Norman Bowie and Richard Rorty on multinationals: Does business ethics need ‘metaphysical comfort?’

Norman Bowie wrote an article on the moral obligations of multinational corporations in 1987. This paper is a response to Bowie, but more importantly, it is designed to articulate the force and substance of the pragmatist philosophy developed by Richard Rorty. In his article, Bowie suggested that moral universalism (which he endorses) is the only credible method of doing business ethics across cultures and that cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are not. Bowie, in a manner surprisingly common among contemporary philosophers, lumps Rorty into a bad guy category without careful analysis of his philosophy and ascribes to him views which clearly do not fit. I attempt to provide both a more careful articulation of Rorty's views, and to use his pragmatism to illustrate an approach to business ethics which is more fruitful than Bowie's. This brand of philosophy follows the Enlightenment spirit of toleration and attempts to set aside questions of Truth, whether religious or philosophical, and have ethics centered around what James called that which is good in the way of belief. Rather than looking for metaphysical foundations or some type of external justification, ethicists perform their craft from within the cultural traditions, narratives and practices of their society.Andrew C. Wicks, M.A. in Religious Ethics. Currently a fourth year Doctoral Candidate in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.     

Women,unions, and social policy

We contend in this paper that the trade union role in social policy is expanding due to the debate on women's issues. The Centrale de l'enseignement du Québec is seen as a forerunner of this trend, with its policy positions on questions previously seen as personal. The method of promotion of these interests is also new, with caucusing and networking. The significance of these changes goes beyond unionized women workers and affects all women. Dr. Margaret Beattie is Professor adjoint at the Département de Service Social, Université de Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Her most important publication is: Women and Factional Politics in a Teacher's Union, Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal (Fall 1982).     

Reactions to ethical dilemmas: A study pertaining to certified public accountants

This study discusses how perceptions of ethics are formed by certified public accountants (CPAs). Theologians are used as a point of comparison. When considering CPA ethical dilemmas, both subject groups in this research project viewed confidentiality and independence as more important than recipient of responsibility and seriousness of breach. Neither group, however, was insensitive to any of the factors presented for its consideration. CPA reactions to ethical dilemmas were governed primarily by provisions of the CPA ethics code; conformity to that code may well be evidence of higher stage moral reasoning.Gregory A. Claypool is Associate Professor of Accounting and Finance at Youngstown State University.David F. Fetyko is Professor of Accounting at Kent State University. Michael A. Pearson is Professor of Accounting at Kent State University. He is the author of Enhancing Perceptions of Auditor Independence, Journal of Business Ethics 4 (1985), 53–6, and Auditor Independence Deficiencies and Alleged Audit Failures, Journal of Business Ethics 6 (1987), 281–7.     

A note on government policy and the new ‘intrapreneurship’ in Bulgaria

Conclusion I have attempted in this paper to highlight the recent emergence and rapid growth of a particular type of intrapreneurship in the Bulgarian economy. This intrapreneurship involves the creation of new smaller establishments within existing large-scale industrial firms. These semi-autonomous auxiliary plants are exempt from part of the bureaucracy which constrains the larger addition, they have provided a higher rate of technological advance, a better supply of consumer goods, a greater utilization of labor resources, and a higher return to human capital.Only through the continued development of a small-firm sector can the Bulgarian economy meet the challenge currently posed by its western counterparts. Whether the next step from intrapreneurship to entrepreneurship is taken may hold the key for industrial development in Bulgaria.     

Beyond bean counting: Establishing high ethical standards in the public accounting profession

Business professions are increasingly faced with the question of how to best monitor the ethical behavior of their members. Conflicts could exist between a profession's desire to self-regulate and its accountability to the public at large. This study examines how members of one profession, public accounting, evaluate the relative effectiveness of various self-regulatory and externally imposed mechanisms for promoting a climate of high ethical behavior. Specifically, the roles of independent public accountants, regulatory and rule setting agencies, and undergraduate accounting education are investigated. Of 461 possible respondents, 230 questionnaires (a 49.6% response rate) indicated that the profession's own rule setting body (The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) and the use of peer review were perceived as the most effective mechanisms, while government regulation was ranked least. Respondents also evaluated the extent to which ethics should be covered in the accounting curriculum. For every course, the CPAs believed a greater emphasis on ethics is appropriate than presently exists. Suggestions for more effectively integrating ethics into accounting courses are made. Finally, respondents were also asked whether in answering the questionnaire they used a definition of ethics as either the Professional Code of Conduct or a moral and philosphical framework for guiding beliefs. Those who viewed ethics as abiding by a professional code had more confidence in the mechanisms addressed in this study to aid the public accounting profession's ability to ensure high ethical standards of conduct. Methodological implications of this distinction for future studies in business ethics are discussed. Jeffrey R. Cohen is Assistant Professor of Accounting at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a C.M.A. and a Peat Marwick Research Fellow. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Accounting Research, Decision Sciences and The Organizational Behavior Teaching Review. His work on Ethics has appeared in Issues in Accounting Education, Management Accounting, and The CPA Journal. Laurie W. Pant is Assistant Professor of Accounting at Boston College. She holds an M.B.A. and a D.B.A. from Boston University and an M.Ed. from Emory University. She serves on the editorial board of Issues in Accounting Education. Her articles on Ethics have appeared in Issues in Accounting Education, Management Accounting and The Organizational Behavior Teaching Review.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1989 American Accounting Association National Meeting.     

