The internal morality of the corporation

Is good morality the natural outcome of profitable business practices? The thesis explored here is one version of the recent literature on corporate culture, typified by the bestselling In Search of Excellence — that the corporation that creates a strong culture, one that best serves the customer, the product, and the employee, must also be profitable. The thesis turns out to have an historical parallel in Plato's Republic (subtitled, I suppose, “In Search of Justice”). Parallel “virtues” can be worked out for state and corporation. In the end, profitability turns out not to be a necessary consequence of excellence, just as Plato's “Ideal” state turned out to be mortal.     

Creed,cult, code and business ethics

What does religion contribute to business ethics? Related to the practical, religion applies theological concepts to business situations; namely, vocation, stewardship, human dignity, co-creation, co-conservation, sharing in God's power, servant leadership, encounter with the Incarnation, sacramental sign and justice (divine and human). These concepts suggest the threefold component of religion: doctrine (creed), worship (cult) and values governing behavior (code). A principle taken from religious practice illustrates its unique contribution to business ethics. The principle of proportionality (or double effect) exemplifies code in its balancing of good and evil outcomes. The more contemporary principle called the fundamental option identifies the role of vocation and calling in the notion of creed. The component cult might be reflected in the insistence on human dignity which is highlighted in papal social teaching.     

A comparison of five business philosophies

While the media and public opinion polls suggest that the state of business ethics is declining, surveys of corporate managers on the subject are less than conclusive. This study presents results of a survey of 487 adult, MBA, and undergraduate business students on the business philosophies of Machiavellianism, Darwinism, Objectivism, Relativism, and Universalism. The findings were consistent with earlier research which showed prospective managers to be less ethical than practicing ones and that women and those reporting a strong religious conviction tend to be more ethical. Explanations and several recommendations for improving the situation are offered. ‘If you saw Atlas... trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — what would you tell him to do?’ ‘To shrug.’ —Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged     

Leadership,Pragmatism and Grace: A Review

Leadership takes a central role in the public affairs agenda. This article is a review of published works on leadership focusing on the concept of grace. It discusses the role of compassion and kindness in current leadership theory and practice and whether these attributes have value in sustainable models. Findings indicate that there is conceptual confusion regarding the definition of compassion and its application in leadership practices. Kindness is not discussed within the concept of compassion and kindness itself may be viewed as a weakness in contemporary self-selected leadership characteristics. The conclusions suggest there is disconnect between contemporary models of leadership and calls for sustainable ethical leadership in the spheres of public and business environments. Compassion and kindness remain in the side-lines yet the implications for future trust and commitment are neglected in times where discretionary effort of workers and volunteers is crucial to goal achievement.     

Developing Sustainable Strategies: Foundations,Method, and Pedagogy

While the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) are a very positive development in the horizon of management education over the last decade, there are still many significant challenges for engaging the mind of the manager in ways that will foster the values of PRME and the UN Global Compact. Responsible management education must address three foundational challenges in business education if it is to actualize the aspirations of PRME: (1) it must confront the cognitional myth that knowing is like looking, (2) it must move beyond mere analysis to systems thinking, and (3) it must transition from a values-neutral stance to a values-driven stance. Using Developing Sustainable Strategies, an MBA practicum in the Sustainable Management Concentration at DePaul University’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business as a case study, this article identifies the ways in which Pragmatic Inquiry can address these challenges. The method of Pragmatic Inquiry prepares students to become responsible managers, to develop sustainable strategies, and to be creators of shared value. Built from the philosophical foundations of American pragmatism and Bernard Lonergan’s critical realism, Pragmatic Inquiry is an effective method and pedagogy for responsible management education.     

