Seminar – Enacting Fairness in Organisations: Handling Morally Puzzling Requests for Exceptional Funding in the English Health System

Dr Emmanouil Gkeredakis, Warwick Business School

This paper explores how fairness is enacted in organisations. While early organisational researchers and moral psychologists approached fairness as a consciously deliberated ethical issue, recent behavioural and sensemaking studies highlight the intuitive and emotional foundations of fairness. Fairness is also increasingly understood as situationally malleable. Whether and how individuals engage with fairness (intuitively/deliberately) may depend on the circumstances in which they find themselves and where their responses to moral issues are primed (rather than consciously chosen). Yet, most of this research has not investigated how organisational context, especially when equipped with an ‘ethical infrastructure’ (e.g., ethical codes, frameworks), shapes engagement with fairness issues. The following question thus remains empirically and theoretically unaddressed: when organisations formally pursue fairness, how do organisational actors enact situated judgements on fairness? To explore this question, we conducted a field study of three English health authorities, which overtly aimed to handle complex cases – patients with atypical needs requesting exceptional funding – with fairness. These organisations explicitly framed fairness in utilitarian terms (maximisation of clinical benefit) and stipulated that a formal model of fairness be applied in every atypical case. Our ethnographic observations focused on how organisational actors enacted fairness when dealing with particular cases. Our findings suggest that fairness is a collective and effortful accomplishment that entails cognitive, moral, and affective work. It is through this work that situated judgements on fairness are crafted in an organisational context where fairness is a formal objective. The paper thus unpacks the internal workings of morally-attuned organisations and draws implications for future research on moral decision making.

Speaker bio

Emmanouil (Manos) Gkeredakis is Assistant Professor at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. He received his PhD from the University of Liverpool and has previously held postdoctoral positions at New York University, Stern School of Business, and University of Warwick. His research focuses on process organisation studies with a particular interest in coordination practices and emerging phenomena of crowd-based innovation. His work has appeared in journals such as Organization Studies and Information Systems Research. His research is generally inspired by practice theories.