On December 18, 2018, I learned about an article in the Journal of Business Ethics by Haridimos Tsoukas (hereafter Tsoukas 2018) assessing my moral imagination as President of the Academy of Management (AOM). The assessment is based on a message sent to AOM members on January, 31, 2017, after US President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13769, commonly called the “immigration and travel ban” (EO 13769, Exhibit 1). On June 24, 2019, the Journal of Business Ethics published online a Correction to Tsoukas (2018) that addressed a number of inaccuracies in the article (hereafter Tsoukas 2019), but which did not address its most interesting problems. The purpose of this commentary is to identify opportunities to develop the methods, theory, and concepts in the literature on prototypicality and moral imagination into which Tsoukas (2018) was written.Footnote 1

Tsoukas (2018) argues that EO 13769 constituted a ‘non-prototypical’ political event that demanded a different response than the message sent to AOM members on January 31, 2017. According to the analysis, I and the other members of the AOM Executive Committee should have exercised “moral imagination” to interpret EO 13769 as a non-prototypical political event, and therefore one on which the AOM’s no-political-stands policy (NPSP) should not be applied rigidly or as a recipe. Instead, the message should have inspired a deliberative response among AOM members by disclosing powerfully the meaning of EO 13769 as an immoral act. Tsoukas (2018) says that leaders such as me must make judgments about the meaning of important events such as EO 13769, and that rules such as the AOM’s no-political-stands policy (NPSP) must not be rigidly applied when events evolve non-prototypically.

My response in this commentary unfolds in four main sections. First, I briefly describe the most important facts about what occurred at the AOM that were not covered in either the original or corrected version of Tsoukas (2018) and that are relevant to the methodological, theoretical and conceptual issues. Second, I indicate the main methodological problems in Tsoukas (2018, 2019). Third, I identify some of the most salient gaps in the theory in Tsoukas (2018, 2019) raised by the case of the AOM. Fourth, I raise conceptual challenges, issues, and opportunities in the literature to which Tsoukas (2018, 2019) contributes. The conclusion suggests that the methods, theory, and concepts in the literature on prototypicality and moral imagination are insufficiently developed to reflect the complexity of the interactions that unfold in situations such as at the AOM in 2017.

Problems of Fact

Among the many factual problems with Tsoukas (2018, 2019), there is one that is the most important. The main assumption in both the original and corrected versions of the paper is incorrect. This assumption is that the message on January 31, 2017, could have been written to enact my personal belief that EO 13769 was immoral.

This assumption fails on three grounds. First, the condemnation of EO13769 that I originally proposed three days prior to the issuance of the message was not accepted by the AOM Executive Committee because of two principles in the AOM Constitution.Footnote 2 The first was a principle that the AOM would cultivate debate among AOM members holding divergent views over political events. This principle, which gave rise to the NPSP, had been interpreted to cover post-World War II political policies, the Vietnam war, the events of September 11, 2011, climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, and immigration. The second was the tenet that nobody, including the AOM President, can express a personal view as that of the organization. As a result, the AOM Executive Director, who controlled the AOM’s listservs, would not have allowed the issuance of a non-conforming message by me or by anyone out of loyalty to the AOM Executive Committee decision and AOM Constitution. In other words, governance power over crucial tools of disclosure and deliberation was not allocated to me as AOM President, but rather to the AOM Executive Committee. This allocation was in direct conflict with the allocation of power to speak for the organization to the AOM President. I therefore condemned EO 13769 as immoral in my own name, but not the name of the organization.

Second, the main assumption in Tsoukas (2018) also fails through a change made in the Correction (Tsoukas 2019) to reassign responsibility for the January 31, 2017, message away from me and to the AOM Executive Committee as a whole. The problem is that the Correction does not interrogate whether the six members of that Committee all shared the belief that EO 13769 was morally wrong and non-prototypical categorically relative to the other political events to which the NPSP had been applied. This is important because the argument in Tsoukas (2018) depends on the claim that the authors of the message held a coherent, mutual interpretation of EO 13769 as morally wrong, and that this shared belief was not in conflict with other beliefs about moral obligations. In the case of EO13769, the members of the AOM Executive Committee did not immediately hold such a shared understanding, although we worked together ardently, intensively, and collaboratively—through deliberation—to discern a way forward that reflected our competing obligations.

