Ethical Decision Making in a Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Situation: The Role of Moral Absolutes and Social Consensus

Individuals are downloading copyrighted materials at escalating rates (Hill 2007; Siwek 2007). Since most materials shared within these networks are copyrighted works, providing, exchanging, or downloading files is considered to be piracy and a violation of intellectual property rights (Shang et al. 2008). Previous research indicates that personal moral philosophies rooted in moral absolutism together with social context may impact decision making in ethical dilemmas; however, it is yet unclear which motivations and norms contextually impact moral awareness in a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing context (Shang et al. 2008). In sum, factors affecting the decision to share copyrighted material require further clarification and investigation (Shang et al. 2008). The purpose of this study was to use a consumer-based scenario and multiple ethics measures to explore how idealism, formalism, and perceived social consensus impact users’ propensity to recognize that the sharing of copyrighted media through P2P networks was an ethical issue and their subsequent ethical intentions. Results showed that high levels of idealism and formalism were associated with an increased recognition that file sharing was an ethical issue, but neither construct had a direct effect on ethical intention. Strong social consensus among respondents that other people consider file sharing to be unethical was also positively related to the recognition that file sharing was an ethical issue, and ethical recognition was a moderate predictor of intention not to engage in file sharing. Finally, a post hoc mediation analysis indicated that idealism, formalism, and social consensus operated through recognition of an ethical issue to impact ethical intention (indirect-only mediation).     

Ethics and HRM: Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis

Despite the ongoing consideration of the ethical nature of human resource management (HRM), little research has been conducted on how morality and ethics are represented in the discourse, activities and lived experiences of human resource (HR) professionals. In this paper, we connect the thinking and lived experiences of HR professionals to an alternative ethics, rooted in the work of Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989; Theory, Culture and Society 7:5?C38, 1990; Postmodern Ethics, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991; Approaches to Social Enquiry, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1993; Life in Fragments, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995) and Levinas (Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 1998). We argue that the study of HRM and ethics should be contextualized within the discourses used, the practices and activities of HR professionals. Through the analysis of interview data from 40 predominantly Canadian HR practitioners and managers we experiment with Bauman??s notion of ??moral impulse?? to help us understand how HRM is both a product and perpetuator of moral neutralization in organizations. We suggest that HRM as it is practiced is concerned with distancing, depersonalizing, and dissembling, and acts in support of the ??moral?? requirements of business, not of people. However, we also recognize that HR practitioners and managers are often confronted with and conflicted by actions and decisions that they are required to take, therefore opening possibilities and hope for an alternative ethical HRM.     

Workplace Romance 2.0: Developing a Communication Ethics Model to Address Potential Sexual Harassment from Inappropriate Social Media Contacts Between Coworkers

This article examines ethical implications from workplace romances that may subsequently turn into sexual harassment through the use of social media technologies, such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, text messaging, IMing, and other forms of digital communication between office colleagues. We examine common ethical models such as Jones (Acad Manag Rev 16:366–395, 1991) issue-contingent decision-making model, Rest’s (Moral development: Advances in research and theory, 1986) Stages of Ethical Decision-Making model, and Pierce and Aguinis’s (J Org Behav 26(6):727–732,2005) review of workplace romance versus sexual harassment issues. The article makes a contribution by developing a new communication ethics model that includes response positive and response negative contingencies to guide decision-making about inappropriate social media contacts that spillover into the workplace. In addition, we recommend that human resource personnel take a more active role in communicating appropriate ethical rules of conduct concerning the use of social media technologies inside and outside the office.     

Compatibility Under Differentiated Duopoly with Network Externalities: A Comment

Chen and Chen (J Ind Compet Trade 11:43?55, 2011) analyze the effects of compatibility under system product Cournot competition with network externalities. They show that a firm’s optimal strategy is to set an incompatible system standard, even though perfect compatibility is socially optimal. In this case, a social dilemma arises. However, their result depends on a specific assumption about the network size. We use the framework of Shy (1995) to modify this assumption, and hence show that the social dilemma identified by Chen and Chen (J Ind Compet Trade 11:43?55, 2011) does not arise.     

A Social Cognitive Perspective on the Relationships Between Ethics Education, Moral Attentiveness, and PRESOR

This research examines the relationships between education in business ethics, Reynolds’s (J Appl Psychol 93:1027–1041, 2008) “moral attentiveness” construct, or the extent to which individuals chronically perceive and reflect on morality and moral elements in their experiences, and Singhapakdi et al.’s (J Bus Ethics 15:1131–1140, 1996) measure of perceptions of the role of ethics and social responsibility (PRESOR). Education in business ethics was found to be positively associated with the two identified factors of moral attentiveness, “reflective” and “perceptual” moral attentiveness, and with the PRESOR “stakeholder view” factor. Also, reflective moral attentiveness was found to act as a mediator in the relationship between education in business ethics and the PRESOR stakeholder view factor. Evidence of gender and social desirability bias effects was also found. The implications of these relationships and social cognitive theory for improved understanding of the mechanisms by which a variety of variables have their effects on PRESOR in business are discussed.     

