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Business without Management: MacIntyrean Accounting, Management, and Practice-Led Business Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Andrew West
Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of managerial capitalism is well known, with some arguing that MacIntyrean thought is antithetical to contemporary capitalist business. Nevertheless, substantial efforts have been taken to demonstrate how different business activities constitute MacIntyrean practices, which points to an incoherence at the heart of MacIntyrean business ethics scholarship. This article proposes
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It’s a Three-Ring Circus: How Morally Educative Practices Are Undermined by Institutions Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Ron Beadle, Matthew Sinnicks
Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981, tensions inherent to the relationship between morally educative practices and the institutions that house them have been widely noted. We propose a taxonomy of the ways in which the pursuit of external goods by institutions undermines the pursuit of the internal goods of practices. These comprise substitution, where the institution
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The Virtue of External Goods in Action Sports Practice Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Glen Whelan
Consistent with the idea that business ethics is a form of applied ethics, many virtue ethicists make use of an extant (pure) moral philosophy framework, namely, one developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. In doing so, these authors have refined MacIntyre’s work, but have never really challenged it. In here questioning, and developing an alternative to, the MacIntyrean orthdoxy, I illustrate the merit of
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The Ethics of Deferred Prosecution Agreements for MNEs Culpable of Foreign Corruption: Relativistic Pragmatism or Devil’s Pact? Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Glauco De Vita, Donato Vozza
Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are legal means, alternative to trial, for the resolution of criminal business cases. Although DPAs are increasingly used in the US and are spreading to other jurisdictions, the ethics of DPAs has hardly been subjected to critical scrutiny. We use a multidisciplinary approach straddling the line between philosophy and law to examine the ethics of DPAs used to
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Can Digitally Transformed Work Be Virtuous? Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Alejo José G. Sison
This essay inquires whether digitally transformed work can be virtuous and under what conditions. It eschews technological determinism in both utopian and dystopian versions, opting for the premise of free human agency. This work is distinctive in adopting an actor-centric and explicitly ethical analysis based on neo-Aristotelian, Catholic social teaching (CST), and MacIntyrean teachings on the virtues
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Leader Authenticity and Ethics: A Heideggerian Perspective Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Florence Villesèche, Anders Klitmøller, Cathrine Bjørnholt Michaelsen
In the shadow of various business scandals and societal crises, scholars and practitioners have developed a growing interest in authentic leadership. This approach to leadership assumes that leaders may access and leverage their “true selves” and “core values” and that the combination of these two elements forms the basis from which they act resolutely, lead ethically, and benefit others. Drawing on
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Psychological Reactance to Leader Moral Hypocrisy Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 McKenzie R. Rees, Isaac H. Smith, Andrew T. Soderberg
Drawing on early work on ethical leadership, we argue that when leaders engage in leader moral hypocrisy (i.e., ethical promotion without ethical demonstration), followers can experience psychological reactance—a negative response to a perceived restriction of freedom—which can have negative downstream consequences. In a survey of employee–manager dyads (study 1), we demonstrate that leader moral hypocrisy
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Self-Authorship through Mutual Benefit: Toward a Liberal Theory of the Virtues in Business Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Caleb Bernacchio
This article develops a liberal theory of the virtues in business. I first articulate two key liberal values embodied within market society: self-authorship and mutual benefit. Self-authorship is a mode of autonomy given expression through the effective exercise of economic liberties. Mutual benefit involves the intentional pursuit of the well-being of one’s transaction partners within economic exchange
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When Are Norms Prescriptive? Understanding and Clarifying the Role of Norms in Behavioral Ethics Research Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Tobey K. Scharding, Danielle E. Warren
Research on ethical norms has grown in recent years, but imprecise language has made it unclear when these norms prescribe “what ought to be” and when they merely describe behaviors or perceptions (“what is”). Studies of ethical norms, moreover, tend not to investigate whether participants were influenced by the prescriptive aspect of the norm; the studies primarily demonstrate, rather, that people
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A Sociological Perspective on Meaningful Work: Community versus Autonomy Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Andrey Bykov
In this article, I present a sociological approach to the problem of meaningful work that dwells on its broad social and cultural sources, as opposed to the focus on subjective and organizational factors currently prevailing in the field. Specifically, I consider two sociological perspectives, those of community and autonomy, as important conceptual tools for understanding the ambivalent character