Third, the main assumption in both the original and corrected versions of the article fails because it does not consider the three-part moral paradox that I personally confronted at the time of EO13769 both as AOM President as a member of the AOM Executive Committee (see McGahan 2017a, b, 2019). The paradox arose from my simultaneous beliefs that (a) the US President’s immigration policies were racist and discriminatory, (b) the US President’s tactic of attacking the construct of the truth by making false claims about immigrants and other matters was divisive, anti-scientific, and polarizing, and designed to pit intellectuals against each other, and (c) the NPSP was a Constitutional principle of the AOM that had shaped its identity and that had merit. The paradox arising from these three beliefs (explained more fully in McGahan 2019) implies for the argument in Tsoukas (2018, 2019) that, even though I believed that EO 13769 was immoral, I could not enact that personal belief in the January 31, 2017, message because I believed that adjudication of the NPSP was a Constitutional matter for the AOM that required due process. Furthermore, I did not believe that EO13769 was non-prototypical Constitutionally, i.e., I believed the event was within the scope of the intended policy in that it was of commensurate significance to events listed above that had shaped the emergence of the NPSP (i.e., the post-World War II political policies, Vietnam War, and so on). I also imagined that the issuance of a message reinterpreting the NPSP would harm deliberation among AOM members rather than support it.Footnote 3 In other words, I sought to cultivate within the AOM the deliberations that the NPSP was designed to encourage, but I did not believe that the best way to accomplish this was through the message that Tsoukas (2018, 2019) analyzes. Rather, I used other tools and vehicles of communication (McGahan 2019).

There are also extensive additional factual problems in both the original and corrected versions of Tsoukas (2018), including the omission of crucial information about the timeline. A number of resources are available to readers interested in learning about what happened at the AOM before, during, and after EO 13769, including McGahan (2017a, b, 2018), the AOM.org website, and a series of articles published in the Journal of Management Inquiry in July, 2019, interpreting both the events at the AOM and Tsoukas (2018).Footnote 4 One of these articles, namely Stackman et al. (2019, pp. 271–274), contains a line-by-line description of problematic statements in Tsoukas (2018).

Exhibit 2 of this paper summarizes the timeline. The top half of the exhibit describes the unfolding of events relevant to the analysis. A statement from the AOM ratifying the accuracy of this timeline appears at the end of this article. The bottom half of Exhibit 2 shows the small number of events reported in Tsoukas (2018, 2019).

The following five essential facts are not covered in Tsoukas (2018, 2019), and are mentioned here because they are relevant to the arguments about methods, theory, and concepts that follow:

  1. 1.

    As AOM Vice President, I had proposed in July of 2015, eighteen months before EO 13769, that the AOM change the NPSP out of concern about the persecution (including censorship and arrest) of scientists in Turkey and China; and because of problems that had arisen over questionable research practices, such as p-hacking, and in response to an initiative for responsible research in our field (McGahan 2019). The proposal had been discussed by the AOM Executive Committee, was sent to Board subcommittee for development, had been raised at the AOM Board meeting in December, 2016, and was returned to the Board subcommittee for further work. Because deliberations about changing the policy were under way, the responses to EO 13769 among AOM Governors, including myself, reflected both the substantive and organizational issues that had evolved over time as we wrestled with the issues.

  2. 2.

    AOM members were not unified on what should occur at the AOM after EO 13769 (see McGahan 2019 and Wright in Davis et al. 2019). Many members felt that, because the NPSP was an integral part of the AOM’s identity as an organization, it should not be changed. Historically, the NPSP was connected to the AOM’s commitment to amplify members’ individual voices on matters of public importance so as to support scholarly dialogue to resolve discord and inform public policy. Many members, including me, felt that the options available to the AOM for responding to EO 13769 were broader than only making a statement about the AOM’s position.

  3. 3.

    I condemned EO 13769 both online and offline immediately after it happened in my own name as an immoral act, and in a number of writings that were issued prior to the message analyzed in Tsoukas (2018, 2019). Some of the materials that I wrote are reproduced in the Exhibits to McGahan (2019). I also began an extensive process of interacting with members because I sought the two-way exchange and dialogue described in Rasche (2019).Footnote 5 As described in Exhibit 2, I interacted during the Winter and Spring of 2017 with approximately 10,000 AOM members through an estimated 870 voice-to-voice calls, 5000 e-mails and social media exchanges, and 50 meetings and presentations. One of these interactions was a Facebook exchange reproduced as Exhibit 3 that is reproduced in part in Tsoukas (2018). In other words, I sought to inspire disclosively the deliberation that the NPSP had been designed to encourage through ongoing, evolving conversations rather than through the message sent to members on January 31, 2017. I also made regular reports to the AOM membership on the AOM.org website through a link on the landing page called “President’s FAQs” created for this purpose. None of this communication is considered in either the original or corrected versions of Tsoukas (2018).

