Ethics at the workplace in the fourth industrial revolution: A Catholic social teaching perspective

While many studies on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR) focus on efficiency, productivity and economic progress, only a few have considered its ethical aspects. This article tries to contribute to filling this vacuum by providing a comprehensive approach to ethical risks at the workplace. Drawing upon Catholic social teaching (CST)—addressed to all people of good will—it analyzes ethical aspects at the workplace posited by the FIR, and more particularly by Industry 4.0, which is at the core of this revolution. CST emphasizes the dignity of the worker and the necessity to flourish at the workplace. While robots, artificial intelligence, and interconnected technologies are only instrumental, the real subject of work is the worker. This casts specific light on the ethical issues analyzed, including effects on employment, wages and inequality, human quality treatment, relational aspects, safety and health, surveillance on employees, and meaningful work.     

Accreditation without Impact: The Case of Accreditation by Professional Accounting Bodies in Australia

Australian tertiary accounting education relies on a variety of accreditation processes to develop, manage and assure the learning outcomes of students. This research focuses on the impact of professional accounting body accreditation on Australian higher education providers (HEPs). It explores the process and rigour with which HEPs utilise the objectives and standards within this accreditation process to evaluate and improve their degree programs. This research uses interview data with HEP staff who have led accreditation processes of bachelor‐level accounting degrees. Data were analysed using a narrative framework to establish a range of discourses that explore the engagement of HEPs with: the process; the level of trust HEP staff have in the process; and the processes’ benefits. This research demonstrates that the current accreditation process does not achieve its stated outcomes and is unable to improve the alignment of student learning with professional expectations. Professional body accreditation fails to achieve its objectives because HEPs consider accreditation to be a ‘tick‐box’ process without consequence and are mistrustful of the veracity of several aspects within the process. Building on these findings, this research provides insights into the challenges associated with accreditation and explores how a previously impactful accreditation process has become largely inconsequential.     

Social Capital and the Shadow Economy

Viewed in a wider context of paid and unpaid informal economic activities, the shadow economy highlights the little recognized ambivalence of social capital as both potentially positive and negative in outcomes for different groups in the economy. Using a concept of social capital as access to durable networks of actual and virtual resources, as claimed by Pierre Bourdieu, I examine the shadow economy as a source of both resilience and repression, intimately connected to the formal economy and tied to a neo-liberal agenda. I draw from review activities I have previously conducted on the informal economy in disadvantaged neighborhoods and from research on social capital in the economy in a European context.     

Christian Ethics and Spirituality in Leading Business Organizations: Editorial Introduction

Christian ethics applied to economics and business has a long tradition. This dates back at least to the thirteenth century, with noteworthy developments in the four following centuries and again in the last century. Christian faith and reason intertwine to bring about principles, criteria, and guidelines for action and a set of virtues with relevance for economic activity. Christian spirituality, with 2000 years of history, has been embedded in Christianity from its beginning, but the application to modern business activity is relatively recent. This article introduces a special issue which, we hope, will make its own small contribution to the developments of both Christian ethics and spirituality in the leading business organizations. After a short historical overview and a consideration of the current situation of Christian ethics and spirituality in business, we introduce the papers selected for this issue.     

Ethics in Finance and Accounting: Editorial Introduction

In light of the recent crisis and its aftershocks, it becomes crucial to reflect on the relationship between finance and accounting and on how to integrate ethics and efficiency, as well as on how to motivate and empower practitioners in the world of finance to commit to justice, fairness and enhanced understanding, and to improving their personal integrity. This article, written as an editorial introduction to a special issue includes works related to control measurement and ethical behavior, misbehaviors in finances and accounting, professionalism in accounting, ethical investing and corporate reporting. We conclude by suggesting further research for a better integration of technical aspects of accounting and finances into business activity—human activity actually—and an for understanding of ethics not limited to rules, but as a mutual and interdependent system of values (human goods), virtues and principles.     

Formalising Workflow: A CCS-inspired Characterisation of the YAWL Workflow Patterns

We present work concerning the formal specification of business processes. It is of substantial benefit to be able to pin down the meaning of business processes precisely. This is an end in itself, but we are also concerned to do so in order that we might prove properties about the business processes that are being specified. It is a notable characteristic of most languages for representing business processes that they lack a robust semantics, and a notable characteristic of most commercial Business Process Management products that they have no support for verification of business process models. We define a high-level meta-model, called Liesbet , for representing business processes. The ontological commitments for Liesbet are sourced from the YAWL workflow patterns, which have been defined from studies into the behavioural nature of business processes. A formal characterisation of Liesbet is provided using Milner’s Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). In this article, we omit some of the technical details of this characterisation and instead present the essential features by means of an abstract machine language, called LCCS. We also explain how we have facilitated the verification of certain properties of business processes specified in Liesbet , and discuss how Liesbet supports the YAWL workflow patterns. We include a simple three-part example of using Liesbet .     

Economics at the FTC: Mergers,Dominant-Firm Conduct,and Consumer Behavior

Economists at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) pursue the agency’s competition and consumer protection missions. In this year’s essay, in antitrust, we discuss the new Merger Guidelines, three exclusion cases, and R&D issues in the Thoratec/HeartWare merger and the Google/AdMob merger. In consumer protection, we discuss the FTC’s new rule on debt settlement, our efforts to improve disclosures, and our recent work on appliance energy disclosures.     

Do boards know when they hire a CEO that is a good match? Evidence from initial compensation

Are CEO initial compensation packages based on variations in the expected match quality of the hiring firms? Using CEO tenure as a proxy for expected match quality, and a sample of CEO turnovers between 1992 and 2006, we find that CEOs that experience good matches, defined as tenures exceeding four years, have higher initial compensation packages. We also find evidence from exogenous switching regression models that inside CEOs receive a higher good match premium than outside CEOs. To account for economic and regulatory changes across our sample period, we divide our sample into three subsamples: 1992–1997, 1998–2002, and 2003–2006, and repeat our analyses. Even though the positive relation between expected match quality and initial compensation persists across all periods, we find that the good match premium for inside and outside CEOs does not differ in the post-2002 period. We attribute this result to increased board independence and changes in regulation (Sarbanes–Oxley) in the post-2002 sample period.