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Multi-stakeholder Initiatives and Legitimacy: A Deliberative Systems Perspective Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Kristin Apffelstaedt, Stephanie Schrage, Dirk Ulrich Gilbert
The legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as institutions for social and environmental governance in the global economy has received much scholarly attention over the past years. To date, however, research has yet to focus on assessing the legitimacy of MSIs in their interactions with other actors within larger systems of deliberation. Drawing on the deliberative systems perspective developed
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Can Welfare Economics Justify Corporate Philanthropy? Proposing the Philanthropy Multiplier as a Metric for Evaluating Corporate Philanthropic Expenditures Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-08-07 William English
Much business ethics and corporate social responsibility literature suggests, implicitly or explicitly, that firms ought to engage in activities that can be characterized as philanthropy, namely, expending resources beyond what is required by law and market norms to promote others’ welfare at the expense of firm profits. However, this literature has struggled to provide a normative framework for evaluating
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New Challenges to the Enlightenment: How Twenty-First-Century Sociotechnological Systems Facilitate Organized Immaturity and How to Counteract It Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Andreas Georg Scherer, Cristina Neesham, Dennis Schoeneborn, Markus Scholz
Organized immaturity, the reduction of individual capacities for public use of reason constrained by sociotechnological systems, constitutes a significant pushback against the project of Enlightenment. Forms of immaturity have long been a concern for philosophers and social theorists, such as Kant, Arendt, Fromm, Marcuse, and Foucault. Recently, Zuboff’s concept of “surveillance capitalism” describes
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Lying about Reservation Prices in Business Negotiation: A Qualified Defense Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Alan Strudler
This essay offers a philosophical defense of deception about reservation prices in business negotiation. Its discussion is prompted by arguments that Charles N.C. Sherwood makes in a recent issue of Business Ethics Quarterly and develops ideas I put forward in an earlier issue of Business Ethics Quarterly. The essay argues that although reservation price deception cannot be justified by appeal to the
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Exploitation and the Desirability of Unenforced Law Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-04-14 Robert C. Hughes
Many business transactions and employment contracts are wrongfully exploitative despite being consensual and beneficial to both parties, compared with a nontransaction baseline. This form of exploitation can present governments with a dilemma. Legally permitting exploitation may send the message that the public condones it. In some economic conditions, coercively enforced antiexploitation law may harm
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Vocabularies of Motive for Corporate Social Responsibility: The Emergence of the Business Case in Germany, 1970–2014 Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-04-14 Nora Lohmeyer, Gregory Jackson
The business case constitutes an important instrumental motive for corporate social responsibility (CSR), but its relationship with other moral and relational motives remains controversial. In this article, we examine the articulation of motives for CSR among different stakeholders in Germany historically. On the basis of reports of German business associations, state agencies, unions, and nongovernmental
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The Moral Permissibility of Digital Nudging in the Workplace: Reconciling Justification and Legitimation Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-04-14 Rebecca C. Ruehle
Organisations increasingly use digital nudges to influence their workforces’ behaviour without coercion or incentives. This can expose employees to arbitrary domination by infringing on their autonomy through manipulation and indoctrination. Nudges might furthermore give rise to the phenomenon of “organised immaturity.” Adopting a balanced approach between overly optimistic and dystopian standpoints
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Ethical Culture in Organizations: A Review and Agenda for Future Research Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Achinto Roy, Alexander Newman, Heather Round, Sukanto Bhattacharya
We review and synthesize over two decades of research on ethical culture in organizations, examining eighty-nine relevant scholarly works. Our article discusses the conceptualization of ethical culture in a cross-disciplinary space and its critical role in ethical decision-making. With a view to advancing future research, we analyze the antecedents, outcomes, and mediator and moderator roles of ethical
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How Digital Platforms Organize Immaturity: A Sociosymbolic Framework of Platform Power Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Martín Harracá, Itziar Castelló, Annabelle Gawer
The power of the digital platforms and the increasing scope of their control over individuals and institutions have begun to generate societal concern. However, the ways in which digital platforms exercise power and organize immaturity—defined as the erosion of the individual’s capacity for public use of reason—have not yet been theorized sufficiently. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capitals