  4. 4.

    The AOM Board of Governors formally changed the Constitution of the organization to allow an exception to the NPSP two weeks to the day after EO 13769, which was the earliest possible date that such a change could have occurred (see Exhibit 2). I called this meeting on Sunday, January 29th, 2017 (i.e., before the message that Tsoukas 2018, analyzes), for February 10th, 2017. This out-of-cycle meeting was without precedent in the seventy-five-year history of the AOM. McGahan (2019) describes in detail a series of specific steps that I took in the days right after EO 13769. The revision of the NPSP approved by the Board was accompanied by a 90-day moratorium to provide time for a special task force to examine how the new policy would be implemented.Footnote 6 One critical development that influenced the decision to impose the moratorium was that the US Courts had issued a stay on EO 13769, which meant that it was not adopted as the policy of the U.S.

  5. 5.

    When the moratorium expired on May 10, 2017, a process was in place that could have led the AOM to issue a condemnation of U.S. immigration policies. This process was designed to be activated when a member-at-large of the AOM initiated a proposal to take a stand. Nobody made such a proposal until September, 25, 2017. On that date, which was a month after my term as AOM President ended, I was the member-at-large who took this step and, till now, I remain the only AOM member who has ever initiated the Board process to condemn the U.S. immigration policies under President Trump.

These and other relevant facts are described more fully in the papers and documents cited above. They are omitted from both the original and corrected versions of Tsoukas (2018).

Problems of Method

The methods in Tsoukas (2018, 2019) are inadequate to analyze the case of the AOM’s response to EO 13769. A scientifically valid assessment of a person’s character, including especially of a moral quality that is inherently difficult to observe, cannot be conducted effectively without the deployment of sophisticated psychological, ethnographic, social psychological, and other established methods. There should be no shortcuts when an evaluation of a person’s morality is scientifically assessed.

The first major methodological problem in Tsoukas (2018, 2019) is the oversimplification of a complex moral problem with many facets, many constituents, diverse beliefs, and a long timeline (McGahan 2019; Exhibit 2). Tsoukas (2018) does not consider organizational processes, competing moral imperatives, or the discussion that began more than a year earlier about the persecution of scientists and the revision of the NPSP. The analysis also focuses on only one message among more than ten thousand communications. It does not consider the varying audiences and purposes of each of these interactions, or the ways in which they were interrelated and evolved.

Second, the method put forth in Yanow and Tsoukas (2009) and used in Tsoukas (2018) is not robust in its approach to inference. It is epistemologically impossible to infer beliefs from behavior,Footnote 7 and equally impossible to infer from an organizational action what a single leader or small group of leaders imagines—morally or otherwise. The approach does not acknowledge that the very subject at hand—namely the AOM’s response as an organization—was developed organizationally and was governed by the AOM’s Constitution rather than exclusively by my choices, beliefs, and understandings as President.

A third problem of methods in Tsoukas (2018) is in the assertion that a leader’s first writing after an event such as EO 13769 reflects her native understandings as a spontaneous response. But the response was anything but spontaneous because the event had been anticipated eighteen months earlier, and interpretation of the NPSP had been on the agenda of the AOM Executive Committee and the AOM Board. This makes the seminal communication difficult to identify. Was it the initial proposal, which was put forth in 2015 out of concern for vulnerable AOM members in Turkey and China? Was it the subcommittee report on changing the NPSP delivered in December, 2016, a month before EO 13769, with recommendations that were deliberated but not adopted? Was it my initial proposal for condemnation immediately after EO 13769 in January, 2017, that was not acceptable to the Executive Committee? Or my personal condemnation of EO 13769 as immoral, which was posted online? What about the phone calls and meetings that occurred between me and members of the Executive Committee? All of these occurred prior to the message analyzed in Tsoukas (2018) and Tsoukas (2019).Footnote 8 In general, the first thing that a leader or group of leaders writes may not be spontaneous, may not be on the topic, may have relevant precedent, may not be observable, and/or may be deliberative rather than declarative. In this case at the AOM, the analyzed message was designed as only one of many that unfolded over time.