Dual career couples: Individual and organizational implications

Since the introduction of the term ‘dualcareer’ family by Rapoport and Rapoport in 1969, an increasingly large body of literature concerning this phenomenon has developed — perhaps in response to the rapid growth of dual-careerism in North American Society. This literature is extremely diverse, ranging from purely ‘academic’ articles in the professional journals of economics, business, sociology, psychology, etc., to ‘self-help’ and ‘trade’ books such as The Two Career Couple by Hall and Hall; to ‘light’ articles in popular magazines such as Redbook, People, Good Housekeeping, etc. This paper reviews this literature and discusses the implications of the dual-career family structure from both the individual and the organizational points-of-view. Specifically, five major topic areas are covered: (1) advantages and disadvantages of the lifestyle, (2) marital satisfaction, (3) egalitarian relationships, (4) the impact of transfers, relocations and living apart, and (5) the employing organization's reaction to and adaption to the phenomenon.     

Entrepreneurship,innovation, and human flourishing

This essay uses Edmund Phelps’ new book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Phelps 2013) as inspiration to discuss innovation and entrepreneurship. The book is laudable for its discussion of what constitutes a “good life”. Phelps argues that true life satisfaction cannot be achieved through a purposeless quest for wealth and material consumption, but rather through adventure, entrepreneurship, and creative endeavors. Weaknesses of the book include an overly glossy characterization of the period before World War II, a niggardly evaluation of European innovation, and the lack of convincing empirical evidence for the claim that the rate of innovation has slowed. These flaws are regrettable given the importance of the book’s main message: innovation and creative entrepreneurship are not merely the keys to economic growth, but to life satisfaction as well. This essay discusses topics in entrepreneurship research linked to the book, including the link between innovation and entrepreneurship, the role of institutions for entrepreneurship, and the tendency of national accounts to under-record the social value of innovation and entrepreneurship. If the measures used do not capture the full social value of innovation, we are likely to underestimate the genuine rate of innovation. Government policy may also be misguided. Finally, the challenge to entrepreneurial capitalism posed by the postmodernist research paradigm is discussed.     

Money is Power: Monetary Intelligence—Love of Money and Temptation of Materialism Among Czech University Students

In this study, we develop a theoretical model of monetary intelligence (MI), explore the extent to which individuals’ meaning of money is related to the pursuit of materialistic purposes, and test our model using the whole sample and across college major and gender. We select the 15-item love of money (LOM) construct—Factors Good, Evil (Affective), Budget (Behavioral), Achievement, and Power (Cognitive)—from the Money Ethic Scale and Factors Success and Centrality and two indicators—from the Materialism Scale. Based on our data collected from 330 university students in Czech Republic, we provide the following findings. First, our formative models are superior to our reflective models. Second, for the reflective model, money represents Power, Good, Achievement, and not Evil, in the context of materialism. Our formative model suggests that those who pursuit materialism cherish Achievement (vanity) but Budget their money poorly. Third, multi-group analyses illustrate that humanities students (62.4 % female) consider money as Evil and Budget their money poorly, while those in natural sciences (37.6 % female) do not. Further, men are obsessed with Achievement, whereas women do not Budget their money properly, suggesting reflective temptation for males and impulsive temptation for females. Our novel discoveries shed new lights on the relationships between LOM and materialism and offer practical implications to the field of consumer behavior and business ethics.     

Aid programme of the neutrals

Foreign aid has often been considered as one aspect of the world-wide confrontation between East and West and one might therefore wonder to what extent the neutral European countries have an aid policy of their own reflecting their status of non-alignment. The following article tries to give an answer to this question by analysing the aid policies and efforts of Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland.     

Business experience and start-up size: Buying more lottery tickets next time around?

This paper explores the determinants of start-up size by focusing on a cohort of 6,247 businesses that started trading in 2004, using a unique dataset on customer records at Barclays Bank. Quantile regressions show that prior business experience is significantly related with start-up size, as are a number of other variables such as age, education and bank account activity. Quantile treatment effects (QTE) estimates show similar results, with the effect of business experience on (log) start-up size being roughly constant across the quantiles. Prior personal business experience leads to an increase in expected start-up size of about 50 %. Instrumental variable QTE estimates are even higher, although there are concerns about the validity of the instrument.     

