This is the editorial for Vol 19 Issue 2 of Philosophy of Management. A reflection is made on COVID-19 measures and a call for papers is made to explore the crisis through philosophical inquiry on 1) disaster management and 2) existentialist views of work. Guidance is given based on papers published previously in the journal, and on Camus’ La Peste / The Plague.

This article will discuss the concepts of Cradle to Cradle and Circular Economy in relation to sustainable production involving philosophical debates on economic growth, and the risk of subversion of managerial practice to business as usual. The case study is based on the assignments submitted by Masters students as part of a course related to sustainable production and consumption at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Some of the supposedly best practice cases placed on the website of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (...) or those awarded Cradle to Cradle certificate were evaluated by students as green-washing. Larger implications of circular production for business and ecological management are discussed. (shrink)

New technologies not only contribute greatly to society and the economy; they also involve fundamental societal shifts, challenging our values and ideas about ourselves and the world. With a view to aligning technological change and innovation with ethical values, the concept of responsible innovation advocates the inclusion of a variety of stakeholders, in particular from society. In shifting moral responsibility towards the producers of innovations, responsible innovation rejects the standard normative economic view that the ethical evaluation of innovations is a (...) matter of individual consumers’ market-based choices. However, in this article we argue that responsible innovation should not abandon all normative consideration of the individual outright, to which end we present an alternative normative economic approach based on preference learning. We show how this approach can provide an enhanced understanding of responsible innovation by clarifying the redistribution of moral responsibility and casting individuals in the normative role of co-innovators, rather than mere consumers. We argue that responsible innovation should enable individuals to form preferences and evaluate innovations, so as to align innovation with ethical demands. Finally, we show how our proposed approach can be put into practice in so-called laboratories in real-world contexts, using methods from the field of design. In short, drawing on normative economics, this article aims to establish a new understanding of responsible innovation that is conceptually sound and can form the basis for novel innovation practices. (shrink)

While much has been written on phronesis, there is a dearth of empirical work on the how the concept can be developed and implemented in practice, particularly in an educational setting. To address this problem, characteristics of phronesis were identified through a review of current literature and an examination of related themes from a special issue of the Philosophy of Management Journal on the philosophy of innovation. The implementation of the concept was investigated using an illustrative study of ongoing work (...) aimed at embedding phronesis in an innovation educational module. The study will contribute to the nascent debate by providing evidence of embedding Aristotle’s phronesis in the curriculum of future managers, in this case Engineering and Business students, working in cross-functional teams. A schema is proposed, based on concepts distilled from the literature and the illustrative study, to examine whether an educational project cultivates phronesis among the students. (shrink)

This paper draws on the emerging field of innovation ethics to complement the more established field of responsible innovation by focusing on key ethical issues raised by technological innovations. One key limitation of influential frameworks of RI is that they tend to neglect some key ethical issues raised by innovation, as well as major normative dimensions of the notion of responsibility. We explain how IE could enrich RI by stressing the more important role that ethical analysis should play in RI. (...) We focus on two transversal issues of IE: the issue of redrawing conceptual boundaries, especially the topic of the artificialization of the world, and the issue of responsibility, especially the notion of total responsibility. We address these two issues from the thematic perspective of IE, thereby generating lessons learnt for RI. These two examples are taken as illustrations and blueprint of the dialogue that should take place between the two fields. (shrink)

As a relational concept, responsible innovation can be made more tangible by asking innovation of what and responsibility of whom for what? Arranging the scattered field of responsible innovation comprehensively, starting from an anthropological point of view, into five fields of tension and five categories of spearheads, may be theoretically and practically helpful while offering suggestions for both research and management.