Political and Economic Arguments for Corporate Social Responsibility: Analysis and a Proposition Regarding the CSR Agenda

Different perspectives on corporate social responsibility (CSR) exist, each with their own agenda. Some emphasise management responsibilities towards stakeholders, others argue that companies should actively contribute to social goals, and yet others reject a social responsibility of business beyond legal compliance. In addition, CSR initiatives relate to different issues, such as labour standards and corruption. This article analyses what types of CSR initiatives are supported by political and economic arguments. The distinction between different CSR perspectives and CSR issues on the one hand and between political and economic arguments on the other could help to advance the debate on the justification and welfare impact of CSR. It is argued that ordinary boundary conditions for business behaviour in a market economy provide support for some, but not all, CSR initiatives. This has implications for policy priorities. Building on the analysis, it is proposed that more attention should be paid to the behaviour of large multinational enterprises in their normal business operations and to CSR issues with a potentially large impact on market functioning.     

Every Picture Tells a Story: Digital Video and Photography Issues in Business Ethics Classrooms

Digital video and photography are becoming aspects of everyday business activities, allowing for the quick modification and distribution of images. From development of websites to the editing of a single photograph on a desktop PC, people are using digital images in many business contexts. However, important business ethics issues are emerging concerning the malleability and veracity of digital images as well as their rapid dissemination on the Internet. Activities with digital video and photography in business ethics classrooms can underscore a number of philosophical and moral concerns involving the nature of perception and documentation as well as surveillance. The era of video and photography as reliable witnesses to human interaction is gradually passing; they are becoming recognized as highly malleable media that give photographers wide leeway in modification, leading to issues involving the trustworthiness of photographic documentation in business contexts. Various exercises and scenarios that explore image modification issues are included in this article. Hands-on exercises can also be effective; students who create and subsequently edit digital portraits of themselves in the context of a business ethics class can gain valuable perspectives on role-taking and the ethical implications of deceptive communications.     

The Unholy Alliance of Business and Science

This paper will build on a recent article appearing in the Harvard Business Review that blamed the alleged crisis in management education on the scientific model that has been adopted as the sole means of gaining knowledge about human behavior and organizations. The solution, they argue, is for business schools to realize that business management is not a scientific discipline but a profession, and deal with the things a professional education requires. We will expand on this article and discuss its implications by looking at the scientific model from a philosophical perspective and dealing with the issue of whether management is a profession. Our discussion of these issues has implications for our understanding of business in society and the design of the business school curriculum. Rogene A. Buchholz is the Legendre-Soule Chair in Business Ethics Emeritus in the College of Business Administration at Loyola University of New Orleans. He has published over seventy-five articles and is the author of ten books in the areas of business and public policy, business ethics, and the environment. He is on the editorial board of several journals and served as chair of the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management. Sandra B. Rosenthal is Provost Eminent Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of New Orleans. She has published approximately 200 articles and 11 books on various dimensions of American pragmatism and its relevance for other areas of philosophy, and in both books and articles has applied pragmatism to a wide range of business ethics issues. She is a member of the editorial board of several journals, and has served as president of numerous philosophical societies.     

Making Room for Labor in Business Ethics

Thesis: The exclusion of organized labor/management issues from the principal arenas for business ethics study and discussions needs to be remedied. The paper develops this thesis in three steps: 1) Exclusion: A careful examination of select textbooks, journals, and conferences provides evidence as to the virtual absence of unions and such crucial organized labor/management issues as labor organizing and collective bargaining; 2) Inclusion: A series of brief arguments favoring inclusion of these issues in business ethics based on the notion of privileged institutions, adversarial posturing, the societal benefits, and globalization; 3) Suggestions: Some practical, cooperative initiatives involving the academy, management and labor, such as, labor officials as guest speakers and members of business school committees, internships in labor organizations, training workshops in business ethics for labor leaders, fora for joint management/labor discussions of issues each group faces in the economy and the legislatures.     

