Received: 1 October 2020 | Accepted: 1 October 2020
DOI: 10.1111/beer.12321
SPECIAL ISSUE
Practicing management wisely
Matthias P. Hühn1 | André Habisch2
1
Alex G. McKenna School of Business, Economics and Government, Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, PA, USA
2
Business and Economic Department, Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, Germany
3
NYU Stern School of Business, New York, NY, USA
4
School of Economics and Business Administration, University of Navarre, Pamplona, Spain
Correspondence: Matthias P. Hühn, Saint Vincent College, 300 Fraser Purchase Road, Latrobe, PA 15650-2667, USA.
Email: matthias.huehn@stvincent.edu
The main goal of this special issue in Business Ethics: A European
Review is to show how practical wisdom research can further, and
indeed has furthered, the theory and practice of management.
Although the papers in this special issue employ different methodol-
ogies and have different foci, there seems to be a common theme of
going “back to the roots,” that is, an interest in the original meaning
of practical wisdom. Practical wisdom (phronesis) is one of the cen-
tral concepts of the oldest of the three most widely taught ethics
theories, virtue ethics. However, similar concepts can be found in
other philosophical traditions (Bachmann et al., 2018). In Aristotelian
virtue ethics, a person who has phronesis is an embodiment of the
12 original virtues that are needed to flourish or, put differently, to
have a genuinely good life. Reaching the state of being a phronimos is
only possible through reflective action; wisdom is practical because
it is the result of an individual practicing/learning how to be wise. It
is also practical because being virtuous does not merely imply know-
ing what is ethical—but also requires the ability to practice the virtue
(Meyer & Hühn, 2020). Thus, wisdom is created individually through
habitual action—a widely shared core tenet of management theory.
As such, it is not too big a leap of faith to assume that conducting
one's own affairs well is a precondition to having a good effect on
other people's affairs as well.
It should therefore not come as a surprise that early management
theory already made use of virtue ethics theory. Fayol (1918/1949),
arguably the first management scholar, saw good management as
the proportionate application of principles through constantly re-
flected experience with the common good in mind. He remarks (19):
“Seldom do we have to apply the same principle twice in identical
conditions; allowance must be made for different changing circum-
stances, for men just as different and changing and for many other
variable elements.” Especially when considering “principles” such
as discipline, subordination of individual interest, equity, esprit de
corps, and others, one can see that they are based on something
much like Aristotle's notion of character, which involves freedom
Business Ethics, Env & Resp. 2020;29:1–5. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/beer
| Edwin M. Hartman3 | Alejo José G. Sison4
and rationality specifically. We do not see them as precisely defin-
able, or as explaining behavior by reference to “covering” causal laws
(Hartman, 2013, p. 16).
Management as a concept has been diluted to comprise all sorts
of phenomena: engineering knows engine management, biologists
say that membranes manage borders and in the business literature
the term has essentially also lost its contours. This special issue
returns to the original ideas and conceptualizes management as a
purposeful human activity in an organizational setting. In that re-
spect, management became distinct from business administration
when Mayo (1933/2004) argued that relative group efficiency de-
pends on three factors: (a) the feeling among members of the or-
ganization of being in control, (b) that organization members feel
that they are part of a group, and (c) the perception that manage-
ment favors these two factors. While business administration sees
the organization as an open system with one-dimensional homines
oeconomici (Hartman, 2015) that must be manipulated to achieve ef-
ficiency, management acknowledges that the organization consists
of free, learning, feeling individuals whose creative power must be
harnessed in order to have effective organizations (Hühn, 2008).
In other words, humans, as individuals, have creative resources.
Management thus implies a certain view of humanity and an un-
derstanding that knowledge is created constantly, and that good
scholarship begins with careful observation. And yet, driven by the
same anti-ethical and anti-philosophical forces as its sister science
economics, mainstream management was merged with business ad-
ministration (Hartman, 2015; Hühn, 2008, 2015) and adopted the
engineering approach put forward by Frederick Taylor: technical
efficiency rather than human flourishing and creativity became the
focus of business theory; systems and rules replaced the wise indi-
vidual; knowing and predicting replaced questioning and learning.
