Managerial technologies, ethics and managing

This paper engages with a key element of Legge's work: the relationship between the technical and the moral in the application of managerial technologies, and how managers manage these different layers of meaning. Taking business planning and performance measurement as an example of managerial technologies, these are analysed for the extent to which they allow for an engagement with an ethical position, using Legge's (1978) characterization of the role of managerial technologies originally identified in Power, Innovation and Problem Solving in Personnel Management. The inter-related elements of the technical, the ethical and the practical are then used to explore how managers construct the meaning of management and their implications for Legge's more recent deontological and teleological ethical framework.