Bring your non-self to work?: the interaction between self-decentralization and moral reasoning

Spirituality continues to exert a strong influence in people’s lives both in work and beyond. However, given that spirituality is often non-formalized and personal, we continue to know little about how moral reasoning is strategized. In this paper, we examine how Buddhist leader-practitioners interp...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Vu, Mai Chi (Author) ; Burton, Nicholas (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2022
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2022, Volume: 181, Issue: 2, Pages: 427-449
Further subjects:B Buddhism
B Aufsatz in Zeitschrift
B Non-self
B Emptiness
B Moral Reasoning
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Summary:Spirituality continues to exert a strong influence in people’s lives both in work and beyond. However, given that spirituality is often non-formalized and personal, we continue to know little about how moral reasoning is strategized. In this paper, we examine how Buddhist leader-practitioners interpret and operationalize a process of self-decentralization based upon Buddhist emptiness theory as a form of moral reasoning. We find that Buddhist leader-practitioners share a common understanding of a self-decentralized identity and operationalize self-decentralization through two practices in Buddhist philosophy - skillful means and the middle way - to foreground social outcomes. However, we also find that practitioners face tensions and challenges in moral reasoning relates to agency - the ‘re-centering’ of the self as an enlightened self and the use of karmic reasoning to justify (un)ethical behavior - and contextual constraints that lead to feelings of vulnerability and exclusion. We present a model that elaborates these processes and invite further research that examines novel approaches and dynamic interpretations of the self in moral reasoning.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-021-04975-1