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A Pharmacological Perspective on Technology-Induced Organised Immaturity: The Care-giving Role of the Arts Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Ana Alacovska, Peter Booth, Christian Fieseler
Digital technologies induce organised immaturity by generating toxic sociotechnical conditions that lead us to delegate autonomous, individual, and responsible thoughts and actions to external technological systems. Aiming to move beyond a diagnostic critical reading of the toxicity of digitalisation, we bring Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological analysis of technology into dialogue with the ethics of
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Hiring, Algorithms, and Choice: Why Interviews Still Matter Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Vikram R. Bhargava, Pooria Assadi
Why do organizations conduct job interviews? The traditional view of interviewing holds that interviews are conducted, despite their steep costs, to predict a candidate’s future performance and fit. This view faces a twofold threat: the behavioral and algorithmic threats. Specifically, an overwhelming body of behavioral research suggests that we are bad at predicting performance and fit; furthermore
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Corporate Moral Credit Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Grant J. Rozeboom
When do companies deserve moral credit for doing what is right? This question concerns the positive side of corporate moral responsibility, the negative side of which is the more commonly discussed issue of when companies are blameworthy for doing what is wrong. I offer a broadly functionalist account of how companies can act from morally creditworthy motives, which defuses the following Strawsonian
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Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Challenges and Prospects of Deliberative Democracy for Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Dirk Ulrich Gilbert, Andreas Rasche, Maximilian J. L. Schormair, Abraham Singer
This introduction argues that the use of the concept of deliberative democracy in corporate social responsibility (CSR) research needs to be theoretically extended. We review three developments that have recently occurred in deliberative democracy theory within political science and philosophy: 1) the conceptualization of deliberative systems (macro level), 2) the considerations of mini-publics (micro
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Who Counts in Business Ethics Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Kirsten Martin
The discipline of business ethics has been slow to include Big Tech as a worthwhile object of examination. My goal in this presidential address is to make the case that the discipline of business ethics is overlooking novel harms and marginalized stakeholders in emerging and impactful technology industries. Furthermore, although the discipline is improving, the persistent narrowness of our field inhibits
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Care in Management: A Review and Justification of an Organizational Value Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Denis G. Arnold, Roxanne L. Ross
Care has increasingly been promoted as an element of successful management practice. However, an ethic of care is a normative theory that was initially developed in reference to intimate relationships, and it is unclear if it is an appropriate normative standard in business. The purpose of this review is to bridge the social scientific study of care with philosophical understandings of care and to
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Moral Disjunction and Role Coadunation in Business and the Professions Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Rita Mota, Alan D. Morrison
We consider the problem of moral disjunction in professional and business activities from a virtue-ethical perspective. Moral disjunction arises when the behavioral demands of a role conflict with personal morality; it is an important problem because most people in modern societies occupy several complex roles that can cause this clash to occur. We argue that moral disjunction, and the psychological
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Dark Sides of Data Transparency: Organized Immaturity After GDPR? Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Frederik Schade
Organized immaturity refers to the capacity of widely institutionalized sociotechnical systems to challenge qualities of human enlightenment, autonomy, and self-determination. In the context of surveillance capitalism, where these qualities are continuously put at risk, data transparency is increasingly proposed as a means of restoring human maturity by allowing individuals insight and choice vis-à-vis
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Toward a Theory of Marginalized Stakeholder-Centric Entrepreneurship Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Rashedur Chowdhury, Saras D. Sarasvathy, R. Edward Freeman
The neglect of marginalized stakeholders is a colossal problem in both stakeholder and entrepreneurship streams of literature. To address this problem, we offer a theory of marginalized stakeholder-centric entrepreneurship. We conceptualize how firms can utilize marginalized stakeholder input actualization through which firms should process a variety of ideas, resources, and interactions with marginalized
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Technology, Maturity, and Craft: Making Vinyl Records in the Digital Age Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2023-01-18 Robin Holt, Rene Wiedner
Drawing from Michel Foucault’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” and specifically his definition of ascesis, we associate maturity with a capacity for, and interest in, forming the self. On the basis of an empirical study of making vinyl records following the successful commercialization of digital media, we identify micro-disciplinary techniques of self-forming that emerge
