Marxism,Business Ethics,and Corporate Social Responsibility

Originally delivered at a conference of Marxist philosophers in China, this article examines some links, and some tensions, between business ethics and the traditional concerns of Marxism. After discussing the emergence of business ethics as an academic discipline, it explores and attempts to answer two Marxist objections that might be brought against the enterprise of business ethics. The first is that business ethics is impossible because capitalism itself tends to produce greedy, overreaching, and unethical business behavior. The second is that business ethics is irrelevant because focusing on the moral or immoral conduct of individual firms or businesspeople distracts one’s attention from the systemic vices of capitalism. I argue, to the contrary, that, far from being impossible, business requires and indeed presupposes ethics and that for those who share Marx’s hope for a better society, nothing could be more relevant than engaging the debate over corporate social responsibility. In line with this, the article concludes by sketching some considerations favoring corporations’ adopting a broader view of their social and moral responsibilities, one that encompasses more than the pursuit of profit.     

Ethics and Social Responsibility in Marketing

ABSTRACT

Ethics are our belief about what is right and wrong. Although these beliefs may vary from one individual to another or one company to another, ethics and business responsibility are an important part to any company's marketing department. The goals of the marketing department are to target an audience, appeal to that audience, and get the audience to purchase that particular product or service. In doing this, a company must make sure that they are first abiding by all laws and regulations, but they should also strive to be sure that they are acting ethically and honestly. One interpretation of morality may vary greatly among individuals, but it still exists.

While the necessity for ethics in business and marketing has been pointed out in numerous sources, many have contended that a good deal of consumer concern is with marketing and its related activities. Within companies, trade organizations, governmental organizations, and professions, one can observe a shift in the way of thinking about codes of ethics. The moral resistance of an organization is referred to as the degree in which the organization can resist the influencing factors, which exercise a downward pressure on the moral content of the organization. The moral content of the organization is the degree in which that organization makes an effort to fulfill its responsibilities with respect to its stakeholders.     

第六届全国MBA商业伦理与社会责任（案例）研讨会吁：将CSR教育与专业培养置于同等地位

8月26日至28日,由全国MBA教育指导委员会指导、北京大学光华管理学院和西安交通大学管理学院主办的第六届全国MBA商业伦理与社会责任（案例）研讨会在西安举行.来自全国各商学院的教员、社会责任研究机构、优秀企业代表约150人围绕着中国前沿社会责任理论、商业伦理与企业社会责任教学、推进案例在企业社会责任教学中的应用等议题进行了集中探讨.     

Evolution and Implementation: A Study of Values, Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility

There is growing recognition that good ethics can have a positive economic impact on the performance of firms. Many statistics support the premise that ethics, values, integrity and responsibility are required in the modern workplace. For consumer groups and society at large, research has shown that good ethics is good business. This study defines and traces the emergence and evolution within the business literature of the concepts of values, business ethics and corporate social responsibility to illustrate the increased emphasis that has been placed on these issues over time. Two organizations that have successfully dealt with these issues were analyzed to identify the links among values, ethics, and corporate social responsibility as they are incorporated into the culture and management of a firm. This study identified the presence and implementation of values, business ethics, and CSR actions within the two organizations studied.     

Corporate Social Responsibility as a Signalling Device for Foreign Direct Investment

A rise in CSR (corporate social responsibility) has accompanied rise in foreign direct investment (FDI) to developing countries in the 1990s. CSR may be serving a signalling function when the entering firm is of an unknown type. Although countries are now competing keenly to attract foreign firms, even so, excessive tax or excess transfers by firms can still cause a Prisoner’s Dilemma structure to the payoffs resulting in an inefficient Nash equilibrium. CSR allows the accommodating firm to reveal its type, making cooperation the equilibrium outcome. The game differs from standard models since signalling changes the payoffs. A unique separating equilibrium exists where only the accommodating firms signal. But, under certain parameter values, a pooling equilibrium where all firms signal, becomes possible. A number of results are derived including the size of CSR expenditure required as a fraction of profits. An example demonstrates their relevance in practical situations.     

Doing Good Business by Hiring Directors with Foreign Experience

Using a manually collected dataset on the overseas experiences of directors of Chinese listed firms, we examine the effects of returnee directors on firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement. Our results show that returnee directors significantly improve their firms’ CSR engagement. The positive relationship between the percentage of returnee directors and CSR engagement is more significant when a firm is in a competitive industry, when a firm has no government ownership, when a firm’s CEO is not politically connected, and when a firm’s CEO is older. Furthermore, we find that only long-term foreign professional or academic experience matters, whereas short-term visiting experience does not. Finally, our results are robust after controlling for endogeneity. Therefore, this paper offers clear policy implications by suggesting that hiring more returnees as corporate directors is an efficient way to enhance firms’ CSR, which may be of particular interest to regulators in emerging markets.     

