from a (neo)-Aristotelian perspective, with implications for professional practice in general and business practice and business ethics education in particular. Despite the proliferation of interest in practical wisdom within business ethics and more general areas of both psychology and philosophy, the focus has remained mostly on the construct at the level of individual decision-making, as in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. However, he also made intriguing remarks about phronesis at the collective level in his Politics: remarks that have mostly eluded elaboration. The aim of this article is practical and revisionary, rather than exegetical and deferential, with respect to Aristotle. Nevertheless, just as most of the literature on individual phronesis draws on Aristotle’s exposition in the Nicomachean Ethics, the obvious first port of call for an analysis of collective phronesis is to explore the resources handed down to us by Aristotle himself. The lion’s share of this article is, therefore, devoted to making sense of Aristotle’s somewhat unsystematic remarks and the lessons we can draw from them about collective managerial phronesis and business ethics education.

The renewed engagement with Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom in management and organization studies is reflective of the wider turn towards practice sweeping across many disciplines. In this sense, it constitutes a welcome move away from the traditional rationalist, abstract, and mechanistic modes of approaching ethical decision-making. Within the current engagement, practical wisdom is generally conceptualized, interpreted or read as a form of deliberation or deliberative judgement that is also cognizant of context, situatedness, particularity, lived experience, and so on. We argue that while this way of conceptualizing practical wisdom moves closer to practice in accounting for the concrete and particular reality within which individuals enact ethics, it does not adequately account for practice in the ontological and relational sense posited in practice theories. Practical wisdom conceptualized on the deliberative dimension still retains a higher emphasis on distinct entities (individuals/institutions), reflexive agency, conscious mental states, goal-directed action, and intentionality. In other words, it puts a higher stress on individual wisdom, as opposed to practice or the relational interaction of the individual and social inhering in practice. We offer an alternative conceptualization of practical wisdom based on the dispositional mode of being in the world which is rarely deliberate, intentional, or reflective. Our conceptualization integrates Aristotle’s original ethical framework, which is already embedded in a practice-based ontology, with insights from practice theories to show how practical wisdom is intuitively channelled in the dispositional mode in a given social configuration of virtues/ends.

During the last decade there has been burgeoning research concerning the ways in which we should think of and apply the concept of responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Despite this conceptual richness, there is still a lack of consensus regarding what Responsible AI entails on both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethical dimension of responsibility in Responsible AI with Aristotelian virtue ethics, where notions of context and dianoetic virtues play a grounding role for the concept of moral responsibility. The paper starts by highlighting the important difficulties in assigning responsibility to either technologies themselves or to their developers. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to moral responsibility are then contrasted, as we explore how they could inform debates about Responsible AI. We highlight the limits of the former ethical approaches and build the case for classical Aristotelian virtue ethics. We show that two building blocks of Aristotle’s ethics, dianoetic virtues and the context of actions, although largely ignored in the literature, can shed light on how we could think of moral responsibility for both AI and humans. We end by exploring the practical implications of this particular understanding of moral responsibility along the triadic dimensions of ethics by design, ethics in design and ethics for designers.

This article is about a virtue ethical approach to the professional ethics of teaching, centred around the ideal of phronesis (practical wisdom) in an Aristotelian sense. It is grounded empirically in extensive research conducted at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues into teachers and other UK professionals, and it is grounded theoretically in recent efforts to revive an Aristotelian concept of phronesis as excellence in ethical decision-making. The article argues for the need for a virtue-based approach to professional practice, based on time-honoured Aristotelian assumptions and culminating in a conceptually viable construct of phronesis as a psycho-moral integrator and adjudicator. After setting some of the historical background in Sect.  1 , Sect. 2 charts the most relevant empirical findings. Section  3 introduces a call for phronesis as a guide to virtue-based professional ethics: its role, nature, and methods of instruction. Section  4 adds some caveats and concerns about if and how phronesis can be cultivated as part of teacher training. Finally, Sect.  5 offers some concluding remarks about the novelty and radicality of the approach on offer in this article.

Adopting a process perspective on entrepreneurship, captured by the notion of \"entrepreneuring,\" the emerging practice-theory approach in the social sciences is proposed as an appropriate frame of reference. Entrepreneuring as a practice is ontologically/epistemologically qualified by presenting phronesis as the relevant guiding intellectual virtue in the knowledge-creating process. A constructionist view invites different modes of coping with an ambiguous environment, including the use of analogizing and bricolage when enacting entrepreneuring by way of improvisation and personal networking. The notion of \"organizing context\" is introduced to grasp how collective support for entrepreneuring may be mobilized. Enactive research as an interactive way for doing field research is outlined and illustrated in order to complete the paradigmatic and theoretical arguments for a practice-theory approach to entrepreneuring with an adequate methodology.

How do corporations attempt to regulate the ways middle managers draw on discourses centred on 'effectiveness' and 'ethics' in their identity work, and how do these individuals respond? We analyse the discursive struggle over what it meant to be a competent manager at Disneyland, where middle managers were encouraged to construe their selves in ways that emphasized 'being effective' over 'being ethical', and managers responded with identity work that positioned them as searching for the practical wisdom (phronesis) to make decisions that were both effective and moral. The theoretical contribution we make is twofold. First, we analyse processes of identity regulation and identity work at Disneyland, highlighting divergences between corporate injunctions and middle managers' appropriations of them, regarding what it meant to be a practically wise manager. Second, we discuss a phronetic identity narrative template, contestable both by organizations and managers, in which people are positioned as questing for the practical wisdom to make decisions that are both moral and effective, and phronesis as an image by which scholars may analyse identities and identity work. This leads us to a more nuanced understanding of middle manager identities and the scope they have to constitute their selves as moral agents.