Zimbardo's “Stanford Prison Experiment” and the relevance of social psychology for teaching business ethics

The prevailing pedagogical approach in business ethics generally underestimates or even ignores the powerful influences of situational factors on ethical analysis and decision-making. This is due largely to the predominance of philosophy-oriented teaching materials. Social psychology offers relevant concepts and experiments that can broaden pedagogy to help students understand more fully the influence of situational contexts and role expectations in ethical analysis. Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment is used to illustrate the relevance of social psychology experiments for business ethics instruction. F. Neil Brady is an Associate Professor of Management at San Diego State University. He has published a dozen articles in the field of business ethics, three of which have appeared in the Academy of Management Review. Jeanne M. Logsdon is an Assistant Professor of Management at Santa Clara University. Her research on various aspects of corporate social performance has appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, Research in Corporate Social Performance and Policy, and California Management Review.     

Ethics and environmental marketing

Corporations have scrambled to bring to market products positioned and advertised as addressing the needs of the environmentally-conscious consumer. The vast majority of claims presented in support of these products are best described, however, as confused, misleading or outright illegal. Ethical considerations have not yet been integrated into environmental marketing, and as a result, long-term harm on both the individual and societal level may result. A framework for reversing this trend is presented. It identifies the sequence of actions necessary for the development and communication of ethical environmental marketing claims. The sequence is based upon two aspects of ethical theory: moral style and normative behavior. Specific implications for marketers' actions at each stage in the sequence of framework development are also discussed.Dr. Joel J. Davis is Assistant Professor of Journalism at San Diego State University. Prior to joining the faculty at San Diego State, Dr. Davis was Vice President, Associate Director of Strategic Planning and Research at D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles Advertising.     

Practical formalism: A new methodological proposal for business ethics

The traditional exposition of Kantian ethical theory in the business ethics literature is abstract, esoteric, and impractical compared to the more usable presentations of utilitarianism. This situation can be improved by identifying and describing the conceptual dimensions of formalistic ethical reasoning, as contained in the interplay between case and principle, with examples from the business/society literature. F. Neil Brady is Associate Professor of Management at San Diego State University. He has published several articles which appeared in Academy of Management Review.     

General causal models in business ethics: An essay on colliding research traditions

The construction of causal models for research in business ethics has become fashionable in recent years. This paper explores four recent proposals, comparing and contrasting their views. The primary purpose of this paper is to expose several confusions inherent in such models and to account for these errors in terms of a failure to distinguish between models as theories and models as representing a research tradition. We conclude with a brief set of recommendations for linking two major research traditions in business ethics: empiricism and ethical theory.F. Neil Brady is Professor of Management at San Diego State University. He is the author ofEthical Managing: Rules and Results (Macmillan, 1990) and numerous articles on business ethics. His research focuses on the application of ethical theory to business decision making.Mary Jo Hatch is an Associate Professor at San Diego State University and visiting Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. Her research interests include the link between business ethics and organizational culture, and humor in management teams. She has published articles on organizational culture and the behavioral and symbolic aspects of organizations as physical structures.     

The Effects of Moral Development and Adverse Selection Conditions on Managers’ Project Continuance Decisions: A Study in the Pacific-Rim Region

According to agency theory, agents base their economic decisions on self-interests when adverse selection conditions exist. However, cognitive moral development theory predicts that ethics/morals may influence decision-makers not to behave egoistically. Rutledge and Karim (1999; Accounting, Organizations and Society 24(2), 173–184) find both the moral reasoning level of the managers and an adverse selection condition affect a manager’s project evaluation decisions significantly. Since prior studies have shown that national␣culture might influence the application of agency theory in project evaluation, this current study uses a different moral development measurement to reexamine Rutledge and Karim’s hypotheses in another culture. A total of 73 Taiwanese executive MBA students with an average of 12.17 years work experience participated in this study. We found that both moral development level and adverse selection conditions significantly affect managers’ project continuance decisions. The interaction effect of these two factors indicates that, when adverse selection conditions exist, participants with a high level of moral development exhibit less of a tendency to continue an unprofitable project than those with a low level of moral development. With subjects from a different culture, our results confirm the findings of Rutldege and Karim. That is, the effects of moral development and adverse selection conditions on managers’ project continuance decisions are robust and can be generalized to different cultures. Implications of the findings of this study to multinational firms are also discussed. C. Janie Chang, Ph.D., is the Vern Odmark Professor of Accountancy at San Diego State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. She is the co-editor of the Review of Accounting and Finance, and has published in the areas of auditing, managerial accounting, and information systems to investigate information processing of experts. She has also studied cross-cultural issues related to professional judgments and decisions in auditing and managerial accounting. Sin-Hui Yen, Ph.D., is currently a Professor of Accounting at Tamkang University in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. from national Taiwan University. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Contemporary Accounting, and has published in the areas of accounting and finance to investigate human information processes, as well as ethical issues related to business professionals.     

