Considering the important role of organizations in the tackling of today’s grand societal challenges, organization and management scholars are increasingly asked to engage in prescriptive theorizing (i.e., theorizing about ideal organizational action). However, current prescriptive theorizing is widely based on conceptual work which has been criticized as utopian and too broad in its recommendations for organizational action. Consequently, scholars call for empirical prescriptive approaches to develop realistic understandings about ‘good’ organizations and concrete recommendations for action. To answer these calls, we develop a new moral-based prescriptive qualitative empirical approach for research at the intersection of normativity and organization. As our systematic literature review shows, this approach complements existing qualitative empirical research approaches which have, so far, focussed either on description or followed a prescriptive approach with an ethical life based understanding of normativity. We contribute to literature at the intersection of normativity and organization by outlining a novel methodological approach that facilitates an empiricallygrounded and philosophically-informed understanding of what a ‘good’ organization is. Our study demonstrates that empirical work and a prescriptive, philosophically-informed motivation are complementary rather than incompatible poles in research at the intersection of normativity and organization.
