The Moral Dimension of Organisational Social Evaluations

Abstract Scholars have long recognised the central role that stakeholders’ ethical beliefs and moral values play in their social evaluations of organisations. Nonetheless, a focus on beliefs and values obscures the equally important role played by moral concepts. Moral concepts shape discourse, affect stakeholders’ evaluative judgements, and determine the limits of what can be expressed. Stakeholders’ ability to make sense of their experiences and reflect them in social evaluations depends on both the availability of suitable moral concepts and the extent of inter-and intra-group agreement on their meanings. In this chapter, we seek to clarify and extend theory on the moral dimension of organisational social evaluations. We draw attention to the importance of what philosophers call ‘thick’ evaluative concepts—concepts that combine an evaluative and a descriptive component, like ‘diverse’, ‘sustainable’, ‘innovative’, or ‘woke’. Thick concepts pervade discourse about organisations, but both the descriptive and the evaluative dimensions of their meaning may change over time or vary between stakeholder groups. More powerful groups often have greater control over the formation and development of thick concepts than less powerful groups, a situation some philosophers have criticised as a form of ‘hermeneutical injustice’. Nonetheless, thick concepts also play an important role in enabling marginalised stakeholders to hold organisations to account.