Discussion: View Thread

Dear All,

Please join us online on Tuesday, 4 June, at 4pm BST, for the fourth and final R:ETRO seminar of this term (and academic year!), hosted by the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation.

Rebecca Ruehle (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) will be giving a paper entitled "Nudge, shove, push – when is influencing employees beyond their immediate work duties morally permissible?"

Abstract:

Companies often influence their employees beyond their immediate work duties, e.g., by suggesting plant-based lunch choices, incentivising environmentally-friendly commuting, implementing workplace giving schemes, or mobilizing them for political activities. This raises the question in how far companies may use their power to interfere with employees' work-unrelated decision-making. Based on earlier work, I argue that employees have a right to justification, consisting of a provision and an exchange of reasons, when their autonomy is presumably infringed. Yet, it remains unclear how conflicting interests can be balanced in reason provision and exchange. Relying on Scanlon's contractualism, I suggest that for an influence to be morally permissible the supporting reasons need to form a principle no one can reasonably reject. The resulting framework not only categorizes different reasons, it also suggests a hierarchy of influences and proposes an ideal provision-exchange-process which can be implemented in the workplace.

Click here to register.

I hope to see many of you there!

All the best,
Rita

------------------------------
Rita Mota
Assistant Professor
ESADE Business School
Barcelona
------------------------------