International Marketing Ethics: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

Globalization has changed the nature of business in the twenty-first century (Doh et al. in Bus Ethics Q 20(3):481–502, 2010). With the increased internationalization of multinational corporations, the need to address international marketing ethics arises (Carrigan et al. in Int Market Rev 22(5):481–493, 2005). Given the diversity of environments and cultures, ethical issues are numerous and complicated (Iyer in J Bus Ethics 31(1):3–24, 2001). The understanding of international marketing ethics is critical to academics as well as practitioners. This paper is a literature review (1960s through 2013) of the study of ethics in international marketing. In order to develop a comprehensive review of articles, we review topics such as ethical problems, moral philosophies, and culture and ethics. We also discuss the methodological procedures that are used in international marketing ethics. Researchers and practitioners alike can use this research on international marketing ethics to discuss the phenomena and subsequently lead to future work research.     

Ethics of AI-Enabled Recruiting and Selection: A Review and Research Agenda

Journal of Business Ethics - Companies increasingly deploy artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in their personnel recruiting and selection process to streamline it, making it faster and more...     

FOCUS: Research in Business Ethics* Business Ethics Research: Shaping the Agenda

“The most significant outcome of effective business ethics research would be an improvement of ethical standards and ethical behaviour in organizations”. So how can such research be made effective? The author is Lecturer in Management Studies, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College.     

The Evolution of Whistleblowing Studies: A Critical Review and Research Agenda

This study investigates the variations in the quality and comprehensiveness of 104 corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports published by the world’s largest financial institutions in 2012. Using a novel measure of CSR report quality, we examine the impact of certain national, legal, and firm-level factors that might explain differences in the overall quality and extent of coverage of various issues in these reports. Our findings show that legal factors and CSR environment in a firm’s country of headquarters play an important role in firms’ CSR reporting quality. Common law countries exhibit systematically higher overall CSR reporting quality than code law countries. Countries with higher CSR standards, policies, and regulations in place also produce significantly higher quality CSR reports. Firm size, on the other hand, has no major impact on the overall quality of CSR reports. In further analysis of the individual aspects of CSR disclosures, namely environment, philanthropy, bribery and corruption, and integrity assurance, we document that larger firms report at a higher quality on philanthropy and bribery and corruption. Bribery and corruption is reported at a higher quality in countries with common law tradition, high-quality legal regimes, and high CSR standards and regulations in place. We also observe higher quality integrity assurance in common law countries. CSR-minded countries and countries with low-quality legal environment also report on philanthropy at a higher quality. Finally, we offer guidelines for companies toward improving the quality of their reports, and suggestions for scholars and researchers for further avenues of research.     

Ethical Analyses of HRM: A Review and Research Agenda

The very idea of human resource management raises ethical considerations: What does it mean to us as humans for human beings to be managed as resources? Intriguingly, the field of ethics and HRM remains underdeveloped. Current approaches to HRM fail to place ethical considerations as their central warrant. This article, building on Greenwood (J Bus Ethics 36(3):261–279, 2002), argues for a deeper analysis of ethical issues in HRM, indeed for a differentiated ethical perspective of HRM that sets normative deliberations as its prime task. By identifying a distinct ethical approach to HRM that is unashamedly normative and socio-politically embedded, two objectives can be achieved. First, mainstream and critical approaches will be challenged to take ethical issues in HRM more seriously. Second, a dedicated forward-looking research agenda for the ethical analysis of HRM will be advanced.     

Online Behavioral Advertising: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

Advertisers are increasingly monitoring people's online behavior and using the information collected to show people individually targeted advertisements. This phenomenon is called online behavioral advertising (OBA). Although advertisers can benefit from OBA, the practice also raises concerns about privacy. Therefore, OBA has received much attention from advertisers, consumers, policymakers, and scholars. Despite this attention, there is neither a strong definition of OBA nor a clear accumulation of empirical findings. This article defines OBA and provides an overview of the empirical findings by developing a framework that identifies and integrates all factors that can explain consumer responses toward OBA. The framework suggests that the outcomes of OBA are dependent on advertiser-controlled factors (e.g., the level of personalization) and consumer-controlled factors (e.g., knowledge and perceptions about OBA and individual characteristics). The article also overviews the theoretical positioning of OBA by placing the theories that are used to explain consumers’ responses to OBA in our framework. Finally, we develop a research agenda and discuss implications for policymakers and advertisers.     