The Impact of Business Education on Moral Judgment Competence: An Empirical Study

Recent highly publicized ethical breaches including those at Enron and WorldCom have focused attention on ethical behavior within the accounting profession. At the heart of the debate is whether ethical attitudes of accountants are to blame. Using a nationally representative sample of accounting practitioners and a multidisciplinary student sample at two Southern United States universities, we compare sample responses to 25 ethically charged vignettes to test whether they differ. Overall, we find no significant difference – even for a specific “accounting tricks” vignette, which resembles the Enron and WorldCom situations. We do find, however, that the practitioners were more accepting of vignettes that involved physical harm (PH) to individuals and those that were legal (but ethically questionable). We postulate that accounting practitioners may apply a legalistic framework to their assessment of the acceptability of each vignette. Focusing on an “accounting tricks” vignette, we also find no significant difference between auditors and institutional practitioners compared to all other types of accountants in the sample. We conclude that ethical attitudes of accounting practitioners do not differ significantly by specialty area. Tisha L. N. Emerson is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Baylor University in Texas. In addition to business ethics, Professor Emerson has published articles in the areas of environmental economics and economic education. She teaches courses in environmental economics, international trade, intermediate microeconomics and microeconomic principles. Stephen J. Conroy is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Diego in California. In addition to business ethics, Professor Conroy has published articles in the areas of economic development and demography, economics of education and economics of aging. He teaches courses in managerial economics at both the graduate and undergraduate level, as well as undergraduate courses in urban and regional economic development, intermediate microeconomics and principles of micro- and macroeconomics. Charles W. Stanley is an Associate Professor of Accounting at Baylor University in Texas. In addition to business ethics, Dr. Stanley has published articles in the areas of financial accounting, managerial accounting, auditing, accounting systems, tax, and professional ethics for accountants. He has also authored several on-line continuing education courses for CPAs including one that meets the Texas State Board of Accountancy requirements for continuing education by Texas CPAs. He teaches courses in auditing, ethics, financial accounting and managerial accounting in the MBA program at Baylor.     

Ethics,education, and corporate leadership

The purpose of this study is to determine the relative frequency of course offerings on social issues and business ethics in American business schools. Specifically, a random sample of the curricula of 119 American business schools were analyzed in order to gauge the importance given to coursework on ethics and social issues. The findings indicated that the incidence of such courses was generally low in American business curricula, particularly at the graduate level. These findings are discussed in light of the current concern for more responsible corporate behavior. G. R. Bassiry is currently Associate Professor of Management at California State University in San Bernardino, California. Formerly he served as Vice President and Acting President of Farabi University. He has published numerous journal articles on corporate leadership, international business, ethics, cultural conflicts and corporate policy and is the author of Power vs. Profit by Arno Press of New York Times.     

Managerial Authority as Political Authority: A Retrospective Examination of Christopher McMahon’s Authority and Democracy

An introduction to the March, 2005 symposium “The Political Theory of Organizations: A Retrospective Examination of Christopher McMahon’s Authority and Democracy” held in San Francisco as part of the Society for Business Ethics Group Meeting at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association. Jeffery Smith is an Assistant Professor and founding Director of the Banta Center for Business, Ethics and Society at the University of Redlands. His current research focuses on communicative ethics and the moral foundations of collaborative decision-making within economic organizations. He is also interested in the role of principles in moral decision-making and the extent to which principled decisions can be made in organizational contexts. Professor Smith’s writings have appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics: A European Review, Southern Journal of Philosophy and in other journals. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2000.     