Management and Legal Issues Regarding Electronic Surveillance of Employees in the Workplace

Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and on the Pentagon in the United States, concerns over security issues have been at an all-time high in this country. Both state and federal governments continue to discuss legislation on these issues amid much controversy. One key concern of both employers and employees is the extent that employers, espousing a “need to know” mentality, continue to expand their capability and implementation of surveillance of employees in the workplace. With the technology typically growing faster than the speed of legislation, protective or permissive, the management and legal issues involved in electronic monitoring of employee communications in the workplace, are and well should be on the agenda for discussion of every management and legal team in American business today. Companies have a legitimate right to protect their trade secrets from disclosure by disgruntled employees. Similarly, companies also have a duty to protect their good names and reputations from unauthorized employee communications with outside parties, and even other employees, that may damage them. It is also a prime duty of management to ensure, in their direction of their workforces, that the employees execute their responsibilities by working full time on their stated objectives. In this regard, any management that fails to oversee its workforce to ensure that employees are not expending valuable company time, for which they are being compensated, on personal business, including unauthorized communications, is remiss in its responsibilities to its shareholders. The company may see a reduction of the price of its shares in the marketplace if it does not protect the economic interests of its shareholders.     

Recognizing Business Ethics: Practical and Ethical Challenges in Awarding Prizes for Good Corporate Behaviour

There seems to be a proliferation of prizes and rankings for ethical business over the past decade. Our principal aims in this article are twofold: to initiate an academic discussion of the epistemic and normative stakes in business-ethics competitions; and to help organizers of such competitions to think through some of these issues and the design options for dealing with them. We have been able to find no substantive literature – academic or otherwise – that addresses either of these two broad topics and audiences. Our modest aim, therefore, is to suggest an agenda of issues, and to begin to explore and analyse some of the possible arguments for and against various philosophical or practical solutions. Part I explores the challenges facing a prize-organizing committee, including problems derived from what Rawls calls the “fact of pluralism” in democratic societies (reasonable people will always disagree over some basic values, including those relevant to evaluating business practices), and epistemic issues about how we can justify qualitative judgments on the basis of incomplete quantitative data. We also try to identify risks and opportunity costs for ethics-prize granters. In Part II we spell out (a) a range of design options and (b) some advice about how any particular prize-awarding committee might select among these options to best achieve its goals (which typically involve highlighting and publicizing best practices for ethical business).     

Preventing know-how from walking out the door in China: Protection of trade secrets

Protecting ‘know-how,’ or trade secrets, is a vexing problem for companies doing business in China. Primary threats to the disclosure of proprietary information include deliberate actions of current and former employees, as well as loss of trade secrets in the context of joint ventures or other business arrangements. Because China continues to be an important trading partner and its domestic market has tremendous consumer potential, many companies remain in China. With this in mind, what are the best practices firms should undertake to protect their trade secrets in China to prevent competitors from gaining an unfair advantage? Based on an analysis of Chinese trade secrets law, practical recommendations are offered herein. Although there is no way for employers to ‘bullet proof’ the workplace from a loss of know-how, carefully crafted policies consistent with current trends in Chinese law will advance arguments in support of trade secret protection.     

In search of a fitting moral psychology for practical wisdom: Exploring a missing link in virtuous management

While business as a social activity has involved communities of persons embedded in dense relational networks and practices for thousands of years, the modern legal, theoretical psychological, and moral foundations of business have progressively narrowed our understanding of practical wisdom. Although practical wisdom has recently regained ground in business ethics and management studies, thanks mainly to Anscombe's recovery of virtue ethics, Anscombe herself once observed that it lacks, and has even neglected, a moral psychology that genuinely complements the nuanced philosophical perspective of a virtue-centered moral philosophy. Herein, we offer one way to fill this gap by suggesting two opposing psychological paradigms, namely the inter-processual self and the autonomous self, which are classified according to the assumptions they make about the self, human agency and action more broadly, as well as how they relate to practical wisdom. Upon presenting these moral psychologies, we will bring this proposal into conversation with business ethics to show how the IPS paradigm can enable and support virtuous management.     

The Missing Dynamic: Corporations, Individuals and Contracts

In this article we discuss whether it pays to invest ethically. Our aim is to examine corporate social responsibility from philosophical, moral and practical points of views. We focus on two main issues related to ethical investments. Firstly we discuss the moral dilemma of how capitalism has changed its shape in today’s world and from ‘blaming the business’ there is a general attempt to use the markets to promote ethics values and corporate social responsibility. Secondly, we analyze the growth of ethical investment funds in the UK today, and their performance, and highlight some of the institutional investors involved in the management of ethical funds. We discuss whether ethical investments really succeed in reducing the conflict between profit-making and social responsibility as they promise or whether they use commercial rhetoric and market mechanism to merely sell us our own perceived values back. We conclude that the paper has a key contribution in setting the scene for future research in an area that is evolving and of fundamental importance to companies, investors and various stakeholder groups.     

