The constitutive role of moral judgments in organizational knowledge

Managerial judgments of worth cut across different specific disciplinary or task competence and emerge as key moral components of both organizational knowledge and organizational learning. At the same time, managerial decisions about the worth or value (of organizational objects, people, behavior) are often criticized on the base of managers lacking the specific technical knowledge needed to appreciate the worth in question. To render things more complex, some situations are particularly exposed to criticism, since decision makers lack some or all the technical knowledge of the people they evaluate, judge, or manage, for instance because of novelty, inherent complexity, or both. One such example is when managers hire employees based on incomplete, biased or morally questionable data (De Keere, 2023; Dencik & Stevens, 2023), where the relation between the evaluation criteria and a specific appropriate knowledge is unclear. Yet rarely are such judgments and decisions based on one type of knowledge only, and hardly reducible to just technical, objective assessments and unique, consensual indicators. We draw on the economies of worth framework (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) to build insights on the constitutive role of moral judgments in organizational knowledge. Our focal context is represented by human resource management (HRM) practices observed in an ethnography of a controversial culture project in a medium sized Swiss city. We provide a process-sensitive practice-based account of how the morality of specific practices was justified, criticized, challenged and changed over time.