Ethics in Organizational Change: Some Legal Perspectives

This paper is the draft text of a lecture given at a Conference on Organizational Change organized by the Committee of Science and Ethics of the University of Leuven, KUL, on October 9, 2009. From a legal perspective I have presented two types of framework operating in two dimensions or on two levels. There is a regulatory and a contractual legal framework, operating from a top and street level. Moreover the law operates in different ethics roles: ethics defining and ethics compliance (matrix in figure 1). The legal perspective is a result of a multi-actor process involving different legal actors, scopes and methods that are all interacting in multiple ways, horizontally, vertically and diagonally (matrix in figure 2).