Abstract
The maintenance and Engineering division of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is in a state of flux. It is restructuring its main operations in order to become more effective, efficient, flexible, client-oriented and quality-minded. As a result the work of thousands of employees is changing in a way that the values they attach to their work become obsolete. In order to investigate this transformation process from an ethical point of view a typology is presented. Using the locus of analysis — individual, organization and branch of industry/profession — and the nature of the ethical contribution-descriptive or prescriptive — six types of research are presented. The question then is: which type is specifically helpful when an organization is reorganizing its work processes? In the last section a few organizational problems are discussed that have a vast impact on the likelihood of managers and workers acting (not) ethically: the bottom line mentality, an orientation towards superiors, the Madison Avenue mentality, and the implementation gap. It is claimed that business ethics should put more effort into the investigation of the process it is reflecting on in order to be of any use to management.
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Hummels, H. Management and the use of business ethics: Towards an investigative ethics. Int J Value-Based Manage 7, 239–253 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00897786
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00897786