Abstract
How do employees navigate a perpetual state of moral uncertainty caused by their organisational context? We addressed this question through a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of employees’ interview accounts of working in the British defence industry. The employees work in an environment of moral uncertainty, given that the industry produces weapons and military equipment for the British armed forces and global trade for use in conflicts around the world. This presents moral challenges for employees as reflexive social actors, yet these are not acknowledged or discussed at the institutional level. We argue that this constitutes a form of institutional wilful ignorance, compounding the effects of moral uncertainty we investigate. Our work contributes to existing research in three main ways: by establishing the existence and identifying examples of experiences of moral uncertainty as an ongoing characteristic of a working environment; by introducing a life course perspective to explore the social construction of positions people take towards a morally uncertain environment; and by identifying practices of wilful ignorance from defence organisations, and some of its employees.