Virtue re-coding: How institutional voids shape ethical practice in international business

Shared moral vocabularies recur across the Arab world, yet senior executives enact them differently across institutional settings. Drawing on a comparative case study of 45 interviews with Muslim and Christian executives in Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt, we ask how shared moral resources are re-coded across distinct institutional voids. We develop a mechanism-based account of virtue re-coding: virtue vocabularies such as reputation (sumʿa) and patience (sabr), and morally contested relational practices such as intermediation (wasta), acquire distinct functional meanings through void-specific legitimacy tests. Coordination, security, and procedural voids are associated with three recurring patterns of ethical bricolage, navigational, survivalist, and hierarchical, within which legitimacy calibration modulates enactment through relative legitimacy positioning. Actors also draw the ethics/corruption boundary around wasta differently across voids. The study contributes to IB ethics by explaining how shared virtues become context-specific moral practices, with implications for compliance design and mixed-method extension.