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What Is a “Fair” Price? Ethics as Sensemaking

Author

Listed:
  • Juliane Reinecke

    (Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom)

  • Shaz Ansari

    (Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1AG, United Kingdom)

Abstract

Whereas the deliberative democracy approach to ethics seeks to bridge universalist reason and contextual judgment to explain the emergence of intersubjective agreements, it remains unclear how these two are reconciled in practice. We argue that a sensemaking approach is useful for examining how ethical truces emerge in equivocal situations. To understand how actors navigate through ethical complexity, we conducted an ethnographic inquiry into the multistakeholder practices of setting Fairtrade Minimum Prices. We offer three contributions. First, we develop a process model of ethics as sensemaking that explains how actors come to collectively agree on what is ethical in complex situations, even if no complete consensus arises. Second, our findings suggest that moral intuition and affect also motivate ethical judgment alongside moral reasoning. Third, an ethical sensemaking perspective explains some of the pitfalls actors confront in coping with ethical complexities in practice and how they attend to the challenges arising from stark inequalities in extreme contexts.

Suggested Citation

  • Juliane Reinecke & Shaz Ansari, 2015. "What Is a “Fair” Price? Ethics as Sensemaking," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 26(3), pages 867-888, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:26:y:2015:i:3:p:867-888
    DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2015.0968
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Delphine Pouchain & Jérôme Ballet, 2018. "Fair Trade and the Fetishization of Levinasian Ethics," Post-Print hal-02390913, HAL.
    2. Juliane Reinecke & Jimmy Donaghey, 2021. "Political CSR at the Coalface – The Roles and Contradictions of Multinational Corporations in Developing Workplace Dialogue," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 58(2), pages 457-486, March.
    3. Shadnam, Masoud, 2020. "Choosing whom to be: Theorizing the scene of moral reflexivity," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 12-23.
    4. Madeleine Rauch & Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari, 2022. "From ‘Publish or Perish’ to Societal Impact: Organizational Repurposing Towards Responsible Innovation through Creating a Medical Platform," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(1), pages 61-91, January.

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