Hives and horseshoes,Mintzberg or MacIntyre: what future for corporate social responsibility?

A horseshoe is regarded as a lucky, perhaps even romantic, symbol of our industrial heritage. Why is it, then, that much of English literature, from Mandeville's ‘Grumbling Hive’ on, portrays business in a murky light? The paper begins with an analysis of this phenomenon and concludes that it is the institutionalisation and legitimisation of avarice and its consequential effects that gives rise to such a portrayal. A horseshoe has also been used as a convenient means of conceptualising an answer to the questions this conclusion raises: ‘Who should control the corporation and for what ends?’ (Mintzberg 1985) and discussing recent developments in corporate social responsibility. Drawing on research evidence the paper demonstrates how corporations are simultaneously under pressure from society and responding to its concerns. The paper concludes that these current developments can at best ameliorate the situation, and that what is necessary is to rediscover the notion of corporate virtue, instead of putting virtue at the service of vice.     

Virtues, Managers and Business People: Finding a Place for MacIntyre in a Business Context

Critics point to four issues as presenting barriers to the use of virtue in the context of business. They focus on the relationship between management and practice, the potential for virtuous behaviour in a competitive environment, the ability to develop a reflexive critique of management that can be acted on, and the differentiation between work and wider social roles and people's propensity to take responsibility for them. In this paper we propose a solution to criticisms levelled at the use of virtue within Business Ethics. We examine the critiques of management in the context of Virtue Ethics and the application of these to business. In arguing for a role for business in being virtuous and promoting virtue we accept that the concept of management that is based on the type of liberalism founded on personal preference and benefit is deeply problematic and that management that is driven solely by profit is not compatible with the development of practice based virtue. However, we argue that to exclude those activities in which management is involved as a result would be wrong and dangerous. Instead we see the great advantageof a Virtue Ethic is that it conjures up an alternative vision to the dominant practice, and such an alternative vision is urgently needed in business today.     

Moral Memory: Why and How Moral Companies Manage Tradition

Recent research on the role of ethics in the organizational culture literature found practically the whole literature reduced to a debate between ethical rationalism and ethical relativism. The role of the past in the form of tradition to maintain and improve moral reflection is completely missing. To address this gap in the literature on the level of practice, the concepts of moral memory and moral tradition are applied to data on 22 companies that have long-standing moral practices. In this way, the practice of moral traditions can be explored with recent conceptual advances and a list of best practices delineated. Moral memory is the recollection of and attachment to the succession of past events and experiences that maintains moral tradition. Moral tradition is the continuing transmission and reception of related moral themes through multiple generations of employees. It is found that companies that maintain moral traditions tend to develop “family” cultures with considerable compassion for workers as persons who have non-economic needs and rights. These companies also temper the role of leadership, insisting that leaders are responsible for and are evaluated by the company’s moral traditions. Finally, moral traditions are essential mechanisms through which companies paradoxically both stimulate and limit competitive behavior. Steven P. Feldman is Associate Professor of Management Policy, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Over the last decade, Dr. Feldman’s research has explored the role of moral memory and moral tradition in the ethical aspects of organizations. His book, Memory as a Moral Decision: The Role of Ethics in Organizational Culture (2002), found that the emotional and cognitive aspects of memory to be key in establishing moral organizational cultures. The moral importance of the past in the present has received little attention in the literature on organizational culture. Winner of the Distinguished Lectureship in Business Ethics from the American Fulbright Program, Dr.␣Feldman will be carrying out research on ethical issues in American-Chinese business relations in Shanghai in 2007.     

Moral Stress: Considering the Nature and Effects of Managerial Moral Uncertainty

To better illuminate aspects of stress that are relevant to the moral domain, we present a definition and theoretical model of “moral stress.” Our definition posits that moral stress is a psychological state born of an individual’s uncertainty about his or her ability to fulfill relevant moral obligations. This definition assumes a self-and-others relational basis for moral stress. Accordingly, our model draws from a theory of the self (identity theory) and a theory of others (stakeholder theory) to suggest that this uncertainty arises as a manager faces competing claims for limited resources from multiple stakeholders and/or across multiple role identities. We further propose that the extent to which the manager is attentive to the moral aspects of the claims (i.e., moral attentiveness) moderates these effects. We identify several consequences of managerial moral stress and discuss theoretical, empirical, and practical implications of our approach. Most importantly, we argue that this work paves an important path for considering stress through the lens of morality.     