Yet, albeit often outside the mainstream, practical wisdom
was kept alive as a theme by some of the most important manage-
ment scholars. Drucker (1954), like Fayol, stressed that managing
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd | 1

2 |
is a practice aimed at effectiveness and that systems are only as
good as the individuals that make them real (Drucker 1967). Henry
Mintzberg's enormous opus is difficult to summarize, but it is the-
matically centered around “wisdom and respect” (2009); moreover,
it constantly stresses that management is a practice that must be
driven by reflection in order to be effective and wise: “[r]eflecting
goes beyond sheer intelligence, to a deeper wisdom that enables
managers to see insightfully” Mintzberg, 2009, p. 209). In a similar
vein, Pfeffer (2018) wants well-being to be the focus of management
theory. In addition to these major scholars, more recent, albeit scat-
tered, management scholarship also makes use of practical wisdom.
Bachmann et al. (2018) found examples of scholars using practical
wisdom in most areas of management. Some of that scholarship is
within an Aristotelian framework, while other authors draw on dif-
ferent intellectual traditions.
Virtue ethics has experienced a comeback in moral philosophy
since G.E.M. Anscombe (1958) criticized modern moral philosophy
for having a conversation about values without any clear notion of
what values are. It took a while for this increased interest in vir-
tue ethics to reach first business ethics, and then the management
mainstream. Today, however, it is a vibrant research stream in busi-
ness ethics and a topic that is attracting interest in management, as
Ignacio Ferrero and Sison (2014) have shown.
The first paper in this special issue connects with Ferrero and
Sison's research and maps the treatment of practical wisdom in
the management-related literature. Maria Clara Ames, Maurizio
Serafim and Marcello Zappellini add to our knowledge about the
role of practical wisdom in business by focusing on journal arti-
cles and book chapters that specifically use the term phronesis,
in contrast to the more general meta-studies on virtue ethics
and practical wisdom by Ferrero and Sison (2014) and Bachmann
et al. (2018). This narrower focus gives us an understanding of how
Aristotelian ideas have concretely impacted business theory. The
authors discuss phronesis and point out that the basic concept was
already in use before Aristotle and has been "a term translated
over time as providence, prudence, practical wisdom, or practi-
cal intelligence.” But they also argue that before phronesis made
its debut in the business literature, it also played a role in schol-
arship that is largely antithetical to virtue ethics: they mention
Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur.
Ames et al. find that three-quarters of the articles on phronesis
in the literature are exploratory or non-empirical, and that surpris-
ingly few studies delved into the connection between phronesis and
virtues. The first major theme they identify is that papers either see
phronesis residing within the individual (these approaches usually
take a traditional virtue ethical view) or as "a collective capacity to
act collaboratively, an ability in synthesizing knowledge from the
context.” Ames et al. count citations with surprising results: "Adding
all citations, the authors that appear the most cited (at least 100
times) are Aristotle (620), Nonaka (469), MacIntyre (231), Tsoukas
(149), Gadamer (145), Toyama (143), and Flyvbjerg (121)." The social
science perspective—in effect, the collective perspective—seems
to be as strong as the classical view represented by Aristotle and
14678608, 2020, S1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/beer.12321 by Egyptian National Sti. Network (Enstinet), Wiley Online Library on [15/06/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
HÜHN et al.
MacIntyre. On the contrary, scholarship on phronesis done between
Aristotle and Nonaka seems to have been largely ignored as Aquinas
and Anscombe get only four and nine mentions, respectively, and
Kant's Critique of Practical Reason is completely ignored. Ames et al.
also organize research into micro, meso, and macro levels and in-
clude methodology (theoretical vs. empirical) as a second dimension.
They offer a matrix that shows little theoretical and no empirical re-
search at the macro level. Filling this research gap will be challenging,
at least for empiricists. The contributions in this special issue also
mostly take a classical perspective—Aristotelian or MacIntyrean—
but they attend to the meso and macro levels of analysis.