Designing communication architectures for interorganizational multimedia collaboration

Advances in computer and communication technologies have stimulated the integration of digital video and audio with computing, leading to the development of various computer‐assisted collaborations. In this article, we propose a multilevel conferencing paradigm called super conference for supporting collaborative interactions between geographically separated groups of users, with each group belonging to possibly a different organization. In a super conference, each participant must receive and display the composite media stream obtained by mixing media streams transmitted by all the other participants. Hierarchical communication architectures are naturally suited for media mixing in super conferences. We present algorithms for designing hierarchical mixing architectures that optimize real‐time end‐to‐end delays of media. In order to improve their real‐time performance further, we propose multistage mixing techniques by which mixers can carry out mixing concurrently with communication. Surprisingly, the optimal architectures for multistage mixing are widely different from those of monostage mixing (in which, mixing and media communication sequential as opposed to concurrent). Based on real‐time delay constraints of multimedia, we obtain interesting limits on the sizes of both super conferences and groups within super conferences in optimal hierarchical architectures, which go to show their high scalability in terms of both the maximum number of participants and the geographical separation between them.

At the Multimedia Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, we have implemented a conferencing system on an environment of Sun SPARCstations equipped with digital multimedia hardware. As an interesting application of the conferencing system, we have developed a telepresenter by which users can remotely attend lectures in progress. We present initial experiences with the system.     

Comments On Hsieh,Moriarty and Oosterhout

A response to the discussants, Nien-hê Hsieh, Jeffrey Moriarty and J. (Hans) van Oosterhout, who took part in the March, 2005 symposium “The Political Theory of Organizations: A Retrospective Examination of Christopher McMahon’s Authority and Democracy: A General Theory of Government and Management” held in San Francisco as part of the Society for Business Ethics Group Meeting at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association. Christopher McMahon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to Authority and Democracy: A General Theory of Government and Management (Princeton, 1994), Professor McMahon wrote Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning (Cambridge, 2001) and has published widely in the area of moral and political philosophy. His work has appeared in Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs and the Journal of Philosophy, among other journals. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh.     

Line-drying versus machine-drying: energy consumption comparison

The purpose of this study was to determine the physical energy utilized in machine-drying and the human energy utilized in line-drying with a standard test laundry load in order to demonstrate the benefits of making a trade-off between mechanized energy and human energy utilized in drying laundry. Comparatively, only a small amount of metabolic energy was utilized in line-drying. Line-drying laundry over an extended period of time, along with similar trade-offs with other household tasks to use more human energy and less mechanized energy, would save energy resources and would contribute to physical health by increasing exercise levels. All data collection occurred at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.     

Aristotelian virtue and business ethics education

In recent years there has been an increased interest in the application of Aristotelian virtue to business ethics. The objective of this paper is to describe the moral and intellectual virtues defined by Aristotle and the types of pedagogy that might be used to integrate virtue ethics into the business curriculum. Virtues are acquired human qualities, the excellences of character, which enable a person to achieve the good life. In business, the virtues facilitate successful cooperation and enable the community to achieve its collective goals. The cultivation of virtue in students requires imparting knowledge about virtue and training students to be virtuous. A variety of instructional techniques are discussed including using case studies, collaborative and cooperative learning, role-playing, and video presentations. Business educators should emphasize to students that virtue considerations apply both to possible actions they may take and to themselves as moral agents. Since faculty may be viewed as role models, it is especially important that they set proper standards of behavior for students to emulate. Steven M. Mintz is the Dean of the School of Business and Public Administration at California State University, San Bernardino. His accounting ethics casebook, Cases in Accounting Ethics and Professionalism, is in its third edition and is published by McGraw-Hill.     