Moral Markets and Moral Managers Revisited

In the wake of recent corporate scandals, this paper examines the claim made by John Boatright that business ethics, as it is currently conceived, “rests on a mistake.” Ethics in business should not be achieved through managerial vision, discretion or responsibility; rather, ethics should shape the design of institutions that regulate business from the outside. What ethicists should advocate for, according to Boatright, are moral markets not moral managers. I explore the empirical and normative dimensions of his claim with special attention paid to the extent to which Boatright’s development of the economic theory of the firm supports his position. I conclude by suggesting some reasons why moral markets and moral management are compatible frameworks for corporate reform.     

Strategic Vision: Sustaining Employee Commitment

Vision is a key part of both the concept and practice of leadership. Many managers successfully create it and present it to employees. However, they are often less good at retaining employees' long-term commitment to the vision, which results in lost opportunities. This article explores how effectively senior managers build and sustain employee commitment to strategic vision, and how they could improve.     

Corporate Moral Agency: Review and Implications

The debate concerning corporate moral agency is normally conducted through philosophical arguments in articles which argue from only one point of view. This paper summarises both the arguments for and against corporate moral agency and concludes from this that the arguments in favour have more weight. The paper also addresses the way in which the law in the U.K. and the U.S.A. currently views this issue and shows how it is supportive of the concept of corporate moral agency. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the debate for business ethics in general, and stakeholder theory and virtue ethics in particular.     

The Influence of Business Ethics Education on Moral Efficacy,Moral Meaningfulness,and Moral Courage: A Quasi-experimental Study

The research described here contributes to the extant empirical research on business ethics education by examining outcomes drawn from the literature on positive organizational scholarship (POS). The general research question explored is whether a course on ethical decision-making in business could positively influence students’ confidence in their abilities to handle ethical problems at work (i.e., moral efficacy), boost the relative importance of ethics in their work lives (i.e., moral meaningfulness), and encourage them to be more courageous in raising ethical problems at work even if it is unpopular (i.e., moral courage). Specifically, the study used a rigorous quasi-experimental pretest–posttest research design with a treatment (N = 30) and control group (N = 30) to investigate whether a graduate-level course in business ethics could influence students’ levels of moral efficacy, meaningfulness, and courage. Findings revealed that participants in the business ethics treatment course experienced significant positive increases in each of the three outcome variables as compared to the control group. The largest increase was in moral efficacy, followed by moral courage, and finally, moral meaningfulness. These findings are discussed in the context of the current research on business ethics education and POS. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Moral Leadership: An Overview

This paper develops and examines the distinctions between the process of leadership, the person of the leader, and the job of leading. I argue that leadership is a delicate combination of the process, the techniques of leadership, the person, the specific talents and traits of a/the leader, and the general requirements of the job itself. The concept of leadership can and must be distinguishable and definable separately from our understanding of what and who leaders are, although the phenomenon of leadership can only be known and measured in the particular instantiation of a leader doing a job.     

The market ethic: Moral dilemmas and microeconomics

Brief cases written as multiple choice questions can provide the basis for a classroom game based on business ethics. This teaching note describes the organization of such a game and provides five sample cases.Julianne Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business of New York University. She has also taught at the Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Tours, France. Her publications have appeared in theInternational Economic Review, Economics Letters, theJournal of Regulatory Economics, theJournal of Business Ethics, andJapan and the World Economy.I would like to thank my students for their suggestions and support of this project. This research was supported by a grant from the Rundin Foundation.     