Garrett Potts, in the second paper of this special issue, is one
of the scholars who base their ideas on Alasdair MacIntyre's con-
tribution to our understanding of phronesis, and he explores a rich
seam: its potential for developing a professional managerial ethic.
Apart from calls by major figures like Harvard deans Rakesh Khurana
and Nitin Nohria to create "a rigorous code of ethics" (Khurana &
Nohria, 2008, p. 70) for management, nothing much has happened
along those lines. Potts suggests that this is because positive social
scientists that have used the concept have gone about it the wrong
way. Potts uses what has been called the "Anscombe Argument"
(Hühn, 2018, p. 284): positive social science prioritizes the empirical
over values and is thus caught in a Catch-22 sort of argument. He
suggests that we switch to an entirely different mode of inquiry: “[a]
MacIntyrean narrative approach [that] can investigate the extent to
which managers support (a) good work, (b) good individual lives, and
(c) the common good of particular communities. In these respects a
MacIntyrean narrative approach can gauge how managers act po-
litically to ‘shepherd’ the institution in its social context.” At least
in a Western perspective, that social context is the neo-Aristotelian
polis (not the city, but the organizational level below it). In that sense,
the dictum that "the polis is the cradle of virtue" (Hartman, 2013, p.
40) suggests that organizational culture is important. The virtuous
manager acts for the good of the community––the organization––
and must always "subordinate external goods to internal goods.”
(MacIntyre, 2007, p. 217).
How does the virtuous manager identify the internal goods that
the organization should pursue? Potts argues that every individual is
embedded in a social context and that this context includes a culture
rooted in history: “the virtuous manager's narrative understanding
of work needs to be deliberated about with fellow workers and it
needs to draw upon the history that a shared and still-living tradi-
tion passes on.” To be virtuous, a manager need not accept the goals
in her narrow job description, nor must she heroically decide what
the goals should be. Rather, what is required is a deliberative and
creative practice that is conscious of culture and individuals. This
view of strategy mirrors James Brian Quinn's (1980) ideas of strat-
egy-making as a political process and Prahalad and Hamel's (1990)
notion of core competencies as the collective learning of an organi-
zation. Hence, Potts's account seamlessly connects the operational
with the strategic and normative levels in an organization—not a
small feat in an environment that encourages the compartmentaliza-
tion of organizations.

HÜHN et al.
At the center of his paper is the MacIntyrean concept of a “call-
ing”: "when work is viewed as a ‘calling’ managerial intentions are
subjected to ‘disciplined practice’ via a tutoring in the virtues for the
betterment of the individual lives and communities that their organi-
zation reaches (Bellah et al., 1996, p. 66)." The concept reunites what
modern business administration has decoupled: the personal telos
(goal, purpose) and professional and organizational goals. As Potts
explains, a managers’ calling is viewed as a part of their personal
story, and it is critical to the pursuit of their telos, which leads to their
flourishing. Moreover, managers' pursuit of excellence within
their calling contributes to the cultivation of virtues that transcend
their craft and impact their character formation in life more broadly.
The “deeply held spiritual and ethical connections” of the individual
and of the organization come together. Potts's ideas are reflections
of Edgar Schein's (2004) seminal contribution to how organizational
cultures work and how they are structured. According to Potts,
phronesis is the “shepherd virtue.” Sheep may safely graze not be-
cause the manager catches stray sheep and forces them back into
the herd, but because practical wisdom is based on reflection, which
depends on self-awareness. Hence, it allows for recognizing and cor-
recting one's own straying.
Another paper focused on the individual-community relationship
is that of Marta Rocchi, Ignacio Ferrero, Massimiliano Pellegrini, and
Elizabeth Reichert. They adopt a Thomist perspective in which they
argue that phronesis/prudence is unique among the virtues in that
it is a moral and an intellectual virtue at the same time. This feature
allows us to apply reason to our natural moral virtues and inject our
reasoning with morality. Practical wisdom is not only shepherding us
when we stray but rather, points us in the right direction when we
reason about all other virtues. Hereby, the authors remind us that
practical wisdom grows from reflected experience.