Sexuality and Ethics in Advertising: A Research Agenda and Policy Guideline Perspective

Abstract

Sexuality in advertising is a major area of ethical concern, though surprisingly little is known about its effects or the norms for its use. The author suggests a framing perspective on these two issues that consists of (1) a research agenda concerning the alleged effects and morality of sexual appeals (i.e., teleological vs. deontological considerations) and (2) a set of ethics-based, policy guidelines for addressing these issues (i.e., choice enhancement vs. consumer protection). Applying this framing perspective, the author provides a basis for making ethical choices about the use of sexual appeals in advertising.     

The Customer Exit Process - A Review And Research Agenda

With increasing priority being given to customer relationships and customer retention, it follows more attention should be given to understanding phenomenon of customer exit. This paper brings together the available literature on exit drawing on social psychology, economics, political science, interpersonal communications and marketing. In particular, four exit issues contained in Albert Hirschman's (1970) 'Exit, Voice and Loyalty' treatise are explored. The first of these is that customer exit can be explained by quality decline, though the latter needs to be broadly defined. Secondly, customer exit by definition relies on alternatives being available to the customer who also perceives them to be different and better. Thirdly, barriers to customer exit may exist. Finally, customer exit and voice are related, but not mutually exclusive. These ideas are brought together in a tentative model of the customer exit process. The paper concludes with an outline research agenda and argues for both inductive and deductive approaches to address customer exit research problems.     

Corporate Sustainability Performance Measurement Systems: A Review and Research Agenda

Corporate sustainability performance measurement systems (SPMS) have been the subject of a growing amount of research. However, there are many challenges and opportunities associated with the design, implementation, use, and evolution of these systems that have yet to be addressed. The purpose of this article is to identify future directions for research in the design, implementation, use, and evolution of corporate SPMS. A concise review of key literature published between 2000 and 2010 is presented. The literature review focuses on research conducted at the both the individual corporation- and sector-levels. The review of published literature provides a basis for the identification of a structured set of 65 key research questions to guide future work. The research questions will be of interest to both practitioners and researchers in corporate sustainability performance measurement.     

Ethical Judgments in Business Ethics Research: Definition,and Research Agenda

Decades of empirical and theoretical research has produced an extensive literature on the ethical judgments construct. Given its importance to understanding people’s ethical choices, future research should explore the psychological processes that produce ethical judgments. In this paper, the authors discuss two steps needed to advance this effort. First, they note that the business ethics literature lacks a single, generally accepted definition of ethical judgments. After reviewing several extant definitions, the authors offer a definition of the construct and discuss its advantages. Second, future ethical judgment research would benefit from greater integration between theories of ethical decision making and theories of social cognition. Drawing upon the Hunt–Vitell (Journal of Macromarketing 6(Spring), 5–15, 1986; In: N. C. Smith and J. A. Quelch (eds.), Ethics in Marketing. Irwin, Homewood, IL, pp. 775–784, 1992) model and the heuristic-systematic model (Chaiken, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39(November), 752–766, 1980), the authors present a brief research agenda intended to stimulate research on the psychological processes behind ethical judgments.     

Strategic Online and Offline Retail Pricing: A Review and Research Agenda

In the increasingly complex retailing environment, more and more retailers operate in more than one channel, such as brick-and-mortar, catalogs, and online. Success in this dynamic environment relies on the strategic management and coordination of both online and offline pricing. This article provides an overview of findings from past research in both offline and online domains and presents an organizing framework, as well as an agenda to spur additional research.     

Innovation and Employment Effects in Services: A Review of the Literature and an Agenda for Research

This article addresses the difficult question of the relationship between innovation and employment. Its main objective is to re-examine the literature on innovation in services in the light of the employment issue. In particular, it attempts to assess to what extent and in what way this question is implicitly or explicitly addressed in the literature or deserves to be introduced into it. In pursuit of these objectives, the national and international literature is reviewed and a research agenda proposed. The following three topics are explored in succession: 1) technologist approaches and the employment question; 2) the question of employment in service-based approaches; 3) innovation by services and employment.     

Entrepreneurship and Ethics: A Literature Review

During the past twenty years, there has been an explosion of new interest in entrepreneurs and their activities. Yet only recently has serious research attention been devoted to the ethical problems encountered by entrepreneurs and their organizations. Entrepreneurs face uniquely complex moral problems related to basic fairness, personnel and customer relationships, distribution dilemmas, and other challenges. This essay surveys contemporary research in entrepreneurial ethics, examines the kinds of ethical dilemmas entrepreneurs confront, identifies major research topics and methodological approaches, and discusses possible directions for future research.     