In Defence of ‘Demand’ Deposits: Contractual Solutions to the Barnett and Block,and Bagus and Howden Debate

This article contributes to a recent debate between Barnett and Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4): 711–716, 2009), Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3): 399–406, 2009), Barnett and Block (J Bus Ethics 100: 299–238, 2011), Cachanosky (J Bus Ethics 104: 219–221, 2011) and Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 106: 295–300, 2012a) regarding the conceptual distinction between demand deposits and time deposits. It is argued that from an economic perspective there is nothing inherently fraudulent or illegitimate about deposit accounts that are available ‘on demand’, but that this relies on certain contractual provisions. Particular attention is drawn to option clauses and withdrawal clauses, which “solve” the problems raised by Barnett and Block, and Bagus and Howden. Previous authors have also neglected the asset side of banks balance sheets, and this is shown to further justify the legitimacy of fractional reserve banking.     

Vulnerability and the Basis of Business Ethics: From Fiduciary Duties to Professionalism

This paper examines the role of vulnerability in the basis of business ethics by criticizing its role in giving a moral substantial character to fiduciary duties to shareholders. The target is Marcoux’s (Bus Ethics Q 13(1):1–24, 2003) argument for morally substantial fiduciary duties vis-à-vis the multifiduciary stakeholder theory. Rather than proceed to support the stakeholder paradigm, a conception of vulnerability is combined with Heath’s 2004) “market failure” view of the ethical obligations of managers as falling out of their roles as professionals involved in the institution of the market. The result is the core of a theoretically defensible and managerially motivating and deployable ethic.     

Human Resource Management in a Compartmentalized World: Whither Moral Agency?

This article examines the potential for moral agency in human resource management practice. It draws on an ethnographic study of human resource managers in a global organization to provide a theorized account of situated moral agency. This account suggests that within contemporary organizations, institutional structures??particularly the structures of Anglo-American market capitalism??threaten and constrain the capacity of HR managers to exercise moral agency and hence engage in ethical behaviour. The contextualized explanation of HR management action directly addresses the question of whether HRM is inherently unethical. The discussion draws on MacIntyre??s (Philosophy 74:311?C329, 1999, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Duckworth, 2000) conceptualization of moral agency within contemporary social structures. In practice, HR managers embody roles that may not be wholly compartmentalized. Alternative institutional structures can provide HR managers with a vocabulary of motives for people-centred HRM and widen the scope for the exercising of moral agency, when enacted within reflective relational spaces that provide milieus for critical questioning of logics and values. This article aims to contribute to and extend debate on whether HRM can ever be ethical, and provide a means of reconnecting business ethics with longstanding concerns in critical management studies.     

Ethical Outcomes and Business Ethics: Toward Improving Business Ethics Education

Unethical conduct has reached crisis proportions in business (Walker et al., Wall Str J East Edn, 258(37):A1–A10, 2011) and on today’s college campuses (Burke et al., CPA J, 77(5):58–65, 2007). Despite the evidence that suggests that more than half of business students admit to dishonest practices (McCabe et al. 2006), only about 5 % of business school deans surveyed believe that dishonesty is a problem at their schools (Brown et al., Coll Stud J A, 44(2):299–308, 2010). In addition, the AACSB which establishes standards for accredited business schools has resisted the urging of deans and business experts to require business schools to teach an ethics class, and fewer than one-third of businesses schools now teach a business ethics course at the graduate or undergraduate levels (Swanson and Fisher, Advancing Business Ethics Education, 2008). In this paper we briefly introduce the status of business ethics education and report the results of a survey of business students, deans of the top business schools, and business ethics subject matter experts about ten ethical outcomes. We then offer five specific recommendations to encourage business ethics faculty and decision makers to improve the teaching of business ethics.     

Shared Value and the Impartial Spectator Test

Growing inequality and its implications for democratic polity suggest that corporate social responsibility (CSR) has not proved itself in twenty-first century business, largely as it lacks clear criteria of demarcation for businesses to follow. Today the problem is viewed by many commentators as an ethical challenge to business itself. In response to this challenge, we begin by examining Porter and Kramer’s (Harv Bus Rev 89(January–February):64–77, 2011) call for a shift from a social responsibility to a shared value framework and the need to respond to the problem of the ‘separation thesis’ between business and ethics (Wicks, Bus Soc 35(1):89–118, 1996; Harris and Freeman, Bus Ethics Q 18(4):541–548, 2008). We identify the eighteenth century economist and philosopher Adam Smith in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a source for an ethical approach to business. Building on his central concept of ‘sympathy’, we introduce the idea of the Impartial Spectator Test, which we argue builds on traditional stakeholder perspectives and which provides an objective route to ethical criteria of demarcation. We conclude by assessing how this approach adds to the existing debate around social responsibility and shared value.     