In the Thomist tradition, phronesis is the most difficult virtue to
attain because it is made up of eight sub-virtues. Correspondingly,
the principal goal of Rocchi et al.’s article is to enrich the concept
of authentic leadership with Thomist ideas. To that end, they ex-
plain the four characteristics of an authentic leader—self-aware-
ness, relational transparency, balanced processing, and internalized
moral perspective—in terms of the sub-virtues of practical wisdom.
“The relationship between the internalized moral perspective and
self-awareness, relational transparency, and balanced processing is
mediated by practical wisdom's act of command.” The virtues are
dispositions and moral skills that are the result of a learning process.
Consequently, in order to become authentic leaders we must learn
how to habituate the necessary sub-virtues. Correspondingly, we
need a training regimen to acquire practical wisdom and translate
it into situations in which these skills make us good leaders. Rocchi
et al. also point out the most common obstacles to becoming au-
thentic leaders and note that the goal is not the perfect life, but the
good life, which differs somewhat from one person to the next.
Germán Scalzo and Kleio Akrivou, in the fourth paper of this spe-
cial issue, have a very ambitious goal: they want to flesh out a moral
psychology for virtue ethics which, they claim, has been left under-
developed by Aristotle and all who have followed him. They argue
14678608, 2020, S1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/beer.12321 by Egyptian National Sti. Network (Enstinet), Wiley Online Library on [15/06/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
| 3
that the modern paradigm sees an “autonomous self” (AS) and “that
a sharp and unbridgeable dualism or antithesis separates the self's
cognitive-rationalistic mental aspects from its affective ones.” As a
consequence, the AS itself is fragmented and the unity of emotio
and ratio that practical reason presupposes is impossible. The inter-
personal self (IPS) understands that there are no hard boundaries
between self and other: “being-related is ontologically core to our
being itself (Alford, 2018, p. 700).”
This elevates our responsibility toward both our own and oth-
ers' growth and happiness. One consequence is that “[f]or IPS, the
self is a complicated (integrated) unity beyond what consciousness
can scientifically grasp: My person is not the consciousness… of it”
(Mounier, 1936, p. 51)." This differs, they claim, from the Aristotelian
understanding of phronesis: “IPS's notion of practical wisdom inte-
grates relational/affective aspects of the self into an intelligent use
of reason and as a dimension of action.” How would this affect our
understanding of managing? “[I]nstead of a set of contracts that pro-
motes technocratic, value-neutral and rationalistic management […]
IPS offers a theoretical framework to approach management based
on interpersonal virtues in business, including trust, cooperation,
gratitude, forgiveness, and even charity, helping to enrich a common
good theory of the firm.” For leadership, the consequences of mov-
ing toward the IPS paradigm would be similar to what Rocchi et al.
propose, as leadership would not “aim to influence others through
managerial-positional power or compliance” but by “considering the
firm as a community of work that aims to achieve unity.” Generally,
“practically wise decision-making requires from decision makers
deeper engagement with reality and with the identity of all who are
involved and directly affected.”
Mai Trinh and Elizabeth Castillo, in the fifth paper of this special
issue, also start from a socially embedded self as the seat of practi-
cal wisdom and propose to view practical wisdom as an algorithm
that allows the self “to maintain fit with the operating environment
while generating ongoing novelty.” Like Potts, they stress that prac-
tical wisdom includes the ability of the system to question its own
structures and parameters and thereby to connect with the liter-
ature on management cybernetics (Hühn, 2012). They argue with
Kohlberg et al. (1983) that practical wisdom is the third and last
stage of a person's moral development. Moreover, they propose that
both Western (Aristotle) and Eastern (Confucius, Mencius, Laozi,
Zhuangzi) philosophers “were mainly concerned with describing the
self-cultivation process of how a person becomes virtuous rather
than prescribing what is good or right,” and that “practical wisdom
is not only a highly regarded virtue, but also the essence of moral
behaviors.” For that purpose, the authors identify the many common
ideas and corresponding formulations among Eastern and Western
virtue ethicists, but also include areas of disagreement. Overall, they
find four important common threads: man is social; practical wisdom
is learned; practical wisdom integrates cognitive, affective, and be-
havioral aspects; and context, as opposed to rules, matters.