Justifications and procedures for implementing Institutional Review boards in business organizations

The present paper describes a number of ethical quandaries facing the implementors of motivational interventions in organizational settings. A critical analysis of the traditional solutions to these issues within the organizational literature finds them lacking for want of considering unwitting cognitive biases and self presentational doublespeak, both of which may result in the rights of research participants being underprotected. The establishment of an Institutional Review process, loosely analogized from the biomedical and behavioral science research traditions, is suggested as a means of protecting the rights of research participants as well as humanizing future motivational interventions. Robert A. Giacalone is Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He has been given the Outstanding Young Men of America Award, 1985. One of his articles has been published in Group and Organization Studies (1985), another will be published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology. Paul Rosenfeld is a Personnel Research Psychologist at the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center in San Diego. The Outstanding Young Men of America Award has been given to him in 1986. He is the co-author of Introduction to Social Psychology (1985), St. Paul, MN: West.     

Experiential ethics: A blueprint for personal and corporate ethics

There is a tendency to think of ethics as a universal body of principles governing human behavior. Richard R. Niebuhr challenges this universalist perspective by examining the development of human consciousness as an individual enterprise originating in immediate human experience. His conclusions lead us towards an understanding of conscience as likewise individual and experiential. It also enables us to identify a corporate consciousness or conscience which accounts for, yet prescinds, individual differences. In effect, Niebuhr's thinking in these matters provides us with a chart or blueprint for better ethical decision-making in business situations.Marist Father Patrick Primeaux teaches business ethics at Saint John's University, Jamaica, New York. He has a Ph.D. in Theology from Saint Michael's College of the University of Toronto and an M.B.A. from Southern Methodist University. In addition to business ethics, he is doing research and writing in the area of church management.     

Good ethics is good for business: Ethical attributions and response to environmental advertising

Researchers have used attribution theory as a basis for exploring the relationship between consumers' inferences of advertiser motivation (attributions) and advertising response. This study postulated the existence of two new types of attributions which relate to the perceived ethics of the advertiser (advertiser ethical attributions) and the advertising message (message ethical attributions). Research conducted among a nationally representative sample of 273 adults: (1) verified the existence of both advertiser and message ethical attributions, (2) demonstrated the independence of advertiser and message ethical attributions both from each other and from other measures of advertiser and message evaluation, (3) identified the specific advertising characteristics which lead to the formation of each type of ethical attribution and (4) demonstrated a significant relationship between advertiser and message ethical attributions and measures of advertising response.Dr. Joel J. Davis is Assistant Professor of Journalism, School of Communication, at San Diego State University. Dr. Davis' interests include environmental marketing, marketing strategy and marketing ethics. He has published in these areas in theJournal of Business Ethics, Journalism Quarterly andSAM Advanced Management Journal.     

Normative Self-Interest or Moral Hypocrisy?: The Importance of Context

We re-examine the construct of Moral Hypocrisy from the perspective of normative self-interest. Arguing that some degree of self-interest is culturally acceptable and indeed expected, we postulate that a pattern of behavior is more indicative of moral hypocrisy than a single action. Contrary to previous findings, our results indicate that a significant majority of subjects (N = 136) exhibited fair behavior, and that ideals of caring and fairness, when measured in context of the scenario, were predictive of those behaviors. Moreover, measures of Individualism/Collectivism appear more predictive of self-interested behavior than out-of-context responses to moral ideals. Implications for research and practice are discussed. George W. Watson received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech, his M.B.A. from California State at Fullerton, an M.S. in Systems Management from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, an a B.A. in Business Administration from the University of Washington, Seattle. His teaching focus is on corporate social responsibility and ethics. Dr.Watson’s current research interests include moral psychology,ethical decision making, and ideology. He has published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Business and Society, and the Journal of Business Ethics. Farooq Sheikh received his BS in Physics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. from Smeal College of Business, Penn State University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Operations Management, School of Business at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Dr. Sheik’s research interests include rational and behavioral models in business operations, bounded-rational behavioral models in population games, social norms, game theory and cross-disciplinary research involving behavioral models.     

A suggested approach to linking decision styles with business ethics

This essay seeks to link management action with business ethics. It utilizes two conceptual models of decision making (bounded rationality and preferred decision styles) to examine the important processes of information gathering and information processing. This analysis is then related to the ethical aspects of a business decision to help explain differences in the selection of ethical criteria.John E. Fleming is Professor of Management, School of Business Administration, University of Southern California. He worked in industry for fifteen years before joining the faculty at USC. His areas of academic research are business ethics, corporate strategy, and public policy.     

