Business ethics is an eclectic blend of intellectual traditions that seeks to examine the question of "what should I do in my businessrelationships." This paper attempts to widen this discussion by proposing an alternative view of the nature of ethical behaviour: ethical behaviour as a situated social accomplishment. From an ethnomethodological perspective, norms and rules have the status of interpretive aids whieh are used to negotiate an acceptable meaning for a situation; norms and rules are constituted by, and in part (...) constitute, the situations in which they occur. While most work in business ethics has tended to reify ethical practices, this paper stresses the contingent and situational nature of ethical decision making. In addition to presenting an ethnomethodological perspective, this paper discusses the methodological ramifications of this perspeetive through an examination of three ethnographic studies of situated rule usage. (shrink)

Business ethics is an eclectic blend of intellectual traditions that seeks to examine the question of "what should I do in my businessrelationships." This paper attempts to widen this discussion by proposing an alternative view of the nature of ethical behaviour: ethical behaviour as a situated social accomplishment. From an ethnomethodological perspective, norms and rules have the status of interpretive aids whieh are used to negotiate an acceptable meaning for a situation; norms and rules are constituted by, and in part (...) constitute, the situations in which they occur. While most work in business ethics has tended to reify ethical practices, this paper stresses the contingent and situational nature of ethical decision making. In addition to presenting an ethnomethodological perspective, this paper discusses the methodological ramifications of this perspeetive through an examination of three ethnographic studies of situated rule usage. (shrink)

Nurses involved in research are concerned with methodological issues. This paper explores the Cartesian debate that has polarized the discourse on nursing research methodology. It is argued that methodologies exclusively based on objectivism, one pole of the Cartesian debate, or subjectivism, the other, do not provide nurses with adequate research foundations to understand the complexity of the lifeworld of nursing practice. This paper provides nurse researchers with an alternative methodological perspective, Gadamerian hermeneutics, which is in harmony with the clinical world (...) of nursing practice. (shrink)