Trinh and Castillo introduce the reader to Complex Adaptive
Systems (CAS) theory, which is part of closed systems theory and
has a long tradition in management (Beer, 1966) and social science.

4 |
CAS are complex systems operating in complex environments.
Human beings are complex and operate in a complex environment,
so there is constant flux but also meta-systemic stability. Character
is an example on the individual level and culture on the social level of
this duality. Individuals who have practical wisdom have a character
(or a self) that is at once stable and adaptive, even creative. Maturana
and Varela (1987) have called this autopoiesis: the ability of a com-
plex system to create both, flexible responses and the structure that
creates this flexibility.
Practical wisdom is the algorithm that allows individuals to flour-
ish in complex moral environments, such as multinational organiza-
tions. The authors show “that the qualities [of practical wisdom] of
generativity, emergence, recursion, adaptation, interdependence,
self-organization, and self-similarity may be global principles that
undergird varying expressions of practical wisdom across cultural
contexts, space, and time.” Hence, through practical wisdom we can
dissolve many paradoxes central to life both within and outside or-
ganizations. Virtue ethical perspectives do not suggest that cultural
differences should be overcome by imposing rules and homogeniz-
ing outcomes, as this stifles creativity and individual flourishing.
Instead, they suggest that morally and practically good management
promotes conversations about the virtues and the common good.
Like in other contributions to this special issue and the virtue ethical
management literature in general, organizational culture plays an im-
portant role in their concept. Uncertainty and diversity are no longer
problems. On the contrary, practical wisdom transforms them into
resources for achieving flourishing organizations.
The last contribution in this special issue asks whether it is not
unrealistic to expect a manager to be a phronimos all day every day.
Gregory Wolcott's paper seems to be a good way to end the special
issue, as it injects some of that shepherd's virtue when he critically
examines the telos of the discussion of practical wisdom in business
ethics. In contrast to Trinh and Castillo, who propose self-manage-
ment, Wolcott believes that modern bureaucratic organizations
need a considerable amount of rules and standardization that “re-
strict the capacity of managers to make day-to-day decisions, guided
by practical wisdom.” Wolcott infers that in many situations, being
practically wise is not an option for a manager.
He is not alone in this skepticism. Alasdair MacIntyre, Adam
Smith, and Edwin Hartman (in decreasing order of pessimism) have
all pointed to Aristotle's opinion that becoming a phronimos is a full-
time pursuit for which not all people are suited, and thus, is not at-
tainable by the average manager. Wolcott is, as Aristotle's doctrine
of the mean may suggest, neither in the optimistic nor the pessimistic
camp. Instead, he stakes out a middle position between proponents
of practical wisdom in managerial business ethics and proponents
of rule-based, formulaic managerial decision making. He does this
by defending two major claims. First, he diagnoses what he sees as
the misapplication of the virtue of practical wisdom in the manage-
rial business ethics literature by its advocates. Because markets are
irreducibly complex, and because they generate consequences and
states of affairs outside anyone's control, it is a category mistake to
appeal to the use of practical wisdom for first-order decision making
14678608, 2020, S1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/beer.12321 by Egyptian National Sti. Network (Enstinet), Wiley Online Library on [15/06/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
HÜHN et al.
by managers. Managers rather face epistemic limits that constrain
their ability to deliberate thoroughly to bring about a large menu of
diverse and desired outcomes. As a consequence, it is often neces-
sary to apply rules that artificially limit deliberative processes and
thus permit managers to make timely decisions. Wolcott argues that
it “is the market, through the price system, that coordinates action
despite uncertainty and despite incomplete knowledge.”
