A Narrative Enquiry About Expatriates’ Situated Moral Agency in Confronting Ethical Problems

Abstract

Expatriates may have to confront ethical problems during their international assignments that are difficult to resolve. By conducting a narrative enquiry concerning expatriates’ lived experiences, this study reveals the actions they understand as morally right in situations that raise ethical problems during their international assignments and how they justify those actions. We drew research data from 20 interviews with Finnish expatriates who worked in China or the United States (US). Relying on basic tenets of moral agency theory, we conducted a narrative analysis of the data to theorize the expatriates’ actions and identified three forms of moral agency: “instructed moral agency”, “business-based moral agency” and “stagnant moral agency”. The expatriates’ narrative construction of moral agency proved to be a dynamic process influenced by both rational and emotional considerations—they are not only contingent on their specific situatedness but also ambiguous, contradictory, and, at times, strategic. We propose that situated moral agency is a useful concept for theoretically and empirically examining expatriates’ moral actions in the future.