The calling of the virtuous manager: Politics shepherded by practical wisdom

This paper extends an ongoing discussion about establishing a sharper way to conduct ethical investigations into managerial virtue. It does so by relying on Alasdair MacIntyre's moral philosophy in place of those more dominant approaches taken by scholars who make up the field of positive social science. A connection is drawn herein between a MacIntyrean “narrative approach” to investigating managerial virtue and the idea of “work as a calling.” Specifically, it will be argued that the MacIntyrean-influenced idea of “work as a calling” provides a substantive moral vision that supports an understanding of how virtuous managers ought to narrate their primary workplace motivations. Ultimately, virtuous managers fulfill a “political calling” to support and sustain (a) good work, (b) the good of individual lives, and (c) the common good of communities that their organization reaches. To do this, they must rely on the “shepherd virtue” of practical wisdom (phronesis). Practical wisdom aids virtuous managers’ thinking about achieving the ends of their “calling” as well as any necessary course-corrections that ought to be made toward the better achievement of those good and worthy ends.     

A quantitative analysis of authors,schools and themes in virtue ethics articles in business ethics and management journals (1980–2011)

Virtue ethics is generally recognized as one of the three major schools of ethics, but is often waylaid by utilitarianism and deontology in business and management literature. EBSCO and ABI databases were used to look for articles in the Journal of Citation Reports publications between 1980 and 2011 containing the keywords ‘virtue ethics’, ‘virtue theory’, or ‘virtuousness’ in the abstract and ‘business’ or ‘management’ in the text. The search was refined to draw lists of the most prolific authors, the most cited authors, the most cited articles, and the journals with the most virtue ethics publications. This information allows one to chart how virtue ethics articles have evolved through the decades and to establish ‘schools’ or clusters of authors as well as clusters of themes. The results of this quantitative analysis of authors, ‘schools’, themes, and publications provide a foundation for the future study of virtue ethics in business and management, identifying its achievements and potentials.     

Corporate Social Responsibility in SMEs: A Shift from Philanthropy to Institutional Works?

For Aristotle, virtues are neither transcendent nor universal, but socially interdependent; they need to be understood chronologically and with respect to character and context. This paper uses an Aristotelian lens to analyse an especially interesting context in which to study virtue—the state’s response when social order breaks down. During such periods, questions relating to right action by citizens, the state, and state agents are pronounced. To study this, we analyse data from interviews, observation, and documents gathered during a 3-year study of riot policing in the U.K. In doing so, we contribute by joining a number of other conversations within JBE, suggesting detailed empirical examination of this context is useful in opening up considerations relevant to ‘virtue’ elsewhere. This extreme context helps us raise interesting and empirically informed questions that can encourage future theoretical and empirical contributions to virtue in business ethics. One such question is on the role of habituation in virtue, which is not just the inculcation of a reflex or automaticity, but can also refer to a trained and developed tendency to behave in the right way, for the right reasons, at the right time. Whilst we stop short of a simplistic alignment of habituation and virtue, we show ways in which it can inform understanding of both courage and phronēsis.     

Constancy and integrity: (un)measurable virtues?

Positive psychology seeks to establish a classification of character strengths and virtues based on objective measures, and so to provide guidance on how good character might be developed. However, it offers no substantive theory of the good life. A short critique of this approach is offered, and an alternative mode of empirical enquiry is explored following Alasdair MacIntyre's philosophy. The virtues of constancy and integrity as they appear in the career narratives of leaders in Scottish banking illustrate this mode of enquiry. Empirical enquiry into these virtues reveals a process of interpretation, which is dependent on an understanding of structures in virtue ethics and an understanding of the way that particular agents pursue their own ideas of human flourishing in some particular social milieu. One consequence of this is that, while behavioural tendencies or dispositions might be measurable through statistical method, virtues are not.     

Best practices in ethics management: Insights from a qualitative study in Slovakia

Voluminous growth of new ethics management elements in corporate practice implies the need to enrich its theoretical understanding. Most studies delineate ethics management conventionally as measures primarily applied for establishing ethical norms and employee compliance. Furthermore, many models are somewhat limited in scope and amount of presented practices and usually do not conceptualize ethics management functions beyond traditional compliance‐integrity discussion. In addition, most models are not grounded in empirical research. With the aim to contribute to ethics management theory and bridge it with practice, this study employs a constructivist approach and maps best practices in ethics management via four focus groups with management professionals. Results suggest that ethics management can be viewed as a fundamentally participative and collaborative process, as a way of building relationships with external stakeholders, balancing structured planning and flexible change, and profoundly amalgamating with human resource management processes. Furthermore, in an Inventory of best practices encompassing 70 ethics practices, this study outlines nine functional subprocesses as key aspects of ethics management’s practical implementation. As the research was conducted in Slovakia, this study provides unique information on the recent developments in ethics management in one of the post‐transitional countries in the region of Central and Eastern Europe.     

Ethical Character and Virtue of Organizations: An Empirical Assessment and Strategic Implications

Virtue ethics has often been regarded as complementary or laissez-faire ethics in solving business problems. This paper seeks conceptual and methodological improvements by developing a virtue character scale that will enable assessment of the link between organizational level virtue and organizational performance, financial or non-financial. Based upon three theoretical assumptions, multiple studies were conducted; the content analysis of 158 Fortune Global 500 firms ethical values and a survey of 2548 customers and employees. Six dimensions of organizational virtue (Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, Courage, Conscientiousness and Zeal) are identified through confirmatory factor analysis, and validated against satisfaction measure. Strategic implications of virtue characters are discussed.     