Can Ethical Organizational Character Be Stimulated and Enabled?: “Upbuilding” Dialog As Crisis Management Method

Crisis management can be simultaneously a content specific problem solving process and an opportunity for stimulating and enabling an organizations ethical tradition. Crisis can be an opportunity for ethical organizational development. Kierkegaardian upbuilding dialog method builds from within the internal ethical tradition of an organization to respond to crises while simultaneously adapting and protecting the organizations tradition. The crisis itself may not be a directly ethical crisis, but the method of responding to the crisis is built upon the ethical foundations of an organizations tradition. A limitation of this method is that it may be less applicable to organizations with questionably ethical traditions. The concept of upbuilding dialog is derived from Kierkegaard, but here is applied to organizational crisis management. The method is illustrated and discussed in the context of a wrongful death crisis of the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute, a nonprofit organization, and an economic survival crisis at Ben and Jerrys, a business organization.     

Creating a Market Orientation

A market orientation is a business culture in whichall employees are committed to the continuous creation of superiorvalue for customers. However, businesses report limited successin developing such a culture. One approach to create a marketorientation, the approach taken by most businesses, is the programmaticapproach, an a priori approach in which a business uses educationprograms and organizational changes to attempt to implant thedesired norm of continuously creating superior value for customers.A second approach is the market-back approach, an experientialapproach in which a business continuously learns from its day-to-dayefforts to create and maintain superior value for customers andthereby continuously develops and adapts its customer-value skills,resources, and procedures. Theory suggests that both approachescontribute to increasing a market orientation. It also suggeststhat when the a priori education of the programmatic approachis sharply focused on providing a foundation for the experientiallearning, the combined effect of the two learning strategiesis the largest. The implication is that the two strategies mustbe tailored and managed as a coordinated joint strategy for creatinga market orientation.     

Mill's proof that happiness is the criterion of morality

This paper considers the converse of the principle that ought implies can, namely, the principle that must implies ought. It argues that this principle is the central premiss for Mill's argument that happiness is desirable (worthy of desire), and it examines the sense of must that is relevant and the implications it has for Mill's moral philosophy.     

National Innovation Systems, ‘Real Economies’ and Instituted Processes

The design of institutions, policies and units of analysis are all predicated upon the ways in which we see the world and explain change. Today, as the pace of change quickens due to technological advancement and growing technoeconomic interdependencies in a series of processes generally referred to as globalization, analytic frameworks which emphasize national systems have emerged to provide a unit of analysis through which to explain these changes and growing interactions. These frameworks have the allure of trying to incorporate the ways in which economies, markets and economic agents actually behave – with particular reference to innovation, knowledge, learning and institutions. Our purpose in this paper is to raise some questions about the importance of these frameworks from a policy (managerial) and analytic perspective, to outline some limitations of their utility, and to suggest some useful paths for investigation.     

Assessing Industrial Buyer Preferences: Using the Swait-Louviere Test to Test the Key Informant Assumption

When using professional buyers to study an organizations buying behavior an important consideration is whether their preferences reflect those of the organization. Since this is a key informant problem, the present article focuses on the issue of the degree to which key informants can be used to provide insights into their own organizations preferences. We conduct a direct test of the key informant assumption using the Swait-Louviere test. In this test preferences from a choice experiment using actual buyers, and from market decisions made by the organization, are estimated separately, then jointly in multinomial logit models. We found that buyers experimental preferences were similar to estimates obtained from the market decisions. Buyers preferences were closer to the intuitive preferences of the organizations top executives than the estimates based on past market decisions, although a model based on the combined data outperformed either. We discuss the implications of these results for industrial buying research.This revised version was published online in May 2005 with a corrected cover date.     

Towards an Integrative Model of Small Firm Internationalisation

Firm internationalisation has long been regarded as an incremental process, wherein firms gravitate towards psychologically close markets and increase commitment to international markets in a gradual, step-wise, manner through a series of evolutionary stages. However, much of the recent literature provides clear evidence of rapid and dedicated internationalisation by born global firms. Typically, these are smaller entrepreneurial firms that internationalise from inception, or start to shortly thereafter. Their main source of competitive advantage is often related to a more sophisticated knowledge base. In addition, the authors have found evidence of firms supporting this born global pattern of behaviour but also evidence of firms that suddenly internationalise after a long period of focusing on the domestic market. These born-again globals appear to be influenced by critical events that provide them with additional human or financial resources, such as changes in ownership/management, being taken over by another company with international networks, or themselves acquiring such a firm. Based upon the extant literature and our own research, we propose an integrative model that recognises the existence of different internationalisation pathways. We then explore differences in behaviour due to the firm's internationalisation trajectory and discuss the strategic and public policy implications.     

