Corporate Integrity and Public Interest: A Relational Approach to Business Ethics and Leadership

This paper approaches the question of corporate integrity and leadership from a civic perspective, which means that corporations are seen as members of civil society, corporate members are seen as citizens, and corporate decisions are guided by civic norms. Corporate integrity, from this perspective, requires that the communication patterns that constitute interpersonal relationships at work exhibit the civic norm of reciprocity and acknowledge the need for security and the right to participate. Since leaders are members of corporate relationships, their integrity will be determined by the integrity of these interpersonal relationships, and by their efforts to improve them.     

An Experiential Approach to Teaching Ethics in International Business

Ethics training in academia and corporations have grown as expansion in international business activities has lead to frequent inter-cultural exchanges. An effective instructional tool in theform of an experiential exercise is presented. The exercise using role-playing enables participants to recognize, confront, and understand business quandaries. A scoring system allows participants to compare the ethical standards of employers, employees, customers, and the society-at-large on a set of predetermined ethical events.     

An Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility,Corporate Identity and Ethics Teaching in Business Schools

Recent events have raised concerns about the ethical standards of public and private organisations, with some attention falling on business schools as providers of education and training to managers and senior␣executives. This paper investigates the nature of, motivation and commitment to, ethics tuition provided by the business schools. Using content analysis of their institutional and home websites, we appraise their corporate identity, level of engagement in socially responsible programmes, degree of social inclusion, and the relationship to their ethics teaching. Based on published research, a schema is developed with corporate identity forming an integral part, to represent the macro-environment, parent institution, the business school and their relationships to ethics education provision. This is validated by our findings. Dr. Nelarine Cornelius, Reader in Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour, Brunel Business School, Brunel University, is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is also a Chartered Psychologist and is Director of both the Centre for Research in Emotion Work and the Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour Research Group at Brunel University. Dr. James Wallace, Lecturer in Quantitative Methods, School of Management, University of Bradford, is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He has considerable experience of statistical and mathematical modelling gained over several years in the UK utilities sector and in H.E. His current research interests include, applying statistical and mathematical modelling approaches to Technological, Operational and General Management problems. Dr. Rana Tassabehji, Lecturer in Information Systems and E-business, School of Management, University of Bradford, is a member of the British Academy of Management and the UK Academy for Information Systems. She worked as an international business consultant and as a consultant in the UK IT sector and is currently an academic member of the eGISE eGovernment network. Her research interests include ethics and e-business, Internet security and e-government.     

Religious Business Ethics and Political Liberalism: An Integrative Approach

Increasingly many business practitioners and academics are turning to religious sources as a way of approaching and answering difficult questions related to business ethics. There now exists a relatively large literature which attempts to integrate business decisions and religious values. The integration, however, is not without difficulties. For many, religious ethics provides the basis and the ultimate authority for a morally meaningful life. Yet, at the same time, in certain contexts, it is often inappropriate to rely and to publicly justify action on the basis of these ethics. With this difficulty in mind, the main goal of this paper is to answer the following specific question: Is a religiously grounded business ethics consistent with the idea of political liberalism? While this question is fundamental and straight-forward, to date it has received little, if any, careful attention. The characterization of business corporations as quasi-public, discussed in the body of the paper, implies that political liberalism may dictate that there exist situations in which invoking religious business ethics is inappropriate. The point is that once one removes the assumption of business as a purely private matter, the justification of a religiously grounded ethics in the context of a politically liberal democracy becomes problematic. On the other hand, such an assumption should not be taken to imply that all religiously grounded business ethics are always inappropriate. As this paper demonstrates, it is far from obvious that even government officials need observe a complete separation between religion and state in formulating, justifying, or expressing public policies, even policies leading to so-called coercive results. If so, it follows that managers of quasi-public institutions may, under appropriate and limited circumstances, invoke and rely upon a religious, albeit private, world-view.     

