This is an expanded version of an interview with Nigel Laurie, based on his contribution to the 11th Annual Australasian Business Ethics Network (ABEN) Conference, held on 8 December 2021. The conference theme Calculative silences and the agency of business ethics scholars is the focus of this interview. After studying philosophy at Glasgow and Guelph in Canada and a career in IBM, Nigel Laurie established his own management consultancy and went on to found the Philosophy of Management journal in 2001. (...) He edited it for its first 8 years and led the early international Philosophy of Management conferences at St Anne’s College, Oxford. In this interview Nigel reflects on his experiences as a consultant in government, the public, private and third sectors across the world and as a visiting academic and offers insights on leadership, agency, analogies, silences and voices for ethics education and practice. (shrink)

How can organisations ‘manage for integrity’?1 Two differing approaches have been called the compliance strategy and the integrity strategy. While the first seeks to instil compliance with externally imposed standards, the integrity strategy seeks to teach ethical decision-making and values as well, so that ‘ethical thinking and awareness…[are]…part of every manager’s mental equipment’. In this paper the Dutch consultant philosopher Hans Bolten reports on how Socratic dialogue has helped managers develop ethical capacities and responsibility. Drawing on research with dialogue members (...) he concludes that organisations that care about ethics cannot rely on abstract moral codes and rules. He argues that they need Socratic dialogue as an instrument if their managers are to shape moral guidelines they both agree upon and can apply in practice. And he shows how dialogue can foster in managers the readiness to give an account of their actions, a readiness implicit in the idea of moral action itself. Thus Socratic dialogue can help create a culture in which morally accountable action is the rule, not the exception, and in which the responsibility to give an account of one’s actions has its rightful place.2. (shrink)

This paper gives a concise overview of the history and meaning of Socratic Dialogue and how it has been developed and used in modern times. The process of Socratic dialogue is seen as an environment for enhancing learning and in enabling the emergence of new meaning to be articulated in language, thereby making the understanding more accessible to the group. The authors also share their perspective as participants in Socratic dialogues. It is suggested that Socratic dialogue enables open communication and (...) empathic listening, development of shared meaning, enhanced insight and increased moral accountability. (shrink)

Plato's depiction of Socrates' interrogations in his early dialogues provides an enduring example of the importance of asking questions as an educative method. This article considers the central educational elements of Socratic dialogue and the ways in which these were developed in the 20th century, particularly in ‘The Socratic Method' practised by Leonard Nelson and Gustav Heckmann.The article contends that Socratic principles should be embedded within standard undergraduate modules and programmes in the Humanities. It views the questions a tutor asks (...) in the seminar room as the principal means for establishing this Socratic agenda. The article discusses appropriate strategies for formulating questions within seminars, and concludes by proposing that the aim of such questioning should be more than just the development of students' knowledge of a given subject area and a facility with subject-specific and transferable skills. (shrink)

This article is a first person account of a first time Socratic Dialogue experience from a Sociospacial Reciprocity perspective. During the process, the writer was nominated as The Example for the Socratic Dialogue Question, ‘What is Wellbeing?’. The account is based both on the writer’s first-hand experience of the process, and the theoretical Socratic Dialogue process as discussed previously in this publication under the title, ‘Reflections on Socratic Dialogue I: the theoretical background in a modern context’ (to which the writer (...) also contributes). All identities have been anonymised for ethical reasons. (shrink)

In view of the current fragmentation in management and organisation studies, we argue that there is a need to elaborate techniques that help reconcile contradictory and superficially incommensurable standpoints. For this purpose, we draw on ‘pre-modern’ Aristotelian epistemological and methodological sources, particularly the idea of ‘saving the appearances’ (SA), not previously introduced into organisation studies. Using SA as our starting point, we outline a methodology that helps to develop reasonable and acceptable intermediary positions in contemporary debates between ‘modernism’ and ‘post-modernism’. (...) We illustrate the functioning of SA in the case of three issues in the philosophy of science where ‘modernist’ and ‘post-modernist’ scholars seem to have incommensurable standpoints: the nature of scientific knowledge; the conception of causality; and the epistemology of practice. We show in particular how to use the logics of ‘qualification’, ‘new conception’, and ‘complementary combination’ to form the basis for mediating positions which could then be accepted by less extreme proponents of both ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’. (shrink)