Integrity and Agency: Being True to the Self

Abstract

Beginning with the case of Alan Greenspan and related credit crisis issues, this chapter first sets out the first mode of responsibility: attributability. Attributability focuses on causation, expressed in effective decision-making and the practice of critical agency and self-governance. Agency is analysed in holistic terms of critical relationship to ideas (cognitive); values, especially ethical values (affective); practice (based in time and space); worth, not simply self-esteem but a sense of worth, focused in purpose, and worldview; and the social and physical environment (interactive and interconnected). From responsibility for reflection on the whole person or organization the chapter then looks at views of the self in relation to plurality, based on development, narrative and dialogue. Built on a social constructionist view of identity, personal and organizational, this suggests a view of integrity as dynamic and continuously developing re-presentation of the plural self.