Fourth, the method used in Tsoukas (2018) rejects readily available, disconfirming evidence and alternative explanations about what occurred. McGahan (2019) includes the texts of other message and official memos written both before and after the message analyzed in Tsoukas (2018) and describes the nature of my communication with members after EO 13769. Neither the original nor corrected article refers to my AOM Presidential address on the AOM’s response to EO 13769 (McGahan 2017c, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4OldjLZTp8), and McGahan 2018, which was published months prior to Tsoukas 2018). Similarly, the deliberations among the AOM Board members about revising the NPSP, which were reported in the Board minutes and thus available to members, were not considered.

Fifth, neither consent nor research ethics approval was obtained by the author or required by the journal prior to the publication of Tsoukas (2018).Footnote 9 These processes are especially important when a peer-reviewed journal seeks to publish a scientific assessment of a person’s moral qualities rather than publishing, say, an expert’s opinion about a matter within the person’s domain of expertise. The risks of mistakes warranting a published Correction (Tsoukas 2019) are reason alone to pursue customary research ethics approval when the subject is a person’s morality.

Sixth, the analysis is a scientific assessment of the moral qualities of the leader(s) of an organization to which the scientist belongs. The implications of this formal organizational relationship between the scientist and the leader are not interrogated in the article. Should peer-reviewed journals publish assessments by members of organizations of the moral qualities of their organization’s leaders without considering the relationship? Should this occur without consent or consultation or research ethics review? I believe the answers to these questions should be “no.”

Finally, Tsoukas (2018) sets the dangerous precedent of evaluating scientifically a person’s morality from identifiable, personal Facebook posts under the protections of peer review but without research ethics approval. Furthermore, my posts (Exhibit 3) were published publicly by Tsoukas (2018) without consent under a Creative Commons license held by Professor Tsoukas. After Cambridge Analytica and other Facebook tragedies, including those that occurred during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, no journal should allow such a study to be published without consent and research ethics review and approval.

Problems of Theory

In this section, I briefly describe several types of theoretical problems in the argument underlying Tsoukas (2018), and the opportunities that these problems create for scholarship. To accomplish this, I rely on insights arising from the AOM case study. I conclude that the contribution to theory in Tsoukas (2018) builds on an architecture of theory that is flawed.

The theoretical literature into which Tsoukas (2018) was written developed over the past half-century to address the moral obligations of leaders in the face of extraordinary political events that are described as non-prototypical. The core of the contribution to theory is an elucidation of Johnson’s (1993) construct of “moral imagination,” which is described qualitatively through citations to Arendt (1982, 2003), Caputo (1997, 2000, 2004), Derrida (1996, 1997, 2002a, b), Nussbaum (1999), Selznick (1984, 1992), and others. Specifically, Derrida (2002a, b) suggests that leaders have moral imagination when they interpret issues and events using the values and purpose that gave rise to the rules and principles of the organization. When an event is non-prototypical, so goes the argument, the rules and principles must be imaginatively interpreted rather than rigidly and bureaucratically applied, because such a reinterpretation is essential to initiate deliberation over an appropriate organizational response.

The first problem is that the basic constructs of the theory lack fidelity, by which I mean that the representation in the theory of the event, of the organization’s principles, and of the leader’s avenues for the expression of imagination are inexact and over-simplified and, thus, do not do justice to the ways in which both an event and the response to it develops. For example, at the AOM, the processes by which the AOM Executive Committee sought to develop a mutually held understanding of the moral issues raised by EO 13769 are not considered. The event of the issuance of EO 13769 was not independent of prior events, including especially the election two months earlier of President Trump, and the enactment of policies in other countries analogous to EO 13769. The achievement of mutual understanding across members of the AOM Executive Committee on how to resolve the competing moral claims is not theorized. The theory does not recognize that the synthesized position of the AOM Executive Committee that constituted the collective’s moral imagination was developed deliberatively, i.e., it does not consider that deliberation led to the synthetic moral imagination, not the other way around. The theory has no lens on the imaginative work done to address the tensions between competing moral claims raised by EO 13769.Footnote 10 In other words, the AOM case suggests that construct validity is problematic in the theory because, in at least this instance, the deliberative discourse is intertwined with imaginative processes and the event itself.