Contrasting the Behavioural Business Ethics Approach and the Institutional Economic Approach to Business Ethics: Insights From the Study of Quaker Employers

The article suggests that in a modern context, where value pluralism is a prevailing and possibly, even ethically desirable interaction condition, institutional economics provides a more viable business ethics than behavioural business ethics, such as Kantianism or religious ethics. The article explains how the institutional economic approach to business ethics analyses morality with regard to an interaction process, and favours non-behavioural, situational intervention with incentive structures and with capital exchange. The article argues that this approach may have to be prioritised over behavioural business ethics, which tends to analyse morality at the level of the individual and favours behavioural intervention with the individual’s value, norm and belief system, e.g. through ethical pedagogy, communicative techniques, etc. Quaker ethics is taken as an example of behavioural ethics. The article concludes that through the conceptual grounding of behavioural ethics in the economic approach, theoretical and practical limitations of behavioural ethics, as encountered in a modern context, can be relaxed. Probably only then can behavioural ethics still contribute to raising moral standards in interactions amongst the members (stakeholders) of a single firm, and equally, amongst (the stakeholders of) different firms. Dr. Sigmund Wagner-Tsukamoto is researcher in business ethics, organisational economics and economic issues that concern the Old Testament. He is placed at the School of Management of the University of Leicester, UK. He holds two doctorates, one in social studies from the University of Oxford, UK, and one in economic studies from the Catholic University of Eichstaett, Germany. He has widely published on green consumerism and institutional economic issues that concern organization theory, business ethics theory and an economic interpretation of the Old Testament. His publications include the books Understanding Green Consumer Behaviour (Routledge, 2003) and Human Nature and Organization Theory (Edward Elgar, 2003).     

European Corporate Citizenship in the USA: An Enquiry

European direct investment in the USA raises many local concerns. Are these concerns justified, or alleviated, by the way in which different European companies exercise corporate citizenship in the host country? The author is Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at the College of Business Administration, University of Oklahoma, 307 West Brooks, Norman, Oklahoma 73019-0450, USA.     

Business ethics,Corporate Good Citizenship and the Corporate Social Policy Process: A view from the United States

Within the American context, the term Corporate Good Citizenship, a rather vague and somewhat dated notion, bears little relationship to the concept of Business Ethics. Whereas the latter refers to systematic reflection on the moral significance of the institutions, policies and behavior of business actors in the normal course of their business operations, the former is a subset of the broader notion of Corporate Social Responsibility and denotes, generally, discretionary, possibly altruistic, non-business relationships between business organizations and diverse community stakeholders. A newer concept, the Corporate Social Policy Process, which focuses on the institutionalization within business organizations of processes facilitating individual and organizational reflection and choice regarding the moral significance of personal and organizational action together with a consideration of the likely consequences of such action, provides analytical linkages between Business Ethics and Corporate Good Citizenship which can be useful to business scholars and operating managers alike. Specific aspects of Corporate Good Citizenship, including corporate community involvements, are examined and particular attention is paid to current trends in corporate donations, including an increasing emphasis on strategic philanthropy which explicitly mixes practical and benevolent motives in company giving policies and practices.Edwin M. Epstein is Professor of Business Administration at the University of California at Berkeley. A former chair of the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management, he has lectured and published extensively in the field of Business and Public Policy with a particular emphasis on the Social Role of the Corporation in the United States and other Advanced Industrial Societies.Bryan W. Husted, Esq., a doctoral student in the Business and Public Policy Program at the Berkeley Business School, University of California at Berkeley, rendered useful research assistance and Mary Ann Huisman for the Program in Business and Social Policy, Center For Research in Management, Berkeley Business School, University of California at Berkeley, provided helpful technical services which I gratefully acknowledge.     

Honesty, Individualism, and Pragmatic Business Ethics: Implications for Corporate Hierarchy

The boundaries of honesty are the focal point of this exploration of the individualistic origins of modernist ethics and the consequent need for a more pragmatic approach to business ethics. The tendency of modernist ethics to see honesty as an individual responsibility is described as a contextually naive approach, one that fails to account for the interactive effects between individual choices and corporate norms. By reviewing the empirical accounts of managerial struggles with ethical dilemmas, the article arrives at the contextual preconditions for encouraging the development of reflective moral agents in modern corporations.     

Virtue Ethics in Business and the Capabilities Approach

Recently, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have developed the capabilities approach to provide a model for understanding the effectiveness of programs to help the developing nations. The approach holds that human beings are fundamentally free and have a sense of human dignity. Therefore, institutions need to help people enhance this dignity by providing them with␣the opportunity to develop their capabilities freely. I␣argue that this approach may help support business ethics based on virtue. Since teleology has become problematic, virtue ethics has had difficulty giving itself an ultimate justification. By combining virtue ethics with the capabilities approach, it becomes possible to ground virtue ethics on the basis of the existence of human dignity. This frees virtue ethics of the need for a strict teleology, replacing it with the notion that people must work to develop the capabilities of others although those capabilities are not pointed toward a definite goal. I further suggest that by grounding virtue ethics in capabilities, the actions of a virtuous manager become clearer. Rather than simply charging a manager with serving the public, the manager is charged with serving the stakeholders in a way that develops their capabilities. For example, a manager should not just give their employees what is just but must give them the environment and the encouragement to grow and to find fulfillment in their job.     