Recognizing Ethical Issues: An Examination of Practicing Industry Accountants and Accounting Students

The academic debate why and how companies are dealing with sustainability is dominated by two main arguments—the profit-seeking and the legitimacy-seeking view. While the first argues that companies (only) establish sustainability management measures if this helps to increase their economic success, others emphasize that companies predominantly react on societal pressure dealing with sustainability (only) to secure legitimacy. Whereas both lines of argument have gained a lot of attention in academia, little is known about their relative importance in shaping corporate practice. This papers aims to fill this gap with an empirical analysis of corporate practices of large companies in ten countries worldwide. To capture the organizations’ rationale in sustainability management practice, we systematically applied various measures related to actors and operational activities focusing on the companies’ intention to pursue sustainability management, the integration of sustainability management to the core business, and the actual implementation of related measures. Overall the findings indicate that seeking legitimacy dominates corporate sustainability management practices.     

The Reasons Behind Non-Ethical Behaviour in Business and Entrepreneurship

Despite the recent increase in interest in corporate social responsibility and the propagation of corporate governance in both business and academic literature, from observations of actual practice, the author has seen at all company levels, in everyday operations, instances of non-ethical behaviour vis-à-vis the whole gamut of stakeholders. This state of affairs is linked with: pressure from stakeholders, short-term tactics, hegemony of financial considerations, ‘juridisation’ of business, the tyranny of communications and the media and the difficulties in translating strategy into practical implementation. The paper scrutinises the motivation and the psychology of entrepreneurs and business people, and their behaviour is compared to other professional groups and confronted with the decline in ethics in society as described by some important observers. The conclusion drawn is that the recent positive evolutions do not provide sufficient ethical guidelines for the day-to-day activities of middle managers and entrepreneurs in the present competitive environment. Managers will always be confronted by difficult choices with ethical dilemmas. There will always be a tension between theory and pragmatism, but progress can be made with the effective implementation of the ethical discourse in companies. To achieve this, ethical management should not be confined to the large strategic issues but also applied to the small practical matters of everyday business life. Ethics in business and entrepreneurship requires more than corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR).     

An Empirical Study of Environmental Awareness and Practices in SMEs

With increasing awareness of environmental issues, there has been rising demand for environmental-friendly business practices. Prior research has shown that the implementation of environmental management practices is influenced by existing and potential stakeholder groups in the form of external pressures from legislators, environmental groups, financial institutions and suppliers, as well as internally by employees and owner/manager attitudes and knowledge. However, it has been reported that despite business owner/managers having strong “green” attitudes, the level of implementation of environmental-friendly practices is low. In order to explore the connection between pressures for improved practices and the management actions taken, this article examines how influence from various stakeholders is related to awareness of environmental issues, and how this awareness relates to actions taken within the businesses to reduce the environmental impact of their operations. The results indicate that legislation does result in general environmental awareness, and that organizations are then willing to␣change their business processes and environmental strategies. However, despite their actions they have little awareness of the benefits that might arise from cost reductions from their environmental-friendly practices. Those influenced by their suppliers act to reduce waste, but do not put into place formal environmental management systems, or use environmental messages to market their goods or services. Nevertheless, it can be argued that they have a real commitment to environmental issues, as evidenced by a willingness to voluntarily contribute to environmental organizations.     

Personalist Business Ethics and Humanistic Management: Insights from Jacques Maritain

The integration of personalism into business ethics has been recently studied. Research has also been conducted on humanistic management approaches. The conceptual relationship between personalism and humanism, however, has not been fully addressed. This article furthers that research by arguing that a true humanistic management is personalistic. Moreover, it claims that personalism is promising as a sound philosophical foundation for business ethics. Insights from Jacques Maritain’s work are discussed in support of these conclusions. Of particular interest is his distinction between human person and individual based on a realistic metaphysics that, in turn, grounds human dignity and the natural law as the philosophical basis for human rights, personal virtues, and a common good defined in terms of properly human ends. Although Maritain is widely regarded as one of the foremost twentieth century personalist philosophers, his contribution has not been sufficiently considered in the business ethics and humanistic management literature. Important implications of Maritainian personalism for business ethics as philosophical study and as practical professional pursuit are discussed.     