Moral and Amoral Conceptions of Trust, with an Application in Organizational Ethics

Across the management, social science, and business ethics literatures, and in much of the philosophy literature, trust is characterized as a disposition to act given epistemic states—beliefs and/or expectations about others and about the risks involved. This characterization of trust is best thought of as epistemological because epistemic states distinguish trust from other dispositions. The epistemological characterization of trust is the amoral one referred to in the title of this paper, and we argue that this characterization is conceptually inadequate. We outline and defend an alternative conception of trust as a moral phenomenon: when A trusts B to do something, A invites B to acknowledge and accept an obligation; when B accepts the invitation, B takes on an obligation; in that way trust creates an obligation. We conclude with an application, drawing out the difference between the epistemological conception of trust and our own in the context of Ghoshal et al.’s (Sloan Management Review 40:9–20, 1995, Academy of Management Learning & Education 4:75–91, 2005) critique of transaction cost theories of the firm.     

Do I Hear the Whistle…? A First Attempt to Measure Four Forms of Employee Silence and Their Correlates

Silence in organizations refers to a state in which employees refrain from calling attention to issues at work such as illegal or immoral practices or developments that violate personal, moral, or legal standards. While Morrison and Milliken (Acad Manag Rev 25:706–725, 2000) discussed how organizational silence as a top-down organizational level phenomenon can cause employees to remain silent, a bottom-up perspective—that is, how employee motives contribute to the occurrence and maintenance of silence in organizations—has not yet been given much research attention. In this paper, we argue that this perspective is a meaningful complementation of the existing literature and that it is sensible to conceptualize distinct forms of employee silence (Pinder and Harlos, Research in personnel and human resources management. JAI Press, Greenwich, 2001; van Dyne et al., J Manag Stud 40:1359–1392, 2003). Drawing on past research and theory we conceptualize four forms of employee silence, namely quiescent, acquiescent, prosocial, and opportunistic silence. We present scales to assess the four forms and provide empirical tests for their distinctiveness and patterns of relationships to various correlates and potential antecedents and consequences.     

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility in Controversial Industry Sectors: The Social Value of Harm Minimisation

This paper examines how it is possible for firms in controversial sectors, which are often marked by social taboos and moral debates, to act in socially responsible ways, and whether a firm can be socially responsible if it produces products harmful to society or individuals. It contends that a utilitarian justification can be used to support the legal and regulated provision of goods and services in these areas, and the regulated and legal provision of these areas produces less harm than the real alternative—illegal and unregulated supply. Utilitarianism is concerned as much with harm minimisation as good maximisation, and both are equally important when it comes to maximising welfare (Bentham 1789, 1970; Mill [1863] 1964). Any adequate theory of CSR must, therefore, have the capacity to handle a business that minimises harm as well as those that more straightforwardly maximise good. In this paper we therefore attempt two tasks. First, we argue that the legal but regulated provision of products and services may be better from an overall utilitarian perspective than a situation in which these harmful or immoral goods and services are illegal but procurable via a black market. Porter and Kramer’s (2006) strategic CSR framework is then presented to describe how firms in these controversial sectors can act in socially responsible ways. This model highlights the importance of firm strategy in selecting areas of socially responsible behaviours that can be acted upon by firms in each industry.     

Embedding Corporate Social Responsibility in Corporate Governance: A Stakeholder Systems Approach

Current research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) illustrates the growing sense of discord surrounding the ‘business of doing good’ (Dobers and Springett, Corp Soc Responsib Environ Manage 17(2):63–69, 2010). Central to these concerns is that CSR risks becoming an over-simplified and peripheral part of corporate strategy. Rather than transforming the dominant corporate discourse, it is argued that CSR and related concepts are limited to “emancipatory rhetoric…defined by narrow business interests and serve to curtail interests of external stakeholders.” (Banerjee, Crit Sociol 34(1):52, 2008). The paper addresses gaps in the literature and challenges current thinking on corporate governance and CSR by offering a new conceptual framework that responds to the concerns of researchers and practitioners. The limited focus of existing analyses is extended by a holistic approach to corporate governance and social responsibility that integrates company, shareholder and wider stakeholder concerns. A defensive stance is avoided by delineating key stages of the governance process and aligning profit centred and social responsibility concerns to produce a business-based rationale for minimising risk and mainstreaming CSR.     