Seek the Good Life, not Money: The Aristotelian Approach to Business Ethics

Nothing is more common in moral debates than to invoke the names of great thinkers from the past. Business ethics is no exception. Yet insofar as business ethicists have tended to simply mine abstract formulas from the past, they have missed out on the potential intellectual gains in meticulously exploring the philosophic tradition. This paper seeks to rectify this shortcoming by advocating a close reading of the so-called “great books,” beginning the process by focusing on Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics and The Politics points to Aristotle’s emphasis on tying business morality to a universal conception of the good life. This conception defines personal happiness to chiefly consist in practicing the virtues, a life in which both desire and the pursuit of wealth is kept under check. According to Aristotle, virtue reaches its height with the exercise of the intellectual virtues of prudence and wisdom – the first manifest in the leadership of organizations, and the second in the philosophic search for truth. From an Aristotelian point of view, therefore, the greatest ethical imperative for business is to give individuals opportunities to thoughtfully participate in the management of company affairs and to contemplate the ultimate meaning of things.     

Monitoring Costs,Managerial Ethics and Corporate Governance: A Modeling Approach

This article evaluates effectiveness and costs of external regulation, in particular the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) in restricting managerial malfeasance and safeguarding shareholder interests. It discusses the role of managerial ethics as an alternative corporate governance mechanism to protect shareholder value. This article builds a mathematical model to illustrate shareholders’ choices of best corporate governance mechanisms, taking into account the influence of managerial ethics, effectiveness and costs of monitoring. We suggest that the best corporate governance design and the optimal monitoring expenses are influenced by managerial types, monitoring efficiency, and effectiveness of ethics education. We conclude that stringent regulation and monitoring may not always enhance shareholder value. When managerial ethics could be improved by ethics education or social norms, ethics education may be a better alternative than stringent regulation.     

Corporate Governance,Commitment to Business Ethics,and Firm Valuation: Evidence from the Korean Stock Market

A variety of stakeholders have long been interested in the factors that are related to firm valuation. This article investigates why companies with more comprehensive corporate governance (CG) have a value premium over companies with less comprehensive CG. We posit and find that the cost of equity capital (COC) decreases with the strength of CG, suggesting that the value premium stems from the lower COC for more comprehensive CG. We also find that the COC is lower for companies with strong commitment to business ethics (BE) than for those with weak commitment to BE and that the beneficial effect of CG on the COC is more pronounced for companies with weak commitment to BE than for those with strong commitment to BE. Companies with more comprehensive CG tend to exhibit strong commitment to BE, but the beneficial effect of corporate ethical commitment is not completely subsumed by CG. Our results suggest that companies could lower their cost of equity capital and increase firm value by adopting more comprehensive CG practices and committing to higher standards of BE.     

The Decomposition of the Corporate Body: What Kant Cannot Contribute to Business Ethics

Kant is gaining popularity in business ethics because the categorical imperative rules out actions such as deceptive advertising and exploitative working conditions, both of which treat people merely as means to an end. However, those who apply Kant in this way often hold businesses themselves morally accountable, and this conception of collective responsibility contradicts the kind of moral agency that underlies Kant’s ethics. A business has neither inclinations nor the capacity to reason, so it lacks the conditions necessary for constraint by the moral law. Instead, corporate policies ought to be understood as analogous to legal constraints. They may encourage or discourage certain actions, but they cannot determine a person’s maxim – which for Kant is the focus of moral judgment. Because there is no collective intention apart from any intentions of the individual agents who act as members of the corporation, an organization itself has no moral obligations. This poses a dilemma: either apply the categorical imperative to the actions of particular businesspeople and surrender the notion of collective responsibility, or apply a different moral theory to the actions of businesses themselves. Given the diffusion of responsibility in a bureaucracy, the explanatory usefulness of collective responsibility may force business ethicists to abandon Kant’s moral philosophy.     

Ethics in Strategic Thinking: Business Processes and the Global Market Collapse

The authors discussed the reasons for the recent economic collapse as caused by the lack of large businesses and global corporations losing touch with the people they serve. Losing touch has caused a distancing of understanding of the customers as people by these businesses and corporations. An antidote to this is that decisions that have to be made in global businesses as well as domestic organizations reflect some level of empathy. The objective is to highlight the fact that these businesses are corporate citizens and in themselves must be aware of the culture in which they conduct themselves. The authors discuss how empathic decision-making can become part of the corporate fabric without losing any sense of appropriate business judgment. A process is defined to enable the empathic process. Finally, a straw man is set up to fund/enable the process while creating a positive and profitable business environment.     

