Professor Alan Morrison
Alan is a former investment banker who wrote his doctoral thesis at Oxford and who has been a member of faculty at the Business School and a fellow of Merton College since 2000. He trained in finance, and was initially a Professor of Finance. An increasing concern with social policy questions relating to the market economy led him to work on regulatory matters, and he was for some years Professor of Law and Finance, before he assumed his current role.
Alan sits on the Editorial Board of Business Ethics Quarterly and is a member of the Board of the Society for Business Ethics. He also sits on the Steering Committee of the Centre for Corporate Reputation, with whom he has organized many ethics conferences in Oxford, and with whose support he co-convenes with Rita Mota the R:ETRO seminar series on Reputation, Ethics and Trust in Organizations.
Alan’s recent research work has been published in Business Ethics Quarterly, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Academy of Management Review and in the past he published extensively in the economics and finance literature. His work has three broad themes.
First, Alan asks how people can live well within organisational contexts. Almost all of us inhabit a work role and a private one; which version of ourselves represents our true identity, and how do we know? How do organisational choices shape us? What moral responsibilities do individuals and organisations have in light of these questions? Alan examines these questions through perspectives on identity drawn from analytic philosophy, virtue ethics, existentialism, and theories of the firm from economics and finance.
Second, Alan studies the nature of the organisation. Is it just a legal charter and a nexus of contracts, or is it something more? Can an organisation hold a “belief”? Are organisations the sorts of things that can be blamed for their actions? Why do organisations sometimes evoke strong emotional responses? Alan is particularly interested in how language functions and in the mental models that organisations create in their stakeholders.
Third, Alan researches regulation. Do the above perspectives provide insights into the effects and role of regulation? Under what circumstances can the state engage with self-authorship in organisations? Can we claim that the state must intervene? This work builds on the above research and draws upon the legal and economic literatures.
Alan teaches courses related to Governance and Ethics on the MBA, EMBA, MFE, and MLF degrees. His recent executive education work has been concerned with the ethics and governance of organizations, on conflicts of interest, and on the ethics and ontology of AI.
