Useful Friendships: A Foundation for Business Ethics

"Friendship", for Aristotle, is a term with "focal meaning" which denominates relationships as casual as “fellow travelers on a voyage”, as permanent as spouses, and whose motives are as various as the commercial, military, religious, sexual, political and the virtuous. What can be said of all these relationships is that they involve a solidarity, a concordat, a reciprocity, which has its foundation in a common field between the parties and which produces common actions or exchanges. All friendships tend to equality in the sense that they do not insist on ‘what is due’ as an ultimate end; friendship, like equity, surpasses justice in the fulfillment of what is owed. Because friendship fosters solidarity and justice it is politically important as a virtue-context, according to Aristotle. Is it possible that friendship can function as a virtue-context within economic life as well? Aristotle's notion of a type of useful friendship which functions through expectation of moral behavior will be shown to provide both motive and context for the performance of acts of virtue in a business setting.     

Barriers to Increased Market-Oriented Activity: What the Literature Suggests

Most research on market orientation has dealt with assessing how market orientation behaviour is related to business performance. This work has established an intense market-oriented activity as significantly and positively related to business performance under most circumstances. In a maturing field of research and practice the question on how to design programs for building market orientation is about to be answered. This branch looks deeper into the nature of market orientation and into designing and managing the increase of market orientation. However, the question on why marketing and related activities still seem to attract relatively few resources is not answered by supplying another checklist or package of facilitators. Based on published conceptual writings and empirical studies this article makes an account of what the intra-organizational barriers may be to increased market-oriented activity. A framework of six generic domains is suggested: Organizational structure, human resource management, market-oriented activity competence, psychological climate, managers' personality characteristics, and individually held beliefs. A model is suggested interrelating the domains.     

Marketing in five “simple” questions!

Peters (1987) describes how after some of his seminars he is asked “But what do I DO?”. This question is also often directed at people who have been introducing marketing ideas to businessmen—particularly businessmen whose work does not bring them into contact with customers. This article explains how anybody can start to think in marketing terms by asking five simple questions about the organisation they work for. “Simple” to ask, but requiring disciplined thought if answers are to be found which lead to appropriate managerial actions. “Difficult” to answer not least because the answers to each question affect the answers given to the others. In doing so it also introduces a number of basic but important marketing concepts.     

Compliance and the Illusion of Ethical Progress

It has become common for business practitioners and management scholars to distinguish between compliance and ethics. According to the conventional distinction as expressed in Paine’s formulation of Integrity Strategy, compliance is ordinarily a necessary but insufficient condition for ethics. Now that this distinction has been institutionalized in the most significant judicial, legislative, and regulatory developments in American business conduct management since the Enron failure, it is worth asking whether the current emphasis on ethics represents progress. Does it make logical and practical sense to impose ethics as a compliance requirement, or have we come full circle? I argue that assertions of organizational ethical progress, usually involving an increase in the number and or severity of compliance restrictions, do not get the conventional distinction quite right. Moreover, under the consensus distinction, there can be no such thing as organizational ethical progress. However, our ordinary ways of talking about business conduct management often betray logical confusions about the ethics–compliance relationship. While the metaphors we employ – “higher standards,” “raising the bar,” “gray areas,” and “crossing the line,” etc. – perform a worthwhile function as standards for external evaluation of business conduct, they also have a tendency to limit and impoverish our conception of what it is to be ethical. The idea that ethics matters is fundamental to Integrity Strategy’s implicit claim, consistent with conventional wisdom and moral theory, that the objective of responsible conduct cannot be achieved solely by imposing from outside what is required but must also appeal to what is desired.     

Ethical Values as Part of the Definition of Business Enterprise and Part of the Internal Structure of the Business Oganization

The orientation of this paper is that there is no special science of "business ethics" any more than there is one of "medical ethics" or "legal ethics". While there may be issues that arise in medicine or law that require special treatment, the ways of relating to such issues are derived from a basic ethical stance. Once one has evolved such an ethical stance and thus has incorporated a fundamental mode of relating to her or his fellow human beings, the "how" to deal with various ethical "issues" will follow as a natural consequence of one's ethical stance or modality. It is not necessary, in the formation of one's fundamental ethical stance to know if one is a utilitarian or a deontologist. It is doubtful whether Buddha knew what kind of ethics he was practising. If one conceives of ethics as something extrinsic to various disciplines and attempts to first practise a discipline and then to apply ethics to modify the results of that discipline it is entirely possible that conflicts will result between what is perceived of as the proper pursuit of that discipline and the ethical considerations. The argument of this paper is that it is more efficacious (in addition to being more true) to take ethical considerations into account in the construction of the definition of the discipline. This paper is devoted to showing that business and ethics are not two different and competing fields of interest (thus requiring a discipline of business ethics to be grafted onto the study of business enterprise), but that ethical concerns are part and parcel of the very concept of a business enterprise and the internal operation of a business organization.     

Is there “no such thing as business ethics”?