The Organizational Implementation of Corporate Citizenship: An Assessment Tool and its Application at UN Global Compact Participants

The corporate citizenship (CC) concept introduced by Dirk Matten and Andrew Crane has been well received. To this date, however, empirical studies based on this concept are lacking. In this article, we flesh out and operationalize the CC concept and develop an assessment tool for CC. Our tool focuses on the organizational level and assesses the embeddedness of CC in organizational structures and procedures. To illustrate the applicability of the tool, we assess five Swiss companies (ABB, Credit Suisse, Nestlé, Novartis, and UBS). These five companies are participants of the UN Global Compact (UNGC), currently the largest collaborative strategic policy initiative for business in the world (www.unglobalcompact.org). This study makes four main contributions: (1) it enriches and operationalizes Matten and Crane’s CC definition to build a concept of CC that can be operationalized, (2) it develops an analytical tool to assess the organizational embeddedness of CC, (3) it generates empirical insights into how five multinational corporations have approached CC, and (4) it presents assessment results that provide indications how global governance initiatives like the UNGC can support the implementation of CC.     

Socratic Questions and Aristotelian Answers: A Virtue-Based Approach to Business Ethics

To teach that being ethical requires knowing foundational ethical principles – or, as Socrates claimed, airtight definitions of ethical terms – is to invite cynicism among students, for students discover that no such principles can be found. Aristotle differs from Socrates in claiming that ethics is about virtues primarily, and that one can be virtuous without having the sort of knowledge that characterizes mathematics or natural science. Aristotle is able to demonstrate that ethics and self-interest may overlap, that ethics is largely compatible with common sense, and that Aristotle’s virtuous person can make ethical decisions rationally. Case studies can help students improve their ethical perception and keep their values from being overwhelmed by corporate culture. Edwin M. Hartman is the Peter Schoernfeld Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Stern School of New York University. He has degrees from Haverford, Oxford, and Wharton, and a PhD from Princeton. Hartman’s most recent book is Organizational Ethics and the Good Life (Oxford).     

Corporate Social Strategy in Multinational Enterprises: Antecedents and Value Creation

In this article, we examine the relationship of the multinational firm’s market environment, stakeholders, resources, and values to the development of strategic social planning and strategic social positioning. Using a sample of multinational enterprises in Mexico, we examine the relationship of these different ways of conducting social strategy to the creation of value by the firm. The market conditions of munificence and dynamism, and the resource for continuous innovation are found to be related to strategic social positioning. The social responsibility orientation of the firm is related to strategic social planning. Positioning is related to value creation for the multinational firm, but planning is not. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice. Bryan W. Husted is a professor of management at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico) and Alumni Association Chair of Business Ethics at the Instituto de Empresa (Spain). His research focuses on corporate social and environmental management. His work has appeared in such publications as the Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, and the Journal of Business Ethics. David B. Allen is a professor of strategy at the Instituto de Empresa (Spain). He received an MBA from New York University and his M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. His research focuses on non-market strategy. His work has appeared in such publications as the Journal of International Business Studies and the Journal of Business Ethics. He has consulted extensively for European and American multinational firms.     

Evolution and Implementation: A Study of Values, Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility

There is growing recognition that good ethics can have a positive economic impact on the performance of firms. Many statistics support the premise that ethics, values, integrity and responsibility are required in the modern workplace. For consumer groups and society at large, research has shown that good ethics is good business. This study defines and traces the emergence and evolution within the business literature of the concepts of values, business ethics and corporate social responsibility to illustrate the increased emphasis that has been placed on these issues over time. Two organizations that have successfully dealt with these issues were analyzed to identify the links among values, ethics, and corporate social responsibility as they are incorporated into the culture and management of a firm. This study identified the presence and implementation of values, business ethics, and CSR actions within the two organizations studied.     

核心能力、财务核心能力与企业价值创造

核心能力是确保企业在市场竞争中获得持续竞争优势的关键 ,核心能力的本质特征在于其价值创造性。随着核心能力战略的发展和推动 ,价值成为财务的核心范畴。从价值创造角度将企业能力理论引入公司财务 ,企业财务能力和财务核心能力的提高保证了企业持续竞争优势的延续及核心能力的培育和形成