The Effect of Implicit versus Explicit Comparisons on Temporal Pricing Claims

Existing research has investigated the "pennies-a-day" strategy of reframing an "aggregate" expense as a "per day" expense (Nagle & Holden, 1995; Price 1995; Gourville 1998). This paper extends this research by considering the incremental impact on compliance of explicitly comparing the cost of a transaction to a specific petty cash expense (e.g., a cup of coffee). We show that in the presence of a per day framing of price (e.g., $1 per day), an explicit comparison provides little added value. However, we also show that in the presence of an aggregate framing of price (e.g., $350), an explicit comparison to a petty cash expense is sufficient to generate a "pennies-a-day" perspective. We conclude that it is not the per day framing, per se, which drives "pennies-a-day" effectiveness, but the petty cash comparisons that such a framing either implicitly or explicitly generates.     

Professionalism: Foundation for business ethics

Professionalism includes the essential contents of other key notions within the field of business ethics. As a term involving the notion of vocation it may be understood as containing a religious content, since vocation refers to a man's most intimate personal decisions, destiny and providence. Professionalism also connotes respect for law and so includes a reference to commercial law as a guide to right conduct. Professionalsim thus lifts the requirements of law to the level of personal commitment.Like an honest act, professionalism may not be easy to define, but you will know it when you see it. As for professionalism's practitioners, like the practitioners of honesty, their art is learned not by seeking definitions of what they do, but by practicing professionalism. Only if this practice becomes an obsession with the Business Aristocracy can we expect professionalism to seize the soul of lesser businessmen and suffuse the entire business community. Thomas E. Schaefer, Ph. D., is Professor of Business Administration at the University of Texas, Permian Basin. He was formerly Head of the Department of Business Administration, University of Alaska, and Dean of Business Administration, Sacred Heart University, Puerto Rico. He has received a Private Sector Award of Pres. Reagan for Extraordinary Contributions to Small Business. His most important publications are: The Process of Management: What Supervisors Do (O.C. Press, 1982); Leadership Through Followership, Business Horizons (September/October, 1982) and many others.Paper presented at the 16th Conference on Value Inquiry, entitled: Ethics and the Market Place: An Exercise in Bridge-Building or On the Slopes of the Inteface.     

Business regulation,business ethics and the professional employee

The differences in business reactions to legal regulation, and the nature of business moralities, are examined through the eyes of an expert group — in-house lawyers. The research indicates that lawyers inevitably provide a degree of control through their technical expertise, but that they also identify strongly with their companies and emphasise shared ethics rather than ethical differences between lawyers and their employers. This can partly be explained by their integration with the company but also rests on the problematic nature of law and regulatory controls in relation to organisations within the community. In-house lawyers therefore reject a policing role in favour of a counselling role. Since they perceive themselves as part of a shared culture of ethics, they also avoid a leadership role. However, the article suggests that the nature of legal judgment should assist lawyers towards such a role, while recognising that organisational statesmanship must be constrained by organisational culture and the wider community culture of ethical standards. Dr Karl J. Mackie is Director of the Centre for Legal Studies in the University of Nottingham, where he lectures in employment law and in management skills development. Lawyers in Business: and the Law Business is published by Macmillan (London) 1989. Dr Mackie is a member of the Business Strategy Network and a consultant in business strategy.This paper has been adapted from Mackie, Lawyers in Business: and the Law Business (1989), (London: Macmillan), ch. 10.     

Learning,market selection and the evolution of industrial structures

Industrial economics is a rich source of puzzles for economic theory. One of them — certainly the most discussed — regards the co-existence of firms (and plants) of different sizes, displaying rather invariant skewed distributions. Other puzzles, however, concern the sectoral specificities in industrial structures, the persistence of asymmetric corporate performances and the dynamics of entry and exit. The paper reports some preliminary results on evolutionary modeling of the links between the microeconomics of innovation, the patterns of industrial change and some observable invariances in industrial structures.First, the paper reviews a few of these empirical regularities in structures and in the patterns of change. Second, the paper discusses the achievements and limits of interpretations of the evidence based on equilibrium theories. Finally, it presents a model where these regularities are explained as emergent properties deriving from non equilibrium interactions among technologically heterogeneous firms. Moreover, simulation exercises show that also the intersectoral variety in the observed industrial structures and dynamics can be interpreted on the grounds of underlying specificities in the processes of technological learning — which is called technological regimes — and of the processes of market interactions — i.e. market regimes.This research has undertaken within an on going project sponsored by the Italian Research Council (CNR, Progetto strategico,Cambiamento tecnologico e sviluppo economico). Support by the Consortium on Competitiveness and Cooperation Centre for Research in Management, University of California at Berkeley is also gratefully acknowledged.     