What are we to make of the claim that we often hear, that there is no such thing as business ethics? This essay first examines two arguments that might be in people's minds in making such a claim — that business is a “game,” and hence the ordinary constraints of morality do not apply, and that one cannot survive in business if one is too “ethical.” The critique of these arguments begins the process of making clear what business ethics is. The paper then proceeds in a more positive vein to define and explain for the sceptic what business ethics is. Everyone must confront the question, what should I do in my business relationships? Business ethics is defined, then, as the effort to develop Socratically one's answer to this question, that is, through the critical examination of alternatives. In the process of explaining this notion, several other senses in which someone might say that there is no such thing as business ethics are explored and the basic distinction between the moral point of view and ethical egoism is introduced.     

Ethical beliefs and personal values of top level executives

Do business executives sell their souls to the corporation? Is the organization a “paramour” in an executive's life? Is backstabbing the only way to climb the corporate ladder? The basic purpose of this study was to provide answers to these questions by surveying Fortune 500 corporate executives in the marketing, finance, and production areas. The findings are interesting as various executives exhibited different behavior regarding three types of ethical concern.     

A Critique and A Retrieval of Management and the Humanities

The use of literature, and other sources from the humanities, in management education has become more prominent in recent years. But, there is reason to question the ethical justifications by which the marriage of Management and the Humanities is customarily defended. This paper is a critique of Management and the Humanities as it is practiced through the use of literature. By means of a liberal pragmatist kind of criticism, and a case analysis about a hypothetical Grand Theory of Management called Theory R, I draw a sharp distinction between a Management and the Humanities approach that merely confirms conventional truths and a new approach to Management and the Humanities that enables students to grow as what Henry Giroux calls "critical rather than 'good' citizens." I show how this new approach can enable management educators to retrieve the potential of Management and the Humanities to contribute to liberal education.     

FOCUS: Coping with Scepticism: about the philosopher's role in teaching ethical business

A philosopher looks at the scepticism of some of her colleagues about just what the study of ethics can contribute to ethical business, and argues that its main purpose is to help business people to engage in constructive ethical dialogue in society as well as in their corporation. The author is a regular contributor to this Review, and Director of the Centre for Business and Professional Ethics, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT.     

解读世界知名跨国公司标识中的原型内涵

荣格的原型理论给商业界以重要启示,因为原型作为人类普遍的心理经验,仍无意识地支配着现代人的深层心理。在商品同质化的今天,标志的识别显得尤为重要。应用原型理论于标识设计,能有效的传达信息,增强企业识别度,实现文化无技术优势中的传播。     

Participation and Property Rights

This paper puts forward an argument for stakeholder rights. It begins by exploring two major answers to the question, 'in whose interests should the commercial company function?'. One claims parity for other stakeholders alongside the shareholder on the basis of a theory of property rights, and another on a theory of citizenship. Each of these answers, it is argued, fail to convince. The way forward is to recast the initial question, not asking in whose interest the company should function, but which type of interest, potentially located in any sort of person, might the company serve. That interest is identified and distinguished from others that people affected by corporations might have. These distinctions then provide the basis for an argument in favour of enfranchising two sorts of individual: sovereign stakeholders, in charge of monitoring the formulation and revision of company objectives; and secondary stakeholders, who along with those in the first category monitor the means used to achieve those objectives. The paper concludes that these distinctions should lead us to reconsider other elements in the corporate governance debate, such as the nature of a director's fiduciary duty; and the difference between democracy in corporations and democracy in the wider society.     

Financial Success and the Good Life: What have We Learned from Empirical Studies in Psychology?

An empirical study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (King, L. A. and C. K. Nappa: 1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(1), 156–165) concludes that people generally believe meaning and happiness are essential elements of the good life, whereas money is relatively unimportant. Yet, the authors also state that although “we do know what it takes to make a good life...we still behave as if we did not.” The authors are suggesting that despite a general belief that money is relatively unimportant in creating happiness, many people continue to focus their behaviors on increasing income and wealth. This is the classic conflict between the folk wisdom that money cannot buy happiness, on the one hand, and a continued focus by many people on achieving material success on the other. The issue is of particular importance to business professionals, not only because profit maximization is the central focus of business, but also because college students often pursue business as a profession for the express purpose of maximizing personal income and wealth. In the business world a focus on personal financial success is the norm. Wealth and income are honored. The purpose of this article is to critically analyze psychological studies comparing happiness and financial success. The results are then contrasted with philosophical wisdom and religious writings comparing happiness and money. The intent is to determine whether psychological studies provide incremental insights into the connection between financial success and happiness. Kent Swift PhD, is a professor in the College of Business Sciences at Zayed University. He has been teaching business at both the undergraduate and graduate level in science 1978, and he has published articles on a variety of business topics. Dr. Swift received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.     

