Mission Driven

In recent years, the term "mission-driven" has become so ubiquitous, it is difficult to determine what organizations are not mission-driven. Its ubiquitousness signals something important, however: that we expect organizations to be moral actors that hold beliefs.

In this book, Sorcha A. Brophy describes organizational politics that occur around the creation of policies on hot button topics like gay marriage, racial diversity, and abortion, arguing that regardless of whether or not members of organizations abide by ethics standards, the creation of these standards matters a great deal. Rather than serving primarily as a resource for guiding daily practice, organizational ethics standards are chiefly important because their creation (or adjustment) provides opportunities for organization members to engage with an imagined moral infrastructure. By creating and repairing ethics standards, members are able to understand their actions as guided by a systematic design and undergirded by stable principles.

In practice, these moral infrastructures are not actually comprehensively designed, or truly stable. Consequently, there is ongoing work that organizations must engage in to repair perceived inconsistencies in the moral infrastructure. Brophy shines a light on this backstage work done by "custodians" at the center of organizations to maintain, and repair underlying moral infrastructures.