An Exploratory Study in Community Perspectives of Sustainability Leadership in the Murray Darling Basin

This article explores the emergence of leadership during implementation of a water saving initiative in the rural community surrounding Barren Box Swamp in the Murray Darling Basin, Australia. Qualitative data analysis indicated that the system elements affecting the type of leadership to emerge included the extent to which the groups were engaged in the process, the level of access to resources, and the level of investment in the outcomes of the project. Although these results reinforced key aspects of complex problem-solving through collaboration, they demonstrated varying degrees and types of both engagement and leadership within the case community. Given the current finding that these varying elements can coincide within one system, this case suggests that each community’s characteristics, resources and context will determine the optimal combination of leadership style and level of collaboration needed to facilitate sustainable community development.     

American and Canadian perspectives on affirmative action: A response to the Fraser Institute

The publication of the Fraser Institute's Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and Equal Opportunity offers an occasion to review some of the practical and philosophical issues raised by affirmative action policy. Canadian affirmative action programs derive from the American context, which is here reviewed, but do not have the legal recourse available in the American system. Perhaps as a consequence, most Canadian programs have been carried out by governments acting in their role as employers. The Canadian Union of Public Employees has been especially active in developing union perspectives on affirmative action programs, which do raise special concerns for organized labour. Affirmative action raises several basic questions: the importance of proportionality, merit, compensation and role models in determining who is entitled to opportunities in our society. Differences between the Fraser Institute's attitude about affirmative action and attitudes of other social groups, such as the labour movement, lie in their very different assumptions about what constitutes a free society.     

Foreign aid,new economic order and basic human needs

The maldevelopments due to aid-tied growth-maximisation strategies of the past decades have led to cynicism, and sometimes downright opposition to aid donation by taxpayers in the industrialised countries. On the other hand, radicals in the developing countries view aid as a Trojan horse to perpetuate neo-colonialism and dependency. Dr. Karunaratne reviews the shortcomings of conventional aid and presents a package of proposals for a reformed aid strategy.     

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: Why It Fails to Deter Bribery as a Global Market Entry Strategy

Recent studies (Cragg and Woof, Bus Soc Rev 107(1):98–144, 2002; Weismann, J Bus Ethics 88:615–66, 2009) revealed that in the first 28 years of its existence, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was not enforced by the federal government. The Weismann study further concluded that the FCPA, designed by Congress as a self-regulatory model of corporate governance, failed to achieve the regulatory goal of deterring global bribery by U.S. companies. The current article addresses the reasons that the FCPA remains an ineffective measure to control bribery as a global market entry strategy despite the highly publicized 2006 Department of Justice initiative to increase prosecutions and tighten enforcement efforts. The failure arises out of both the increased use of informal dispositions of case prosecutions, (including non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements), which has made “getting caught” merely an increased “cost of doing business” and the failure to close the regulatory gaps in the statute that permit violators to slip through the enforcement net. The article updates and compiles the case prosecution data for every reported case prosecuted between 1977 and 2011. That data are then compared to the results of a 2010 integrity risk survey performed by Deloitte Financial Advisory Services and Forbes which reveal a widely held global business perception that compliance and integrity risks appear to be rising sharply and that the FCPA is ineffective in deterring bribery and corruption in foreign markets. The article aims to serve as a predictive tool for policy makers and business professionals in assessing risk in the global markets, particularly as commerce intensifies in the BRIC countries, notable for bribery and corruption.     

Oil from Chinese deposits

From 18–25 March the United Nations’ “International Meeting on Petroleum Geology” will take place in China, a country whose oil reserves up to the mid-sixties had been judged by foreign observers to be minute and the development of her oil sector of no major importance. Today, with an annual crude output of 106 mn tons, China already ranks ninth among the world’s oil producers. And, with the prospect of a further advance towards leadership among producers and exporters of the coveted energy material, the West is showing growing interest in China’s energy potential. How real is this prospect?     