A Review of the Empirical Ethical Decision-Making Literature: 2004–2011

This review summarizes the research on ethical decision-making from 2004 to 2011. Eighty-four articles were published during this period, resulting in 357 findings. Individual findings are categorized by their application to individual variables, organizational variables, or the concept of moral intensity as developed by Jones (Acad Manag Rev 16(2):366–395, 1991). Rest’s (Moral development: advances in research and theory, Praeger, New York, 1986) four-step model for ethical decision-making is used to summarize findings by dependent variable—awareness, intent, judgment, and behavior. A discussion of findings in each category is provided in order to uncover trends in the ethical decision-making literature. A summary of areas of suggested future research is provided.     

Consumer Social Responsibility (CnSR): Toward a Multi-Level,Multi-Agent Conceptualization of the “Other CSR”

Despite considerable debate as to what corporate social responsibility (CSR) is, consumer social responsibility (CnSR), as an important force for CSR (Vogel in Calif Manag Rev 47(4):19–45, 2005), is a term that remains largely unexplored and under-theorized. To better conceive the role consumers play in activating CSR, this paper provides a multi-level, multi-agent conceptualization of CnSR. Integrating needs-based models of decision making with justice theory, the article interpretively develops the reasons (instrumental, relational, and moral) why variously positioned agents leverage consumers as a force for corporate social responsibility. The paper theoretically expands currently limited conceptions of CnSR by exploring the levels at which diverse agents engage with CnSR (Who and What?) and the needs driving these agents (Why?). The paper suggests that the so-called “consumer side of CSR” (Devinney et al. in Stanf Soc Innov Rev:29–37, 2006) is contingent upon the presence, absence, and varying intensities of underlying agent needs. Academic and managerial implications are drawn in the paper’s conclusion.     

A Multi-Agent Model for Overlapping Negotiations

In the last few years, research on multi-agent systems has addressed different aspects of intelligent negotiations using methods developed in different domains including game theory, decision theory, and economic models. The research proposed in Andersson and Sandholm (1999), Sandholm (1993), Sandholm and Lesser (1995) and Aknine et?al. (2004), Aknine (2002) are significant examples. However, only some of this work focuses on problems related to complex negotiations, particularly those concerning new generation applications. This new research raises fundamental difficulties we have encountered, especially in overlapping negotiations and combined negotiations. This article is interested essentially in overlapping negotiations, which include several agent roles in a same negotiation. One or more agents may play each of these roles. This work shows that the high-level negotiation models are necessary in order to control the execution of overlapping negotiation processes, since, in these negotiations we are facing both classical problems of multi-agent negotiations based on two agents’ roles and the problems concerned with the interdependence of these negotiations. Synchronization of these different processes is thus necessary because of the multiplicity of the roles. Thus, this paper presents a formalized negotiation model, which deals with this problem. It gives a theoretical analysis of the suggested model and discusses the results of the experimental evaluation. To perform this evaluation, we use the application of intelligent service agencies on the Internet.     

Experience, socialization and customer retention: Lessons from the dance floor

Experience and socialization are key factors in customer commitment and defection decisions. To study the effect of experience and social relationships on customer retention, we analyze a reality-mined co-presence network of health club members over a period of 4 years. Since central customers in the network have more social ties they will lose if they defect, we use centrality as a proxy for customer relationship switching costs. We find that long-standing customers do have a lower chance of renewing their contracts. However, in line with theoretical predictions (Burnham et al., Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 31(2):109–126, 2003), the consumer’s centrality in the network (reflecting a social cost of defection) reduces customer churn rate. This study’s results indicate that the inclusion of social effects increases the predictive power of the customer churn model (Nitzan and Libai, Journal of Marketing 75(6):24–38, 2011), thus contributing to our understanding of the role social networks play in customer decisions.     

Relational Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Negotiation Dialogue: Using the Rorschach Inkblot Method for Assessing Integrative Complexity

Negotiation theory encompasses a broad range of phenomena and makes use of a variety of perspectives. Applications of theoretical constructs referring to different realms of personality functioning (e.g., cognitive, affective, interpersonal) for understanding negotiators’ decision making have become quite common in the field. Nevertheless, the methodology used for personality assessment still needs to be broadened so as to encompass a variety of assessment tools that can be used for obtaining a more comprehensive view on negotiators’ personality functioning in relation to task performance. In line with two previous studies, published in Group Decision and Negotiation (Tibon in Group Decis Negot 9(1):1–15, 2000, Group Decis Negot 17(6):541–552, 2008) we suggest using the Rorschach Inkblot Method to extend our understanding of mental functioning within the context of negotiators’ decision making.