Technology and Business: Rethinking the Moral Dilemma

In a market economy, the corporation is the primary institution through which new technologies are introduced. And the corporation, being primarily interested in economic goals, may ask very limited questions about the safety and workability of a particular technology. This viewpoint causes problems which manifest themselves in many cases where the concerns of engineers and technicians in corporations about decisions relating to a particular technology clash with managers prone to overlooking these concerns in favor of organizational interests. The problem can be seen as a structural one that is inherent in the capitalistic system. It can also be seen as an organizational or policy problem that requires changes in the organization to give engineers more authority in decision-making or to facilitate whistle-blowing on the part of engineers or technicians. In this paper, we take the view that problems surrounding the misuse of technology lie in a lack of understanding of technology's inherently social and moral dimensions. Technology creates a moral situation, and this situation should provide the context for decision-making. Technology is also experimental, and everyone involved with introducing a particular technology needs to ask the question as to whether a real life experiment is warranted. Finally, technology demands a moral sensibility which recognizes that business interests and technological interests alike need to be understood in the network of concrete relational contexts in which they are embedded.     

Moral Emotions and Corporate Psychopathy: A Review

While psychopathy research has been growing for decades, a relatively new area of research is corporate psychopathy. Corporate psychopaths are simply psychopaths working in organizational settings. They may be attracted to the financial, power, and status gains available in senior positions and can cause considerable damage within these roles from a manipulative interpersonal style to large-scale fraud. Based upon prior studies, we analyze psychopathy research pertaining to 23 moral emotions classified according to functional quality (positive vs. negative signal) and target (self vs. other). Based upon our review, we suggest that psychopaths are high in moral emotions associated with other-directed negative signals, low in self-directed negative signals, and low in other-directed positive signals. We found no empirical articles related to self-directed positive signals. This understanding of the specific moral emotion deficits of corporate psychopaths provides greater theoretical understanding and practical implications of knowing which individuals not to promote, though more research is needed on moral emotions that are faked for manipulative reasons.     

金蜜蜂：共同愿景,共同行动

本次论坛以＂金蜜蜂：共同愿景,共同行动＂为主题,体现出中国企业社会责任已经进入到强化实践、注重合作、提升价值的新的发展阶段。以＂金蜜蜂＂为代表的中国企业,在追求可持续发展、共筑可持续未来的共同愿景的指导下,履行社会责任的意识不断提升、行动不断深化、跨界合作不断增加,示范作用不断显现,有力推动着中国和谐社会的建设。     

Managers as Moral Leaders: Moral Identity Processes in the Context of Work

Journal of Business Ethics - This qualitative study explores how business leaders narrate their personal ways of recognizing, reasoning, and resolving moral conflicts and what these stories reveal...     

FOCUS: Moral Responsibilities to Competitors

Are there any moral restraints on how a company should behave towards its competitors, or is all fair in love, war - and business? Dr Higginson is Director of the Ridley Hall Foundation, Cambridge CB3 9HG. The Foundation is concerned with the application of Christian faith and values in business, and conducts research, seminars, publications and speaking engagements to that end. This paper was first presented at a Seminar on Teaching Business Ethics held at London Business School on Friday, 10 March, 1995.     

Prohibitive Voice as a Moral Act: The Role of Moral Identity,Leaders, and Workgroups

Employees’ may view prohibitive voice—that is, expressing concerns about harmful practices in the workplace—as a moral yet interpersonally risky behavior. We, thus, predict that prohibitive voice is likely to be influenced by variables associated with moral and relational qualities. Specifically, we hypothesize that employees’ moral identity internalization—i.e., the centrality of moral traits in their self-concept—is positively associated with their use of prohibitive voice. Furthermore, we hypothesize that this association is stronger when employees enjoy a higher quality relationship with their leader (leader-member exchange). In addition, drawing on the literature on moral symbolism, we hypothesize that workgroup moral identity symbolization—i.e., the extent to which workgroup members symbolically display moral traits—moderates the relationship between moral identity internalization and prohibitive voice in a compensatory manner. That is, workgroup moral identity symbolization enhances employees’ use of prohibitive voice when employees’ moral identity internalization is low. Data collected from hospital employees and their supervisors and coworkers support these hypotheses. These findings suggest new ways to promote prohibitive voice and, thereby, protect organizational stakeholders from harmful behaviors.