The Demise of Ethical Schizophrenia?

Business Ethics is a topical issue. The relationship between Business Ethics and Corporate Strategy, however, has been less widely discussed. This article argues that recent developments in society, including a greater awareness of environmental issues, encourage a different way of exploring this relationship.     

The Pay Review Bodies in Britain Under the Labour Government

The current Labour Government's public sector 'modernization' policy has placed new pressures on the 30-year-old Pay Review Body system. The Government is now expecting the six Review Bodies to make recommendations on pay reform and restructuring and key decisions on pay for public sector groups are being taken by Government outside of the Review Body process. Despite these problems, the Pay Review Body system still offers the main parties—the Government, employers and unions—a useful political device for handling pay determination at 'arm's length' in the public sector. While political expediency is the main defence for the Pay Review Bodies, the move to long-term agreements may undermine their role.     

The Stability of Judgmental Modelling: an Application in the Social Services

Judgmental modelling has been used on a wide variety of business problems, and with the advent of new technologies is becoming increasingly user friendly. The range of applications has helped develop understanding of managerial decision making processes, especially those related to group decision making. However, to date there has been little evidence of their use in the social services. This paper describes such an application among social workers in the United Kingdom.One of the difficulties facing social workers is deciding how to deal with individuals with mental disorders. The state has various legal procedures which can be brought into operation, ranging from no involvement with the individual through to compulsory hospitalisation. This study shows how a judgmental modelling approach was used to help define the decision variables. A group of experts from a particular social services department worked together on the problem, using a simple computer model to investigate its decision making criteria and the associated processes. The results are fully presented, and the implications for the role of social workers discussed.     

Criteria for Responsible Business Practice in SMEs: An Exploratory Case of U.K. Fair Trade Organisations

This paper develops a set of 16 criteria, divided into four groupings, for responsible business practice (RBP) in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) drawn from the existing SME/RBP literature. The current lack of a general set of criteria against which such activity can be judged is noted and this deficit is redressed. In order to make an initial assessment in support of the criteria so derived, an exploratory feasibility study of RBP in U.K. Fair Trade organisations was conducted. The findings from this study show that most but not all of the RBP criteria seem to be applicable to U.K. Fair Trade organisations but it is recommended that the complete set of criteria continues to be used in further research until such time as there is a general consensus as to which criteria are appropriate. Implications for RBP in small businesses in general, and for Fair Trade organisations in particular, are drawn out and suggestions for further research are identified.     

Ethical Investment Processes and Outcomes

There is a growing body of literature on ethical or socially responsible investment across a range of disciplines. This paper highlights the key themes in the field and identifies some of the major theoretical and practical challenges facing both scholars and practitioners. One of these challenges is understanding better the complexity of the relationship between such investment practices and corporate behaviour. Noting that ethical investment is seldom characterised by agreement about what it actully constitutes, and that much of the extant research focuses on a narrow set of issues, the paper argues that there are benefits associated with examining ethical investment as a process.     

Modernising pay in the UK public services: trends and implications

The emerging character of the UK government's public sector pay reforms during the second and third (New) Labour terms of office is reviewed and contextualised. Three settings are examined where pay reform has been actively employed – with the accent on harmonisation, simplification and devolution of practice, with the express intention of restoring public service workforce morale, while improving services to clients – namely, local government, the National Health Service and the Higher Education sector. The evidence is interpreted as illustrating undoubted change, but also significant areas where progress has been less than intended, measured against the government's original programme goals. Equal pay considerations appear to have dominated all three projects reviewed: the failure to date of public sector managements to capitalise on opportunities the new pay architecture affords them to change local working practices may be attributed to a combination of factors discussed in the article. These have given rise to tensions as efforts have been pursued to transplant private sector pay techniques, somewhat hastily in some cases, without due consideration of the institutional context within which public services and proximal institutions function.     

Work Ethic,Social Ethic,no Ethic: Measuring the Economic Values of Modern Christians

Benito Arruñada finds evidence of a distinct Protestant social ethic in the ISSP's 1998 Religion II Survey (Economic Journal 2010; 120 : 890–918). We replicate Arruñada's results using his broad definition of Protestantism and our new narrow definition, which includes only those ascetic denominations that Max Weber singled out for possessing a strong capitalist work ethic. We then extend this analysis to the ISSP's 2008 Religion III Survey, the most recent comparable international questionnaire on religious attitudes and religious change. We find no evidence of a Calvinist work ethic, and suggest that Arruñada's Protestant social ethic continues into the 21st century. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.