Trinh and Castillo present a partial counter-argument: markets
are not always “out there” to be “discovered” but are created by peo-
ple in exchange relationships—something that was also mentioned
by Adam Smith (Hühn, 2019). But strategic decisions made under
uncertainty concerning existing and stable markets could bene-
fit from standardized logic, as the prescriptive schools in strategy
have argued since the 1960s (Mintzberg et al., 2005). Nevertheless,
Wolcott's second proposition is that the virtue of practical wisdom
is still valuable for guiding an ethical life. Transferred to a managerial
context, this means that phronesis is better applied to higher-order
decision making. That is, one should cultivate practical wisdom to
guide broader, second-order decisions about one's projects, educa-
tion, family life, and careers, including managerial roles in business.
Wolcott echoes Moldoveanu and Martin (2008), who lament that
MBAs lack the ability to even understand the need to ask these
higher-order questions. Thus Wolcott proposes that insofar as
normal day-to-day business decisions are made within the context
of a morally defensible market order, it is possible to relieve prac-
tical wisdom of the burden of justifying first-order decisions and to
recover its proper place in ethical deliberation.
Hence, in a comprehensive management approach, practical
wisdom never claims to totally substitute thoroughly rational disci-
plinary analyses; rather it calls for complementing and embedding
their (probably diverse) results in an overarching normative and epis-
temic reflection: nothing more––but nothing less!––than that.
The contributions to this special issue not only focus on a very
basic concept, practical wisdom, but they all do so taking a classical
Aristotelian/Thomist perspective. However, the papers use this lens
to look into very different corners of management: strategic plan-
ning, organizational learning, leading, structuring, decision making,
management cybernetics, and so forth. This shows that there is a
plethora of scholarly opportunities to connect virtue ethical con-
cepts with many topical areas in management. This vast research
gap is even more interesting as practical wisdom represents what
philosophers refer to as a “thick concept”: one with a high degree
of descriptive content that marries fact and value (Blomberg, 2007).
This thickness of ancient philosophical thought offers an opportu-
nity to enrich, widen, and deepen our understanding of management
theory largely driven by modern academic disciplines (psychology,
sociology, and political science). We hope this special issue will gen-
erate interest among scholars from outside virtue ethics for consid-
ering how wisdom might inform their management research.
ORCID
Matthias P. Hühn https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9403-1438
André Habisch https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7188-1357
 14678608, 2020, S1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/beer.12321 by Egyptian National Sti. Network (Enstinet), Wiley Online Library on [15/06/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
HÜHN et al. | 5

REFERENCES Moldoveanu, M. C., & Martin, R. L. (2008). The future of the MBA:
Designing the thinker of the future. Oxford University Press.
Alford, H. (2018). The practical wisdom of personalism. The Journal of
Mounier, E. (1936). Manifeste au service du personalisme. Editions due Seuil.
Management Development, 29(7–8), 697–705.
Pfeffer, J. (2018). The overlooked essentials of employee well-being.
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). Modern moral philosophy. Philosophy,
McKinsey Quarterly, 3(2018), 82–89.
33(124), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031​81910​0 037943
Prahalad, C. K., & Hamel, G. (1990). The core competence of the corpo-
Bachmann, C., Habisch, A., & Dierksmeier, C. (2018). Practical wisdom:
ration. Harvard Business Review, 68(3), 79–91.
Management's no longer forgotten virtue. Journal of Business Ethics,
Quinn, J. B. (1980). Strategies for change: Logical incrementalism. Dow-
153(1), 147–165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s1055​1-016-3417-y
Jones-Irwin Homewood.
Beer, S. (1966). Decision and control: The meaning of operational research
Schein, E. H. (2004). Organizational culture and leadership. Jossey-Bass.
and management cybernetics. John Wiley & Sons.
Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M.