Responsibility and moral reasoning: A study in Business Ethics

This essay was written for the 1984 General Motors Intercollegiate Business Understanding Program. It consists of three sections, each responding to a separate issue posed by General Motors. The opinions expressed are not those of the General Motors management.The first section attempts to document, through the use of Harvard Business Review articles, a shift in the notion of managerial responsibility from a narrowly focused role responsibility to a more widely focused moral responsibility.The second section explicates the different conceptions of Justice behind the United States and West German economic systems. It gives examples of the consequences of the different conceptions both in methods of policy formation and results.The third section deals with business ethics in international contexts. It argues that law is by itself inadequate in the regulation of business activity and must be supplemented by public discussion, which employs the traditional methods of moral reasoning.John Davis Feldmann, John Kelsay, and Hugh E. Brown III are or have been graduate students in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Their essay, written under the direction of James F. Childress, Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Ethics, won first prize in the 1984 General Motors Intercollegiate Business Understanding Program.John D. Feldmann, currently writing a dissertation on justice and tax reform, holds a law degree from the University of Virginia. He has practiced business law, served as a Vice-President of a banking corporation, and worked for the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration.John Kelsay, an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., holds a Ph.D. in Religious Ethics from the University of Virginia and has been serving as an Instructor there. His dissertation dealt with ethics and society in Islam.Hugh E. Brown III, now preparing for the Episcopal ministry at Virginia Theological Seminary, holds an M.A. in Religious Ethics from the University of Virginia. Prior to entering graduate school, he had experience in business as a supervisor for an AT&T affiliate.     

Social Responsibility and Ethics: Clarifying the Concepts

Students coming into a third-year business ethics course I teach are often confused about the use and meaning of the terms social responsibility and ethics. This motivated me to take a closer look at a sample of the management and business ethics literature for an explanation of their confusion. I found that there are inconsistencies in the way the two terms are employed and the way the concepts are defined. This paper identifies the different ways the relationship between social responsibility and ethics has been represented, the various uses of these two terms, and the contrasting views regarding the connection between morality and ethics. While this analysis does not resolve any difficult substantive questions, it does provide conceptual clarity as a necessary first step towards facilitating students critical engagement with the substantive issues.     

An Interview with the new Dixons Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility

The Editor, Jack Mahoney, has the tables turned on him by being interviewed on his appointment this month to the new Dixons Chair of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at London Business School. Interviewing him is the businessman and well-known consultant, John Drummond, who is an Associate Editor and Managing Director of Integrity Works and Crime Prevention Consulting.     

The Decomposition of the Corporate Body: What Kant Cannot Contribute to Business Ethics

Kant is gaining popularity in business ethics because the categorical imperative rules out actions such as deceptive advertising and exploitative working conditions, both of which treat people merely as means to an end. However, those who apply Kant in this way often hold businesses themselves morally accountable, and this conception of collective responsibility contradicts the kind of moral agency that underlies Kant’s ethics. A business has neither inclinations nor the capacity to reason, so it lacks the conditions necessary for constraint by the moral law. Instead, corporate policies ought to be understood as analogous to legal constraints. They may encourage or discourage certain actions, but they cannot determine a person’s maxim – which for Kant is the focus of moral judgment. Because there is no collective intention apart from any intentions of the individual agents who act as members of the corporation, an organization itself has no moral obligations. This poses a dilemma: either apply the categorical imperative to the actions of particular businesspeople and surrender the notion of collective responsibility, or apply a different moral theory to the actions of businesses themselves. Given the diffusion of responsibility in a bureaucracy, the explanatory usefulness of collective responsibility may force business ethicists to abandon Kant’s moral philosophy.     

An Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility,Corporate Identity and Ethics Teaching in Business Schools

Recent events have raised concerns about the ethical standards of public and private organisations, with some attention falling on business schools as providers of education and training to managers and senior␣executives. This paper investigates the nature of, motivation and commitment to, ethics tuition provided by the business schools. Using content analysis of their institutional and home websites, we appraise their corporate identity, level of engagement in socially responsible programmes, degree of social inclusion, and the relationship to their ethics teaching. Based on published research, a schema is developed with corporate identity forming an integral part, to represent the macro-environment, parent institution, the business school and their relationships to ethics education provision. This is validated by our findings. Dr. Nelarine Cornelius, Reader in Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour, Brunel Business School, Brunel University, is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is also a Chartered Psychologist and is Director of both the Centre for Research in Emotion Work and the Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour Research Group at Brunel University. Dr. James Wallace, Lecturer in Quantitative Methods, School of Management, University of Bradford, is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He has considerable experience of statistical and mathematical modelling gained over several years in the UK utilities sector and in H.E. His current research interests include, applying statistical and mathematical modelling approaches to Technological, Operational and General Management problems. Dr. Rana Tassabehji, Lecturer in Information Systems and E-business, School of Management, University of Bradford, is a member of the British Academy of Management and the UK Academy for Information Systems. She worked as an international business consultant and as a consultant in the UK IT sector and is currently an academic member of the eGISE eGovernment network. Her research interests include ethics and e-business, Internet security and e-government.     