Second, the theory assumes without nuance that the problem faced by a leader is to enact deliberation once a non-prototypical event occurs. There is no consideration that deliberation may already be under way, as it was at the AOM and as is almost inevitable given the ubiquity of social media. There is also no contingency in the theory to account for questions about which leaders within the organization have the authority to respond on behalf of the organization. The theory does not discern between a response by a leader in the name of the organization and a response by a leader in the leader’s own name. There is no reflection in the theory on the deliberations required between leaders to discern the non-prototypicality of an event. The theory is not moderated by organizational processes, discussions, and governance decisions. For example, there is no contingency in the theory that reflects that the problem at the AOM was not one of stimulating deliberation among members, but rather one of achieving constructive dialogue among members who were not aligned in their views about the relationships between EO 13769 and the organizational principles and rules of the AOM (rather than of the meaning of EO 13769). The theory does not consider that a political event such as EO 13769 may immediately stimulate deliberations among members of an organization without leadership intervention, which thus changes the challenge for the leader from one of inciting deliberation to one of understanding, shaping, and organizing deliberation. It also does not consider that some acts construed as deliberative may be morally objectionable, such as when threats of violence arise, as they did at the AOM.

The third is that the constructs are mutually determined. The quality of deliberation already under way may influence the nature of the decision to which moral imagination is construed as relevant; and the event (prototypical or not) may be designed to disrupt organizational processes. For example, in 2016, I interpreted the US President’s attacks on the truth itself as designed instrumentally to foment discord among scholars. The communications in which I engaged, including the message analyzed in Tsoukas (2018), were part of a much broader set of interactions between me and members in which I sought to encourage, support, and cultivate the AOM’s purpose of constructive dialogue toward the resolution of important social problems. The plan of communication itself into which the message was embedded co-evolved and reflected emerging information about both the U.S. President’s immigration policies and the nature of the U.S. President’s communications online and offline. In other words, the conversations among members of the AOM, and between me as AOM President and those members, were part of the meta-events of which EO 13769 was a part. The theory employed in Tsoukas (2018, 2019) does not consider this.

The fourth is that direction of causality in the relationships between the constructs is incorrectly stipulated for at least the category of situations into which the AOM falls. At the AOM, the relationship between the NPSP and the vulnerability of scholars that preceded EO 13769 (i.e., in Turkey and China) had an important impact on the plan of communication crafted by the AOM Executive Committee and Board of which the analyzed message was a part.Footnote 11 Thus, deliberations had co-evolved with policies that employed tactics that were also engaged in the issuance of EO 13769.

Fifth, the theory is not clear on any robust approach—imaginative, deliberative, or otherwise—for discerning between politically prototypical and non-prototypical categories of events. Because judgment is required, reasonable and morally imaginative actors may disagree. At the AOM, the events that were in the politically prototypical category to which the NPSP applied included post-World War II policies for European and Japanese reconstruction; the Vietnam War and the anti-war protests of the 1960s, including those of Students for a Democratic Society, and the events of September 11, 2001 and the USA–Iraq war, and others. The AOM Executive Committee determined that EO 13769 was covered by the NPSP, which according to the theory, is aligned with the judgment that the event was politically prototypical rather than non-prototypical. This determination reflected the reason for the founding of the AOM in the 1930s, which was to provide a community that worked differently from other disciplinary associations that did make political statements.

In my role at the AOM, I personally believed in the merit of in the NPSP’s purpose, which was to cultivate civil dialogue among AOM members on matters of importance, but I did not believe that the prototypical categorization of such events that had given rise to the NPSP was sufficient given the evolution of such issues. This is why I had proposed in 2015 that the NPSP be modified. In other words, I sought to engage in a profoundly political process within the AOM of seeking to change the principles—and, by extension, the prototypicality of the categories defined by them—enacted in the NPSP. I believed that the political events within the categories had changed even though the categories themselves had not (i.e., I saw EO 13769 as prototypically political, but the nature of the prototypicality as evolving in ways that I felt threatened science and scientists). In the absence of a nuanced treatment of these compounded and complicated problems of the discernment of both prototypicality and categories, the theory leaves to the adjudicating scientist an assessment of the judgment of the leader in understanding them. As a consequence, the theory fails, for it simplifies the assessment to one of a judgment made by the scientist of the leader without considering whether the leader may be engaged in a deeply political and lengthy process of changing understanding of the categories themselves.