(1996). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American
Life, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. AU T H O R B I O G R A P H I E S
Blomberg, O. (2007). Disentangling the thick concept argument. SATS -
Nordic Journal of Philosophy, 8(2), 63–78. https://doi.org/10.1515/
Matthias P. Hühn is the Mary S. Carey Chair in Ethics and Catholic
SATS.2007.63
Drucker, P. F. (1967/2018). The effective executive. Routledge. Social Thought at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
Drucker, P. F. (1954). The practice of management. HarperCollins. His research is on virtue ethics and epistemic values. He holds
Fayol, H. (1918/1949). General and industrial management. Pitman. editorial positions at BE:ER, Philosophy of Management, and
Ferrero, I., & Sison, A. J. G. (2014). A quantitative analysis of authors,
Frontiers in Organizational Psychology.
schools and themes in virtue ethics articles in business ethics and
management journals (1980–2011). Business Ethics: A European
Review, 23(4), 375–400. https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12057 André Habisch is a Professor for Social Ethics and Politics and
Hartman, E. (2013). Virtue in business: Conversations with Aristotle. Head of the Center for Corporate Citizenship, Catholic University
Cambridge University Press.
of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Eichstätt, Germany. His research has
Hartman, E. M. (2015). Rationality in management theory and practice:
An Aristotelian perspective. Philosophy of Management, 14(1), 5–16. been published in all major business ethics journals. He serves as
https://doi.org/10.1007/s4092​6-015-0003-9 an associate editor at BE:ER.
Hühn, M. (2008). Paradigms in management. Working Paper Series.
German University in Cairo.
Edwin M. Hartman has undergraduate degrees from Haverford
Hühn, M. (2012). Cybernetic management paradigms. In S. N. Grösser
& R. Zeyer (Eds.), Systemic management for intelligent organizations College and Oxford University, a Ph.D. from Princeton University,
(pp. 3–19). Springer. and an MBA from the Wharton School. He has taught philosophy,
Hühn, M. P. (2015). The unreality business-how economics (and manage- management, and business ethics at the University Pennsylvania,
ment) became anti- philosophical. Philosophy of Management, 14(1),
Rutgers University, and New York University. He was a consul-
47–66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s4092​6-015-0006-6
Hühn, M. P. (2018). CSR-the cuckoo's egg in the business ethics nest. tant in strategic management with Hay Associates. He has au-
Humanistic Management Journal, 3(2), 279–298. https://doi. thored many articles and four books.
org/10.1007/s4146​3-018-0046-x
Hühn, M. P. (2019). Adam Smith's philosophy of science: Economics as
Alejo José G. Sison, Ph.D., is a Catedrático in the School of
moral imagination. Journal of Business Ethics, 155(1), 1–15. https://doi.
org/10.1007/s1055​1-017-3548-9
Economics of the University of Navarre, a visiting ordinary pro-
Khurana, R., & Nohria, N. (2008). It's time to make management a true fessor at the Busch School of Business of the Catholic University
profession. Harvard Business Review, 86(10), 70–77. of America and an adjunct professor at the McCourt School of
Kohlberg, L., Levine, C., & Hewer, A. (1983). Moral stages: A cur- Public Policy, Georgetown University. He is also Senior Research
rent formulation and a response to critics. Contributions to Human
Fellow at the Center for Business and Society of IESE Business
Development, 10, 174.
MacIntyre, A. (2007). After virtue (3rd ed.). University of Notre Dame Press. School and a section editor at the Journal of Business Ethics. He
Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree of knowledge: The biolog- has published in all major business ethics journals.
ical roots of human understanding. New Science Library/Shambhala
Publications.
Mayo, E. (1933/2004). The human problems of an industrial civilization.
Routledge.
How to cite this article: Hühn MP, Habisch A, Hartman EM,
Meyer, M., & Hühn, M. P. (2020). Positive language and virtuous lead-
ership: Walking the talk. Management Research: Journal of the José G. Sison A. Practicing management wisely. Business
Iberoamerican Academy of Management. 18(3), 263–284. Ethics, Env & Resp. 2020;29:1–5. https://doi.org/10.1111/
Mintzberg, H. (2009). Managing. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. beer.12321
Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (2005). Strategy safari: A guided
tour through the wilds of strategic management. Simon and Schuster.