In response to a series of notable public scandals—accounting fraud at Enron, plagiarism at the New York Times, torture at Abu Ghraib, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and steroid use in baseball—the Kenan Institute for Ethics organized an interdisciplinary group of two dozen faculty and graduate students from across Duke University and the United States to examine ethical crisis and change.

While moments of ethical crises offer opportunities for ethical reflection there is little consensus about the best strategies to create effective change in these moments. Indeed, organizations often do the very things that we know don’t work in moments of crisis. So, how do institutions learn to prepare for, respond to, or recover from ethical crises?

Over the past two years this interdisciplinary research consortium, Changing Institutional Cultures, has been investigating how best to understand, assess and improve the ethical cultures of military, religious, business, and educational institutions. We ask, for example, how the introduction of women into higher education institutions at the turn of the century is similar or dissimilar to the racial integration of the military several decades later. Or why was the racial integration of the Army in the 1950s more successful than gender integration of the Army in the 1990s? In gathering and reviewing the existing research on ethical crisis and organizational change and drawing upon a wide range of faculty expertise—including philosophy, religion, law, psychology, business, and public policy—we have collectively developed a novel, interdisciplinary approach to ethical culture and crisis. Our approach integrates philosophical and theoretical frames across disciplines and combines normative, analytical and policy studies. The core value of our analyses is that they enable faculty and others to more effectively participate in both normative and policy debates about institutional cultures—what they are and how they can and should be better.

To learn more about our ongoing work, public events, publications, and case studies, see our application to the Provost’s Common Fund [PDF].