The Agenda for Ethics in Human Resource Management

In April this year a Conference on Ethical Issues in Contemporary Human Resource Management was held at the Management School, Imperial College, London, and jointly sponsored by the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA) and the UK Chapter of the European Business Ethics Network (EBEN-UK). We are indebted to the organisers of the Conference, Dr Diana Winstanley, Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Imperial College Management School, Dr Jean Woodall, Reader in Human Resource Management at Kingston Business School, and Professor Edmund Heery, Professor of Human Resource Management at Cardiff Business School, for the following overview of the ethics agenda emerging for modern HRM as this figured in contributions to the Imperial College Conference. All the papers delivered at the Conference are obtainable from Dr Diana Winstanley, Imperial College Management School, 53 Prince's Gate, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PG, tel: (44)(0) 171-594-9114.     

Mobile Advertising: A Framework and Research Agenda

Mobile advertising allows retailers, service providers, and manufacturers to provide consumers with increasingly relevant offers. The success of such campaigns depends on an ever better understanding of environmental, consumer, and technological context variables; a strong focus on advertising goals; accounting for market factors related to the nature of stakeholders and market environment; and the use of appropriate mobile ad elements to improve relevant outcome metrics. This article provides an overarching framework to synthesize current findings in mobile advertising, as well as a research agenda to stimulate additional work in this nascent field.     

The Usefulness of Social Norm Theory in Empirical Business Ethics Research: A Review and Suggestions for Future Research

In response to recent calls to extend the underlying theories used in the literature (O’Fallon and Butterfield in J Bus Ethics 59(4):375–413, 2005; Craft in J Bus Ethics 117(2):221–259, 2013), we review the usefulness of social norm theory in empirical business ethics research. We begin by identifying the seeds of social norm theory in Adam Smith’s (in: Raphael and Macfie (eds) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Glasgow Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1759/1790) seminal work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Next, we introduce recent theory in social norm activation by Bicchieri (The grammar of society: The nature and dynamics of social norms, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006) and compare the new theory to two theoretical frameworks found in the literature: Kohlberg’s (in: Goslin (ed) Handbook of socialization theory and research, Rand McNally, Chicago, IL, 1969; in: Lickona (ed) Moral development and behavior, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1976) theory of moral development and Cialdini and Trost’s (in: Gilbert et al. (eds) The handbook of social psychology, Oxford University Press, Boston, 1998) taxonomy of social norms. We argue that the new theory provides useful insights by emphasizing the ability of situational cues and information to generate common expectations for social/moral norms. The theory is particularly useful for empirical research in business ethics because it gives both organizational and individual factors a role in motivating norm-based behavior. To demonstrate this usefulness, we present examples where the theory has been effectively applied in experimental accounting research to generate new insights. We conclude by citing specific examples where the theory may prove useful in empirical business ethics research.     

After Durkheim: An Agenda for the Scoiology of Business Ethics

Over the last twenty years the organization of business activity appears to have shifted from an emphasis on bureaucratic organizations toward an emphasis on market structures. Economic self-interest has acquired a new social legitimacy, and the force of traditional moral authorities has waned. In these circumstances the work of Emile Durkheim on the problematics of business ethics and the impact of a culture of self-interest on the stability of society, work that has hitherto been neglected by the business ethics community, acquires a new relevance. In this paper we review Durkheim's problematization of business ethics, establish its relevance for the contemporary world, and use it to develop an empirical research agenda for the contemporary sociology of business ethics.     

Ethics and HRM: A Review and Conceptual Analysis

This paper reviews and develops the ethical analysis of human resource management (HRM). Initially, the ethical perspective of HRM is differentiated from the "mainstrea" and critical perspectives of HRM. To date, the ethical analysis of HRM has taken one of two forms: the application Kantian and utilitarian ethical theories to the gestalt of HRM, and the application of theories of justice and fairness to specific HRM practices. This paper is concerned with the former, the ethical analysis of HRM in its entirety. It shows that numerous theoretical shortcomings exist, least of which is the disregard of stakeholder theory. These deficiencies are explored and, as such, the analysis is advanced. It is argued that such ethical analysis is outside the scope of the modern corporation. A third way in which ethics may be applied to HRM is suggested. Ethical concerns are used as a basis to develop minimum standards against which HRM, in its various guises and practice, may be evaluated. Yet, even when judged by these standards, HRM is seriously lacking. This begs the question, not of whether HRM is ethical, but of whether HRM can be ethical.     

Disadvantaged Hispanic Consumers: A Research Perspective and Agenda

Within the limits of sparsely available data, this paper outlines the major barriers to effective consumption for Hispanic-Americans. These barriers are (a) the consumers' own circumstances, attitudes, values and goals; (b) deficiencies in the structure of the markets they typically patronize; and (c) exploitative practices of merchants with whom they come in contact. A research agenda is proposed to provide a basis for overcoming these barriers.