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The Role of Deliberative Mini-Publics in Improving the Deliberative Capacity of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-09-22 Simon Pek, Sébastien Mena, Brent Lyons
Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs)—private governance mechanisms involving firms, civil society organizations, and other actors deliberating to set rules, such as standards or codes of conduct, with which firms comply voluntarily—have become important tools for governing global business activities and the social and environmental consequences of these activities. Yet, this growth is paralleled with
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What’s the Point of Efficiency? On Heath’s Market Failures Approach Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-09-20 Richard Endörfer, Louis Larue
This article reviews and criticizes Joseph Heath’s market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics. Our criticism is organized into three sections. First, we argue that, even under the ideal assumptions of perfect competition, when markets generate Pareto-efficient distributions, Heath’s approach does not rule out significant harms. Second, we show that, under nonideal conditions, the MFA is either
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Prudent Entrepreneurship in Theory of Moral Sentiments Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Kacey Reeves West
Adam Smith writes favorably about innovation in Wealth of Nations while writing unfavorably about a figure associated with innovation: the projector. His criticism of projectors prompts many scholars to claim that Smith disapproves of entrepreneurship. But Smith criticizes the projector not because he acts as an entrepreneur but because he fails to meet Smith’s moral standards for entrepreneurship
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Site-seeing Humanness in Organizations Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Tuure Haarjärvi, Sari Laari-Salmela
In this study, we theorize humanness in organizations as a property of practice. We apply practice theory to examine how humanness becomes enacted in a business organization as people prioritize organizational and individual ends in their work activities. Our empirical case study examines the everyday interactions of development team members in an R&D organization of a large Nordic cooperative. Challenging
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Free Markets and Public Interests in the Pharmaceutical Industry: A Comparative Analysis of Catholic and Reformational Critiques of Neoliberal Thought Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-06-24 Mathilde Oosterhuis-Blok, Johan Graafland
The rise of liberal market economies, propagated by neoliberal free market thought, has created a vacant responsibility for public interests in the market order of society. This development has been critiqued by Catholic social teaching (CST), forcefully arguing that governments and businesses should be directed to the common good. In this debate, no attention has yet been given to the Reformational
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Taylor-ing Ethics: Implications of Charles Taylor’s Work of Retrieval on Moral Foundations Theory Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-06-24 Carolyn T. Dang
This article draws from Charles Taylor’s work of retrieval to advance moral foundations theory (MFT). Taylor’s contribution to MFT lies in his insistence that we retrieve the moral sources that have helped constitute, substantiate, and give meaning to individuals’ moral sensibilities. Applying Taylor’s insights to MFT, this article seeks to advance a view of moral foundations that connects them more
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Sweatshops, Exploitation, and the Nonworseness Claim Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Michael Kates
According to the nonworseness claim, it cannot be morally worse to exploit someone than not to interact with them at all when the interaction 1) is mutually beneficial, 2) is voluntary, and 3) has no negative effects on third parties. My aim in this article is to defend the moral significance of exploitation from this challenge. To that end, I develop a novel account of why sweatshop owners have a
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Moral Repair: Toward a Two-Level Conceptualization Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-05-02 Jordi Vives-Gabriel, Wim Van Lent, Florian Wettstein
Moral repair is an important way for firms to heal moral relationships with stakeholders following a transgression. The concept is rooted in recognition theory, which is often used to develop normative perspectives and prescriptions, but the same theory has also propelled a view of moral repair as premised on negotiation between offender and victim(s), which involves the complex social construction
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The Dark Side of Status at Work: Perceived Status Importance, Envy, and Interpersonal Deviance Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Niki A. den Nieuwenboer, Jennifer J. Kish-Gephart, Linda K. Treviño, Ann C. Peng, Iris Reychav
Organizations differ in the extent to which they emphasize the importance of status, yet most extant research on the role of status at work has utilized a limited view of status as merely a matter of a person’s status rank. In contrast, we examine people’s perceptions of the extent to which having status matters in their work context and explore the behavioral implications of such perceptions. We offer
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The Challenge of Implementing Voluntary Sustainability Standards: A Dynamic Framework on the Tension between Adherence and Adaptation Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-04-08 Lucrezia Nava, Maja Tampe
Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) aim to encourage ethical behaviors of organizations, yet studies show that many VSS adopters do not live up to these promises. Existing literature typically attributes the reason for this ineffectiveness to either policy–practice decoupling, owing to a lack of adhering to VSS requirements, or means–ends decoupling, owing to a lack of adapting to the local context
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The Role of Accountability in Workplace Democracy Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-04-08 Galina Goncharenko
Roberto Frega argues for the advancement of workplace democracy theorisation by synergising the conceptual pathways of various disciplines. He places a particular emphasis on the practice of employee involvement, which, according to him, constitutes one of the three pillars of workplace democracy, the other two being voice and representation. The present commentary broadens the interdisciplinary horizons
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Corporate Responsibility for Wealth Creation and Human Rights, by Georges Enderle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 332 pp. Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Marcos Paulo de Lucca-Silveira
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Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism, by Christopher Marquis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 312 pp. Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Raquel Antolín-López
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When Workplace Norms Conflict: Using Intersubjective Reflection to Guide Ethical Decision-Making Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Tobey K. Scharding, Danielle E. Warren
We address how to ethically evaluate workplace practices when workplace behavioral norms conflict with employees’ attitudes toward those norms, which, according to research on psychological contract violations, regularly occurs. Drawing on Scanlonian contractualism, we introduce the intersubjective reflection process (IR process). The IR process ethically evaluates workplace practices according to
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The Ethics of Alternative Currencies Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Louis Larue, Camille Meyer, Marek Hudon, Joakim Sandberg
Alternative currencies are means of payment that circulate alongside—as an alternative or complement to—official currencies. While these currencies have existed for a long time, both society and academia have shown a renewed interest in their potential to decentralize the governance of monetary affairs and to bring people and organizations together in more ethical or sustainable ways. This article
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The Contingent Role of Conflict: Deliberative Interaction and Disagreement in Shareholder Engagement Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-02-10 Irene Beccarini, Daniel Beunza, Fabrizio Ferraro, Andreas G. F. Hoepner
How is the tension between conflict and deliberation resolved in shareholder engagement? We address this question by studying shareholder engagement as a deliberative process with three stages: establishing dialogue, solution development, and solution implementation. We theorize that two interactionist mechanisms, deliberative interaction and the voicing of disagreement, play different roles at different
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Deep Learning Meets Deep Democracy: Deliberative Governance and Responsible Innovation in Artificial Intelligence Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Alexander Buhmann, Christian Fieseler
Responsible innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) calls for public deliberation: well-informed “deep democratic” debate that involves actors from the public, private, and civil society sectors in joint efforts to critically address the goals and means of AI. Adopting such an approach constitutes a challenge, however, due to the opacity of AI and strong knowledge boundaries between experts and
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“Woke” Corporations and the Stigmatization of Corporate Social Initiatives Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Danielle E. Warren
Recent corporate social initiatives (CSIs) have garnered criticisms from a wide range of audiences due to perceived inconsistencies. Some critics use the label “woke” when CSIs are perceived as inconsistent with the firm’s purpose. Other critics use the label “woke washing” when CSIs are perceived as inconsistent with the firm’s practices or values. I will argue that this derogatory use of woke is
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Editorial Musings on What Makes the Blood Flow in Business Ethics Research Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Frank den Hond,Mollie Painter
The editorial essay, such as this one, in which incoming editors in chief to a reputed academic journal present their viewsof a field, their strategy for a journal, and how they are going to impact an ongoing ecology of academic discourses, is a strange genre. Its authors traverse the tightrope stretched between change and continuity, seeking to inspire and renewwithout alienating the community on
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Overlooked Thinkers: Stretching the Boundaries of Business Ethics Scholarship (Guest Editors’ Introduction) – Corrigendum Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Andrew Wicks,Lindsay Thompson,Patricia Werhane,Norman Bowie
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The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, by Katharina Pistor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. 297 pp. Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Thomas Mulligan
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Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance, by Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 232 pp. Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Kenneth Silver