Correlates of salespeople's ethical conflict: An exploratory investigation

Much have been written about marketing ethics. Virtually no published research, however, has examined what factors are related to the ethical conflict of salespeople. Such research is important because it could have direct implications for the management of sales personnel. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study that examined selected correlates of salespeople's ethical conflict. Implications for practitioners and academic are also provided. Alan J. Dubinsky is visiting Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota. He was previously Assistant Professor of Marketing at Southern Methodist University and Territory Manager for Burroughs Corperation. His publications have appeared in several journals, including Journal of Retailing, Journal of Advertising, California Management Review, MSU Business Topics, Business Horizons, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Purchasing and Materials Management, Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Thomas N. Ingram is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Kentucky. He was formerly Product Manager and then Sales Manager with EXXON Company, U.S.A. and Mobil Chemical. His publications have appeared in Journal of Marketing Research, California Management Review, Business Horizons, Journal of Purchasing and Materials Management, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He is also coauthor of a personal selling textbook (Macmillan, 1984).The autors gratefully acknowledge the University of Kentucky Research Foundation for its financial support of this project.     

Endorsement of managers following accusations of breaches in confidentiality

Two related studies focused on the effects that a questionable supervisory conduct has on the endorsement and vulnerability of the supervisor, as well as on judgments of supervisory morality. Male and female undergraduate and graduate business students were asked to read the account of a personnel manager who violates employee confidentiality concerning certain personality test results, but who has had a previous record of increasing or decreasing productivity. The studies revealed varying patterns of leadership endorsement, vulnerability, and judgments of morality following this questionable or unethical conduct as a result of the personnel's manager's record and the subjects' sex. Robert Augustine Giacalone, Professor of Management at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, received his B.S. from Hofstra University and his Ph.D. from SUNY at Albany. Dr. Giacalone was the 1985 recipient of the Outstanding Young Men in America Award. His research interests include organizational social influence strategies and business ethics. Dr. Giacalone is the editor of Impression Management in the Organization (Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers).Paul Rosenfeld (Ph.D., SUNY Albany) is a Personnel Research Psychologist at the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center in San Diego, CA. Dr. Rosenfeld is currently conducting research on computerized organizational surveys. Stephen L. Payne is a Professor of Management at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. His primary research interests include business ethics, employee theft, and management education. Previous articles by Dr. Payne have appeared in this journal and others including The Academy of Management Review, Personnel Administrator, The Organizational Behavior Teaching Review, and Business and Society Review.     

Wrongdoing by Consultants: An Examination of Employees’ Reporting Intentions

Organizations are increasingly embedded with consultants and other non-employees who have the opportunity to engage in wrongdoing. However, research exploring the reporting intentions of employees regarding the discovery of wrongdoing by consultants is scant. It is important to examine reporting intentions in this setting given the enhanced presence of consultants in organizations and the fact that wrongdoing by consultants changes a key characteristic of the wrongdoing. Using an experimental approach, the current paper reports the results of a study examining employees reporting intentions subsequent to their discovery of wrongdoing by a consultant. The results of the study indicate that perceptions about the seriousness of a wrongdoing, personal costs and personal responsibility related to reporting a wrongdoing, and moral-equity judgments are significantly associated with reporting intentions for a normal (non-anonymous) reporting channel. Only perceptions of seriousness and personal costs are significantly associated for an anonymous reporting channel. Lastly, while personal costs for the anonymous reporting channel were lower than the normal reporting channel, reporting intentions were similar across the two channels.Susan Ayers is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the University of San Diego, where she has been a faculty member since 2000. Previously, she served on the faculty at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University. She has published in journals such as Auditing: A Journal of Practice Theory, Accounting Horizons, Information Systems Audit and Control Journal, and ABACUS. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in Accounting Information Systems. Her primary research interests involve the investigation of judgment and decision making in information systems environments. Steve Kaplan is a Professor of Accounting at Arizona State University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1981. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He has published widely in journals such as The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Business Ethics Quarterly, and Journal of Business Ethics. He is the previous editor of Behavioral Research in Accounting, a section journal of the American Accounting Association. His primary research interests are behavioral issues, judgement and decision making, and ethics.