The Response of CCPIT to the Financial Crisis --Talk to Mr.Wan Jifei,CPPCC member and CCPIT chairman

The 2009 NPC and CPPCC annual sessions were held amid the global financial crisis and the Chinese government＇s full preparation for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Many people around the world are asking, what will be done to help China＇s foreign trade and exhibition industry weather the current storm and create new business opportunities？ To get the answer to this question, we conducted a special interview with Mr. Wan Jifei, CPPCC member and CCPIT chairman.     

What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching

This reflection focuses on what insights Catholic Social Teaching (CST) can provide for corporate governance. I argue that the ‘standard’ agency theory is overly reductionist and insufficiently incorporates important economic limitations (such as asymmetric information, incomplete contracts, and the need for coordination) as well as human frailty. As a result, such agency theory insufficiently distinguishes firms from markets, which can easily relativize how we treat others and facilitate rationalization of unethical behavior. I then explore how three pillars of CST—human dignity, solidarity, and subsidiarity—can help overcome these limitations. CST proposes a vision of the business corporation as a community of persons, working together in cooperative business relationships toward the shared purpose of contributing to human flourishing.     

Designing and Delivering Business Ethics Teaching and Learning

The recent corporate scandals in the United States have caused a renewed interest and focus on teaching business ethics. Business schools and their faculties are reexamining the teaching of business ethics and are reassessing their responsibilities to produce honest and truthful managers who live lives of integrity and ethical accountability. The authors recognize that no agreement exists among business schools and their faculties regarding what should be the content and pedagogy of a course in business ethics. However, the authors hold that regardless of one’s biases regarding the content and pedagogy, the effective teaching of business ethics requires that the instructor in designing and delivering a business ethics course needs to focus particular attention on four principal questions: (1) what are the objectives or targeted learning outcomes of the course? (2) what kind of learning environment should be created? (3) what learning processes need to be employed to achieve the goals? and (4) what are the roles of the participants in the learning experience? The answers to these questions provide the foundations for any business ethics course. The answers are major determinants of the impact of a business ethics course on the thinking of students and the views on the ethical and professional accountabilities and responsibilities of managers in the workplace.     

A Multidimensional Approach to Finnish Managers' Moral Decision-Making

This paper analyses managers' moral decision-making, and studies the role of ethical theories in it by following the research tradition using the multidimensional ethics scale. The research question is: what kinds of ethical dimensions do Finnish business managers reveal when they are making moral decisions, and how have these dimensions changed in the 1990s? This question is answered by examining what kinds of factors emerge when the multidimensional ethics scale is used to analyse Finnish managers' attitudes toward moral dilemmas. The results show that Finnish managers' decision-making reflects a variety of ethical theories. Teleological thinking is strongly emphasised by Finnish managers, and relativist thinking is used as well, but often combined with either deontology or justice thinking. In addition, a strong moralistic dimension emerged in Finnish managers' decision-making. The analysis was carried out in two different surveys in years 1994 and 1999, and the results show that the ways of decision-making were more complex at the end of the 1990s than almost six years earlier.     

Distinguishing Economically from Legally Formal Firms: Targeting Business Support to Entrepreneurs in South Africa’s Townships*

Although the government of South Africa (SA) has formally adopted a policy of proactive support of entrepreneurship, providing business assistance to all of its entrepreneurs is beyond SA’s financial and human resource capabilities. This study utilizes the results of an in‐depth survey of entrepreneurs in SA’s townships to find: (1) The business and owner traits that predict revenues and job creation among the township entrepreneurs, (2) The key issues that challenge township entrepreneurs; and (3) What the answers to these issues imply about the appropriate content and recipients of business assistance to township entrepreneurs. A distinction is helpful in framing this study’s approach. In SA, registered (licensed) businesses are legally formal firms. In contrast, economically formal firms have institutionalized processes that lead to success as a profit‐making firm. We use this distinction in our analysis of the data and framing of the implications for business assistance strategy in SA.     

Business or Basic Needs? The Impact of Loan Purpose on Social Crowdfunding Platforms

Journal of Business Ethics - Crowdfunding has created new opportunities for poor microentrepreneurs. One crucial question is the impact that the purpose of a loan—either business investment...     

How Can Business Ethics Strengthen the Social Cohesion of a Society?

The essay aims to show how business ethics—understood as a three-level approach—can strengthen the social cohesion of a society, which is jeopardized today in many ways. In the first part, the purpose of business and the economy is explained as the creation of wealth defined as a combination of private and public wealth that includes natural, economic, human, and social capital. Special emphasis is placed on the implications of the creation of public wealth which requires institutions other than the market and motivations other than self-regarding ones. In the second part, the question of what holds a society together is discussed through different approaches: enlightened self-interest, a new game-theoretical approach, and the concept of the common good advanced by Catholic Social Teaching, followed by my own proposal. The third part presents several perspectives for business ethics to strengthen social cohesion of a society (a) by focusing on the purpose of business and the economy to create natural, economic, human, and social capital; (b) by advancing public goods that stand the test of ethical scrutiny; and (c) by securing human rights conceptualized as public goods.