Modeling of FDI in business services: Additional effects in case of Ukraine's European integration

To analyze Ukraine's deep and comprehensive integration with the EU, we develop a multi-regional general-equilibrium simulation model incorporating heterogeneous firms and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in business services. This allows for consideration of (a) trade growth in new varieties; (b) aggregate productivity changes attributed to reallocation of resources across and within an industry; and (c) productivity growth in manufacturing due to increased access to business services. The results indicate relatively small gains for the EU, whereas Ukraine benefits with a welfare increase of over 8%. The deindustrialization impact, previously found by Olekseyuk and Balistreri (2014 Olekseyuk, Z., and E.J. Balistreri. 2014. “Trade Liberalization Gains under Different Trade Theories: A Case Study for Ukraine.” Working Paper 2014-13. Colorado School of Mines, Division of Economics and Business. Golden. [Google Scholar]) in a comparison of different modeling structures, is supported by our findings. Ukraine's welfare gains are higher under an Armington structure compared to monopolistic competition. This is due to a movement of resources into Ukraine's traditional export sectors producing under constant returns. Implementation of the FDI modeling approach and liberalization of barriers to FDI, however, mitigates the deindustrialization impact as multinational firms enter the Ukrainian market. This increases the number of available varieties and, consequently, induces productivity growth of manufacturing sectors due to improved access to business services as critical inputs.     

Problems of international development taxes

Attempts by the developing countries to replace the largely voluntary provision of development aid by a system that would free official resource flows from the possibility of political interference by the donors and from the need for yearly budgetary allocations have been going on for some time. The present author here examines the proposal of the Group of 77 for a Financing System for Science and Technology for Development.     

Modeling Support for Role-Based Delegation in Process-Aware Information Systems

In the paper, an integrated approach for the modeling and enforcement of delegation policies in process-aware information systems is presented. In particular, a delegation extension for process-related role-based access control (RBAC) models is specified. The extension is generic in the sense that it can be used to extend process-aware information systems or process modeling languages with support for process-related RBAC delegation models. Moreover, the detection of delegation-related conflicts is discussed and a set of pre-defined resolution strategies for each potential conflict is provided. Thereby, the design-time and runtime consistency of corresponding RBAC delegation models can be ensured. Based on a formal metamodel, UML2 modeling support for the delegation of roles, tasks, and duties is provided. A corresponding case study evaluates the practical applicability of the approach with real-world business processes. Moreover, the approach is implemented as an extension to the BusinessActivity library and runtime engine.     

Karma-Yoga: The Indian Model of Moral Development

A comprehensive model of moral development must encompass moral sensitivity, moral reasoning, moral motivation, and moral character. Western models of moral development have often failed to show validity outside the culture of their origin. We propose Karma-Yoga, the technique of intelligent action discussed in the Bhagawad Gita as an Indian model for moral development. Karma-Yoga is conceptualized as made up of three dimensions viz. duty-orientation, indifference to rewards, and equanimity. Based on survey results from 459 respondents from two large Indian organizations, we show that the dimensions of Karma-Yoga are related to moral sensitivity, moral motivation, and moral character.     

Training and women: Some thoughts from the grassroots

Current assumptions and values with respect to management training for women are examined. A number of suggestions for change are made. The thrust of the changes will move us toward ensuring that education for women does not remain “education for frustration”, that is, education which gives women the desire for change in a world that remains the same. Many women have paid their dues, even a premium, for a chance at a top position, only to find a glass ceiling between them and their goal. The glass ceiling is not simply a barrier for an individual, based on the person's inability to handle a higher-level job. Rather, the glass ceiling applies to women as a group who are kept from advancing higher because they are women. (Morrison, White and Velsor, 1987, p. 13). Breaking the Glass Ceiling Can Women Reach the Top of America's Largest Corporations?