Doing business in China II. Investing and managing in china—how to dance with the dragon

This article presents the second part of a comprehensive analysis of the key issues involved in conducting business in China. It provides practical advice and recommendations on how to invest and manage successfully in the world's most complex market (“know‐how”). Topics include investment strategies, market‐entry options, key factors for success in management, as well as functional strategies for optimizing the value chain. Chinese business practices and culture, as well as different opportunities and threats, also are discussed. A key theme is that foreign investors and businessmen entering China and managing on the ground have to devise and execute intelligent strategic approaches that fully leverage new “third growth wave” opportunities in China and create a market niche in an extremely competitive environment. Otherwise, they will produce similarly disappointing results as most foreign investment in the Central Kingdom so far. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The Influence of Internal and External Codes on CSR Practice: The Case of Companies Operating in Serbia

In this article, our aim is to examine the difference between the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice of the multinational companies (MNCs) and of the domestic companies operating in Serbia, as well as the influence of internal self-regulations such as statements of corporate values and codes of conduct, and external self-regulations such as the implementation of the ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 standards on CSR practice. The CSR practice is observed in five CSR areas: employee relations, customer relations, environmental practice, community and social involvement, and transparency in business activity. The findings indicate that the CSR practice of the MNCs is significantly different in comparison to domestic companies only in the area of employee relations. Furthermore, the overall results suggest that internal self-regulations have more influence on CSR practice than the implementation of generic management system standards. However, the existence of transparent corporate values, codes of conduct and implemented management systems according to ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 standards does not prove to be strong predictors of CSR performance.     

Business Ethics in North America: Trends and Challenges

This conceptual paper analyses the arguments which have been made in favour of a transition towards humanistic management. In order to reconcile economic as well as moral arguments an integrative model of humanistic management is presented. This model outlines prospective lines of empirical research especially in the area where business conduct is profitable but not humanistic.     

Business model innovations in China: A focus on value propositions

Prior studies that examine business model innovations lack consideration on how value propositions are best developed in specific contexts or how restructuring other components can deliver on value propositions. This article first identifies three types of Chinese consumption behaviors—imitation-based “good-enough” consumption, renqing consumption, and face consumption—and their corresponding value propositions based on value-hierarchy theory. We then look at Chinese companies that illustrate how business model innovations that focus on the targeted value propositions are initiated, formulated, and implemented. In particular, we identify four types of business model innovations: imitation-based “good-enough” business models, renqing business models, face business models, and hybrid business models. We conclude with practical implications for conducting and implementing business model innovations in China.     

Striving for Legitimacy Through Corporate Social Responsibility: Insights from Oil Companies

Being a controversial industry, oil companies turn to corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a means to obtain legitimacy. Adopting a case study methodology, this research examines the characteristics of CSR strategies and CSR communication tactics of six oil companies by analyzing their 2011–2012 web site content. We found that all six companies engaged in CSR activities addressing the needs of various stakeholders and had cross-sector partnerships. CSR information on these companies’ web sites was easily accessible, often involving the use of multimedia technologies and sometimes social media platforms. Furthermore, to boost the credibility of their CSR messages, these companies utilized a variety of tactics, such as factual arguments and two-sided messages. In sum, this research unveils the interconnectedness among business strategy, CSR practices, and CSR communication in oil companies’ attempt to gain legitimacy in an environment of controversy. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the research findings.     

Unmastered risks: From crisis to catastrophe: An economic and management insight

In contrast to sociology, economics, and above all, business economics has not yet discovered disaster management as a research topic even though this subject affects many areas of economics due to its interdisciplinary character. The enormous economic losses suffered by private parties, businesses and public institutions in crisis events, the huge amounts of money which are spent in disaster prevention, as well as the challenges that providing emergency management and disaster control present, contain many issues and have an increasing social and economic relevance. This article takes a close look at the concept of disaster from an economic and management point of view to mitigate the impact on human beings and environment. Based on the rational choice approach the study analyzes the state of preparedness that is mainly responsible for good or poor disaster prevention and presents a theoretical framework for a comprehensive disaster management including examples of practical applications. The conclusion outlines several important areas of future research in business economics.