The foundations of corporate responsibility

The thesis of this paper is that corporate activity can best be understood on analogy with the acitivity of persons. The ground for this analogy lies in the nature of activity itself which is common to both and to find a ground therein an analysis of the features of activity is presented based upon a comparison of activity and process by Alburey Castell. Activity is said to be bi-polar with one pole the purpose or goal to be handled in utilitarean fashion and the other pole concerned with the maintenance of the presuppositions of activity.While any goal chosen will have hypothetical oughts as its conditions, it is argued that the presuppositions of activity are categorical oughts in that they cannot be denied without asserting them. And since one of these presuppositions is freedom of choice, thus giving activity the power to destroy its own possibility, these presuppositions function in the context of practice as categorical norms and are universal in their applicability as preserving the possibility of responsible activity for everyone else as well as myself. All activity whether it be other-regarding or self-regarding (self-interest in the business world) is subject to the norms of its own possibility, its enabling conditions, and this constitutes the moral ground for personal, managerial and a basis for inquiry into corporate responsibility.All of these ideas are put forth within the wider context of the problem of corporate legitimacy and constitute a prolegomena to it.     

Demand-side Spillovers and Semi-collusion in the Mobile Communications Market

We analyze roaming policy in the market for mobile telecommunications. Firms undertake quality improving investments in network infrastructure in order to increase geographical coverage, capacity in a given area, or functionality. Prior to investments, roaming policy is determined. We show that under collusion at the investment stage, firms and a benevolent welfare maximizing regulators interests coincide, and no regulatory intervention is needed. When investments are undertaken non-cooperatively, firms and the regulators interests do not coincide. Contrary to what seems to be the regulators concern, firms would decide on a higher roaming quality than the regulator. The effects of allowing a virtual operator to enter are also examined. Furthermore, we discuss some implications for competition policy with regard to network infrastructure investment.     

Lying and intentions

In this essay I criticize recent attempts to prove that the concept of lying does not include the intent to deceive. I argue that examples by Isenberg and Carson fail to prove that one can lie without intending to deceive and, furthermore, that untoward consequences would follow if these authors were correct. I conclude that since intending to deceive is indeed a necessary condition of lying, the class of statements that constitute lies is smaller than what Isenberg et al. would suggest. Hence the class of deceptive advertisements is also correspondingly smaller. Gary E. Jones is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department of the University of San Diego. He won the Review of Metaphysics Dissertation Essay Contest, 1977 and he holds fellowship of the University of Cincinnati and the University of Tennessee. His most important publications are The State and the Right to Health Care (in Philosophical Quarterly), Rights and Desires (in Ethics), Vindication, Hume, and Induction (in Canadian Journal of Philosophy), Engelhardt on Abortion and the Euthenasia of Defective Infants (in Linacre Quarterly) and Clendinnen, Jackson and Induction (in Philosophy of Science).     

What is business ethics? A reply to peter drucker

In his What is Business Ethics? Peter Drucker accuses business ethics of singling out business unfairly for special ethical treatment, of subordinating ethical to political concerns, and of being, not ethics at all, but ethical chic. We contend that Drucker's denunciation of business ethics rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the field. This article is a response to his charges and an effort to clarify the nature, scope and purpose of business ethics.     

The indefensibility of insider trading

The article, Inside Trading Revisited, has taken the stance that insider trading is neither unethical nor economically inefficient. Attacking my arguments to the contrary developed in an earlier article, The Ethics of Inside Trading (Journal of Business Ethics, 1989) this article constructs careful arguments and even appeals to Adam Smith to justify its conclusions. In my response to this article I shall clarify my position as well as that of Smith to support my counter-contention that insider trading is both unethical and inefficient. Patricia H. Werhane is the Henry J. Wirtenberger Professor of Business Ethics at Loyola University, Chicago. She is the author or editor of seven books including Ethical Issues in Business,edited with Tom Donaldson, in its third edition, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, Profits and Responsibility,and Philosophical Issues in Human Rights,edited with David Ozar and A. R. Gini. She is past president of the Society for Value Inquiry, founding member, past president and Executive Director of the Society of Business Ethics, and Chairperson of the Ethics Advisory Council of Arthur Andersen & Co. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Business Ethics,the Journal of Value-Based Management, and Public Affairs Quarterly,and is Editor-in-Chief of Business Ethics Quarterly.Her book, Adam Smith and his Legacy for Modern Capitalismis forthcoming with Oxford University Press.