Finally, the theory offers no criteria for distinguishing the following situations: (a) a leader views rules narrowly and bureaucratically, without recognizing the need for their reinterpretation under changing conditions; (b) a leader views the category of an event as prototypical of those that have shaped the interpretation of a rule, but sees the categorizations implicit in the rule as inadequate to support the purpose of the rule, and thus the rule as requiring reconstitution, but is overruled in implementing the view unilaterally by a governance body with an equally legitimate mandate to conduct an interpretation; at the same time, both the leader and other governance bodies see moral imperatives emanating from an event as multi-faceted and paradoxical, and thus requiring a complex resolution that deals powerfully with relationships between these moral imperatives. At the AOM, situation (b) prevailed, and thus provides at least one case that demonstrates that the theory is insufficiently developed, for it does not consider a more complex organizational political dynamic that may break a link between a leader’s views and the organization’s response. The principles at work in such a situation are effects, and this means that there must always be an interpretative, deliberative process in deciding under which conditions it might be appropriate to alter the rules (or even to figure out what the rules mean here and now). At the AOM, the figuring out of what the NPSP meant occurred prior to, during, and after the issuance of the message that Tsoukas (2018) analyzes, in a process that was deeply and dynamically complex both organizationally and politically, and that was equally complex in its interaction with the evolution of the very event that the theory takes as conferred exogenously.

The contribution to theory claimed by Tsoukas (2018) is a judgment about whether, at the AOM, an imaginative reframing occurred. Tsoukas (2018) does not consider that organizations have missions, visions, and values that are enacted in their governance arrangements, and that an organizational leader’s charge is, among other things, to lead members who may differ in their beliefs. The suggestion in Tsoukas (2018) that I should have violated the AOM Constitution runs squarely against the purpose of the checks and balances of governance that the AOM had adopted. The six theoretical problems outlined here suggest that, because of a confounding of constructs, absent contingencies, incorrect level of analysis, inadequate treatment of organizational actors, absent treatment of interactions between organizational actors, and incorrect representations of categories and of interpretation of those categories, the theory is inadequate to address these complexities.

Tsoukas (2018) also seeks to discern a boundary between two types of moral imagination, namely disclosive power and incremental force, without stipulating the theoretical conditions that would give rise to either type, and without identifying the ways in which the constructs of power and force are attributes of imagination itself. Further, these constructs are not linked to the nuanced and complex interrelationships between organizational leaders, each with authority and responsibility for implementing conflicting principles, in interpreting and understanding the meaning of events surrounding the organization. With no discussion of construct validity, and no criteria linking the constructs through the organization to the meaningful actions taken by the organization’s leaders, the contribution is not theoretically robust.

Conceptual Problems

This section points to three broad conceptual problems in the literature on which Tsoukas (2018) rests. The first is that the theory incorporates a prototypical, industrial-era conceptualization of organizational leadership and deliberation that is insufficient for supporting analysis of the moral imperatives that leaders face in non-hierarchical organizations with complex governance structures. The second is that theory does not deal with the emergence of new types of political events that are specifically and instrumentally taken to challenge legitimacy of the totality of the principles that gave rise to an organization. The third is that the theory divorces the responsibilities of the leader from the veracity and character of the leader’s beliefs about morality. In this section, I briefly review each of these issues.

The first conceptual challenge relates to the lack of adaptation of core constructs and stipulated relationships to twenty-first-century organizations, communication processes, and leadership imperatives. For example, at the AOM, members deliberated over EO 13769 intensively and continuously through social media, web platforms, blogs, e-mail, and other systems. The creation of meaning and the interpretation of events are not primarily vested in the leader, but rather constitute an emergent and evolving event of its own, such as at the AOM immediately after EO 13769. But the theory does not consider that what may be non-prototypical is the character and quality of the deliberations among members (e.g., as incivil). Similarly, the nature of the AOM as an organization had evolved significantly over the years since its founding to reshape the relative authority and responsibilities of its governance bodies, including the Divisions and Interest Group leaders, the AOM Executive Committee, the AOM Board, and the AOM President. By the time of EO 13769, many rules and principles had accumulated to interact with the NPSP and the restrictions on presidential voice. Yet the theory does not consider these evolutions or interactions.