F inancial markets may be mercurial in their own right, but Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely seem to view finance a bit like mercury itself: it can be useful, but it’s dangerous and makes for bad medicine. Though finance has been around for thousands of years, the book charts the recent rise and proliferation of finance and financial markets—primarily in the United States over the last forty years—and
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The Ethics of Employment-at-Will: An Institutional Complementarities Approach Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2021-12-23 Vikram R. Bhargava, Carson Young
Employment-at-will (EAW) is the legal presumption that employers and employees may terminate an employment relationship for any or no reason. Defenders of EAW have argued that it promotes autonomy and efficiency. Critics have argued that it allows for the domination, subordination, and arbitrary treatment of employees. We intervene in this debate by arguing that the case for EAW is contextual in a
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A Lie Is a Lie: The Ethics of Lying in Business Negotiations Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2021-12-23 Charles N. C. Sherwood
I argue that lying in business negotiations is pro tanto wrong and no less wrong than lying in other contexts. First, I assert that lying in general is pro tanto wrong. Then, I examine and refute five arguments to the effect that lying in a business context is less wrong than lying in other contexts. The common thought behind these arguments—based on consent, self-defence, the “greater good,” fiduciary
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Wage Exploitation as Disequilibrium Price Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2021-12-23 Stanislas Richard
There are two opposing views concerning intuitive cases of wage exploitation. The first denies that they are cases of exploitation at all. It is based on the nonworseness claim: there is nothing wrong with a discretionary mutually beneficial employment relationship. The second is the reasonable view: some employment relationships can be exploitative even if employers have no duty towards their employees
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Ideologies of Corporate Responsibility: From Neoliberalism to “Varieties of Liberalism” Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2021-12-10 Steen Vallentin, David Murillo
Critical scholarship often presents corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a reflection or embodiment of neoliberalism. Against this sort of sweeping political characterization we argue that CSR can indeed be considered a liberal concept but that it embodies a “varieties of liberalism.” Building theoretically on the work of Michael Freeden on liberal languages, John Ruggie and Karl Polanyi on embedded
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Affects in Online Stakeholder Engagement: A Dissensus Perspective Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2021-12-09 Itziar Castelló, David Lopez-Berzosa
A predominant assumption in studies of deliberative democracy is that stakeholder engagements will lead to rational consensus and to a common discourse on corporate social and environmental responsibilities. Challenging this assumption, we show that conflict is ineradicable and important and that affects constitute the dynamics of change of the discourses of responsibilities. On the basis of an analysis
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Islands of Deliberative Capacity in an Ocean of Authoritarian Control? The Deliberative Potential of Self-Organised Teams in Firms Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2021-12-03 Alexander Krüger
Business firms play an increasingly influential role in contemporary societies, which has led many scholars to return to the question of the democratisation of corporate governance. However, the possibility of democratic deliberation within firms has received only marginal attention in the current debate. This article fills this gap in the literature by making a normative case for democratic deliberation
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Tackling Grand Challenges beyond Dyads and Networks: Developing a Stakeholder Systems View Using the Metaphor of Ballet Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2021-11-19 Thomas J. Roulet, Joel Bothello
Tackling grand challenges requires coordination and sustained effort among multiple organizations and stakeholders. Yet research on stakeholder theory has been conceptually constrained in capturing this complexity: existing accounts tend to focus either on dyadic level firm–stakeholder ties or on stakeholder networks within which the focal organization is embedded. We suggest that addressing grand
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Feminist Epistemology and Business Ethics Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Lauren Kaufmann
Neoclassical economics has become the predominant school of economic thought, influencing scholarship on management, organizations, and business ethics. However, many feminist economists challenge the individualist and positivist foundations of neoclassical economic epistemology, arguing instead that purportedly gender-neutral and value-free methods routinely and systematically leave out and undervalue
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Pandemics at Work: Convergence of Epidemiology and Ethics Business Ethics Quarterly (IF 4.697) Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Michele Thornton, William “Marty” Martin
Like COVID-19, new infectious disease outbreaks emerge almost annually, and studies predict that this trend will continue due to a variety of factors, including an aging population, ease of travel, and globalization of the economy. In response to episodic public health crises, governments and organizations develop, implement, and enforce policies, procedures, protocols, and programs. The epidemiological