Toward a Novel Theory of Rational Managerial Deliberation: Stakeholders, Ethical Values, and Corporate Governance

Abstract

How should managers deliberate, and how do we teach them to do so? How one evaluates managerial decision making will partly depend on what conception of the corporate function one endorses. Agency Theory and its accompanying shareholder conception of the corporate function has long dominated management. Voices in management learning have called for a change, but we argue that such change has been hampered by the lack of a theory of managerial deliberation, which is compatible with the alternative stakeholder conception of the corporate function. Here, we develop a novel theory of managerial deliberation: one that is suited to stakeholder theory. We argue that if genuine ethical deliberation is to become prevalent within management, then we must conceive of managerial deliberation as a creative, yet rational, learning process, while we assure that this process is adequately constrained to allow for managerial accountability. By taking inspiration from modern philosophical theories of deliberation, we provide such a theory of rational managerial deliberation.

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