The second is that the theory does not deal with situations in which a leader believes that the seminal event that gives rise to the need for reinterpretation is designed specifically to evoke that reinterpretation. In other words, in the current era of ubiquitous news cycles, constant surveillance, and mechanisms of digital deliberation, one type of political act is to use these mechanisms of communication to disrupt the activities of organizations that would resist their cooption. The theory takes no perspective on itself by not offering boundary conditions on its application.

Third, the theory does not consider the substance of the leader’s beliefs about what is moral and immoral, which can lead to a perverse assessment through its application of the quality and character of a leader’s response. Zenger in Davis et al. (2019) points to a profound irony in Tsoukas (2018): “After all, the executive order that prompted this moral dilemma for the Academy of Management’s leadership was precipitated by a leader who in pursuit of a ‘moral agenda’ that the vast majority of AOM membership presumably viewed as abhorrent, exercised precisely such ‘moral imagination,’ viewing US laws not as rules, but rather as ‘reminders,’ at best” (Zenger in Davis et al. 2019). By resting the assessment of the morality of the leader on the link between the leader’s imagination and action, the theory distances itself from the nature of the moral problem that gives rise to the imaginative act. The morality of the beliefs of the leader in situ cannot be set aside in the assessment. Similarly, the morality of the beliefs of the scientist about the event must be interrogated.

Each of these problems points to opportunities for further scholarship. Additional theorizing is needed to understand the relationships between digital deliberation and the evolution of principles of organization under non-prototypical and even prototypical political events. The instrumental evocation of organizational crisis through non-prototypical political acts must be considered. And the theory must be developed to consider how the substance and character of the moral beliefs of a leader stand up in light of the organization’s principles.

Conclusion

This paper points to problems of fact, methods, theory, and concepts in Tsoukas (2018) to demonstrate that the literature on prototypicality and moral imagination are insufficiently developed to reflect the complexity of the interactions that unfold in situations such as at the AOM in 2017. At the AOM, the message analyzed in Tsoukas (2018) responded to deliberations that were already under way, and was one among more than ten thousand interactions that I had with members through a wide range of media: e-mails, web posts, presentations, phone calls, in-person meetings, Committee meetings, conference calls, and task force charges, among others. I interacted with members in these ways because I was committed to strengthening the AOM as an institution of science through scholarly dialogue, which was the principle behind the NPSP that I sought to support, and that I felt was threatened by EO 13769. I wanted the scholars of the AOM to deploy their best and distinctive capabilities to demonstrate the social consequences of the weaponization of falsehoods as truths, and of the immoral and racist policies deployed in the U.S. against vulnerable immigrants. The AOM’s members are uniquely capable of contributing to public understanding of what is happening in the world around us. A condition of the AOM mission is that scholarly dialogue is not only possible, but that it is the most constructive and significant way in which scholars can remediate social divisions (Adler in Stackman et al. 2019; Bartunek in Pirson et al. 2019; Pirson in Pirson et al. 2019; Philips in Pirson et al. 2019; Ozkazanc-Pan and Donnelly in Davis et al. 2019; Rasche in Davis et al. 2019; Tsui in Davis et al. 2019; McGahan 2017a, b, 2018, 2019).

We make important choices in moments like this. Stackman and Martin de Holan in Stackman et al. (2019) invite us to ‘renounce aggression’ in the face of policies such as EO 13769, and instead to engage in civil scholarly dialogue. All of us—as scholars—have an opportunity to recognize, embody, and enliven our roles in protecting the truth in society, whatever we believe that truth to be. Whether purposefully or not, if we use the tools of our profession to represent falsehoods as if they are true, then we discredit our profession, reduce the standing of our journals, erode the foundations of scholarly association, legitimize divisiveness, and harm those we could have helped. My moral imagination over EO 13769 was that we could deploy our best capabilities to pursue rigorous scholarship with humanity, compassion, and integrity, which is what the AOM’s NPSP was designed to encourage. What had changed was the moral character of prototypical political events and the nature and timeline of deliberation. The theory and concepts employed in the literature on which both the original and corrected versions of Tsoukas (2018) relies do not account for these changes or the challenges that they create. Therefore, I call for scholarship on them as I did in the message that Tsoukas (2018) analyzes (see Exhibit 1).