Business Groups and Corporate Social Responsibility

We present an analysis of over 400 comments about complying with tax obligations extracted from online discussion forums for freelancers. While the topics investigated by much of the literature on taxpayer behaviour are theory driven, we aimed to explore the universe of online discussions about tax in order to extract those topics that are most relevant to taxpayers. The forum discussions were subjected to a qualitative thematic analysis, and we present a model of the ‘universe’ of tax as reflected in taxpayer discussions. The model comprises several main actors (tax laws, tax authority, tax practitioners, and the taxpayer’s social network) and describes the multiple ways in which they relate to taxpayers’ behaviour. We also conduct a more focused analysis to show that the majority of taxpayers seem unconcerned with many of the variables that have been the focus of tax behaviour research (e.g. audits, penalties, etc.), and that most people are motivated to be compliant and are more concerned with how to comply than whether to comply. Moreover, we discuss how these ‘real-world’ tax discussions question common assumptions in the study of tax behaviour and how they inform our understanding of business ethics more generally.     

企业社会责任管理七大植入路径

2012年是中国企业社会责任发展进入到社会责任管理发展的里程碑年。对于中国企业来讲,社会责任管理无疑意味着企业管理发展的一次新机遇。在全球可持续发展压力倍增和形势严峻的大背景下,企业积极开展社会责任管理,有利于在实现自身发展的同时,进而实现经济、社会、环境的和谐共生和持续发展。     

外贸结汇如何省钱

省市级外贸大公司结汇,多数由熟悉业务的单证财务人员操作,他们对于信用证及汇款项下的索汇路线熟门熟路,一般问题不大。现在多数民营企业初涉外贸结算领域,对于如何进行外汇结算却是一知半解。许多外向型企业大多为劳动力密集型产业,风险大、成本高、利润薄,每一元钱都要精打细算,都要用在刀口上,银行的结汇费用自然也不例外。其次,也不能偷工减料,降低了银行在安全快速收汇中的作用,从而造成损失。     

社会责任造就美铝更大商业价值

美铝是世界领先的生产氧化铝,电解铝和铝深加工产品的500强跨国企业,已经有120多年的历史,在航空航天、汽车、建筑、包装、商业运输和消费电子品等领域有很多发明和应用,并且连续八年入选道·琼斯可持续发展指数.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and Family Business in Spain

Despite the economic relevance and distinctiveness of family firms, little attention has been devoted to researching their nature and functioning. Traditionally, family firms have been associated both to positive and negative features in their relationships with the stakeholders. This can be linked to different orientations toward corporate social responsibility. Thus, this research aims to identify the approaches that Spanish family firms maintain about social responsibility, based on the model developed by Quazi and O Brien Journal of Business Ethics 25, 33–51 (2000). An empirical study carried out for 112 Spanish family firms gives support to our initial assumption about these organizations not being a homogeneous group in terms of their orientation towards corporate social responsibility. The differences in perceptions do not seem to be associated to biographical characteristics. These results lead to some relevant academic and practical implications that suggest interesting lines for future research.María de la Cruz Déniz Déniz is professor in the Department of Management at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University (Spain). She received her Ph.D. in the area of Management from that University in 1999. Her current research interests include the study of Corporate Social Performance and the Management of International Business.M^a Katiuska Cabrera Suárez is professor in the Department of Management at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University (Spain). She received her Ph.D. in the area of Management from that University in 1998. Her current research interests include the study of Family Business Behaviour and Management.     

Ethics,Power and Communities: Corporate Social Responsibility Revisited

Ally-building can be an ethical pursuit in developing sources of power for the business manager. The commitment to social responsibility is a source of power, as well as an ethical practice for corporate endeavors. Pfeffer promotes a business manager’s ability to develop effectiveness with ties to powerful others in an intra-organizational environment. This paper advances an analysis about how individuals in corporations may use an inter-organizational approach to developing sources of power through a notion of corporate social responsibility. As such, a more meaningful qualitative reciprocity between corporations and the communities in which they operate can be developed. And, this relationship develops a source of power for the individual involved in this effort. In other words, relationships with powerful others in the community could develop by revisiting CSR based on reciprocity and exchange of sustainability in a community, rather than on a notion of paternal responsibility to some particular construct in society. Denise Kleinrichert has published papers on the areas of business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and applied ethics, as well as a book and a forthcoming chapter in socio-economic history. She has a Master in Liberal Arts degree in Humanities with an emphasis in Social and Political Thought from the University of South Florida, as well as her Bachelors degree in Economics with minors in Political Science and Sociology from Indiana University. She also has extensive corporate experience in human resources and risk management. Currently, she teaches Ethics and Business and Honors Applied Ethics at University of South Florida and is finishing her Ph.D. in Philosophy at this University.     

Corporate Directors and Social Responsibility: Ethics versus Shareholder Value

This paper reports on the results of an experiment conducted with experienced corporate directors. The study findings indicate that directors employ prospective rationality cognition, and they sometimes make decisions that emphasize legal defensibility at the expense of personal ethics and social responsibility. Directors recognize the ethical and social implications of their decisions, but they believe that current corporate law requires them to pursue legal courses of action that maximize shareholder value. The results suggest that additional ethics education will have little influence on the decisions of many business leaders because their decisions are driven by corporate law, rather than personal ethics. Jacob Rose is Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His research emphasizes judgment and decision making in accounting and governance contexts.