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.     

Putting ethics and economic rationality together: an Aristotelian and philosophical approach

The gap between economic rationality, as embedded in utility maximization, and ethical rationality, identified with a set of rules that prescribe the right course of action, has been a challenging issue for economists, philosophers, and business ethicists. Despite the difference and the noncompetition between a scientific economic approach of economics and business ethics, and a behavioral and philosophical one, we highlight the importance of the Aristotelian concept of prudence or phronesis applied to business activity. Phronesis allows for a conceptualization of rationality that can be simultaneously applied to economics and ethics. It also allows conceiving the intrinsically ethical nature of economic rationality. This relationship requires an appropriate education and the intervention of the state.     

CSR Practices and Corporate Strategy: Evidence from a Longitudinal Case Study

This paper aims to contribute to the present debate about business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that the Journal of Business Ethics is hosting. Numerous contributions argued theoretical frameworks and taxonomies of CSR practices. The authors want to ground in this knowledge and provide further evidence about how companies adopt CSR practices to address stakeholders’ claims and consolidate their trust. Evidence was provided by a longitudinal case study about an Italian food company that is one of the largest producers of baby food. This company reshaped its corporate strategy along three decades through the adoption of CSR practices in order to win stakeholders’ trust about food safety and supply chain behaviour. The empirical exercise was informed by a literature review of the relevant contributions in terms of CSR business practices and levels of efforts to adopt them. In light of this review, the authors adopted for the research framework the taxonomy of business practices proposed by Spiller (2000, “Ethical Business and Investment: A Model for Business and Society”, Journal of Business Ethics 27, 149-160) and the levels of commitment towards CSR proposed by Stahl and Grigsby (1997, Strategic Management; Total Quality & Global Competition (Blackwell, Oxford)). The main findings are discussed in order to argue theoretical implications and identify further areas of research and debate.     

Patterns of Research Productivity in the Business Ethics Literature: Insights from Analyses of Bibliometric Distributions

In any academic discipline, published articles in respective journals represent “production units” of scientific knowledge, and bibliometric distributions reflect the patterns in such outputs across authors or “producers.” Closely following the analysis approach used for similar studies in the economics and finance literature, we present the first study to examine whether there exists an empirical regularity in the bibliometric patterns of research productivity in the business ethics literature. Our results present strong evidence that there indeed exists a distinct empirical regularity. It is the so-called Generalized Lotka’s Law of scientific productivity pattern: the number of authors publishing n papers is about 1/n ^c of those publishing one paper. We discuss the likely processes that underlie the productivity pattern postulated by the Generalized Lotka’s Law. We find that the value of the exponent c is equal to about 2.6 for the comprehensive bibliometric data across the two leading business ethics journals. The observed research productivity pattern in the business ethics area, a relatively young discipline, is interestingly very consistent with those found in much older, related business disciplines like economics, accounting, and finance. We discuss the general implications of our findings.     

The Development of a Measure of Auditors’ Virtue

Auditors’ virtue comprises those qualities of character that manifest the ideals of the audit community (c.f., Maclntyre, 1984, After Virtue. (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame)), and are instrumental in ensuring that auditors’ professional judgment is exercised according to a high moral standard (Thorne, 1998, Research on Accounting Ethics. (JAI Press, Greenwich, CT)). Nevertheless, the lack of valid and reliable quantitative measures of auditors’ virtue impedes research that furthers our understanding of how best to promote virtue in the audit community. To address this gap, we develop two measures of auditors’ virtue. We report the results of the validity and reliability of the scales. In addition, we use the findings from the administration of these scales to professional accountants to refine and validate the theoretical characterization of virtues developed by Pincoffs (1986, Quandaries and Virtues. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS) and Libby and Thorne (2004, Business Ethics Quarterly). In so doing, this study provides a foundation by which future audit research can study ways to ensure that auditors’ virtue is promoted throughout the audit community. Theresa Libby, Ph.D. (University of Waterloo) is an Associate Professor of Accounting at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has published mainly in the areas of accounting ethics, managers' use of accounting information for decision-making, procedural justice and innovation in management accounting systems. Linda Thorne, Ph.D. (McGill University) is an Associate Professor of Accounting at York University. She has various publications that consider factors that influence auditors and others’ ethical decision process.     

Towards a practice theory of entrepreneuring

Adopting a process perspective on entrepreneurship, captured by the notion of “entrepreneuring,” the emerging practice-theory approach in the social sciences is proposed as an appropriate frame of reference. Entrepreneuring as a practice is ontologically/epistemologically qualified by presenting phronesis as the relevant guiding intellectual virtue in the knowledge-creating process. A constructionist view invites different modes of coping with an ambiguous environment, including the use of analogizing and bricolage when enacting entrepreneuring by way of improvisation and personal networking. The notion of “organizing context” is introduced to grasp how collective support for entrepreneuring may be mobilized. Enactive research as an interactive way for doing field research is outlined and illustrated in order to complete the paradigmatic and theoretical arguments for a practice-theory approach to entrepreneuring with an adequate methodology.     

Reconsidering Virtue: Differences of Perspective in Virtue Ethics and the Positive Social Sciences

This paper describes differences in two perspectives on the idea of virtue as a theoretical foundation for positive organizational ethics (POE). The virtue ethics perspective is grounded in the philosophical tradition, has classical roots, and focuses attention on virtue as a property of character. The positive social science perspective is a recent movement (e.g., positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship) that has implications for POE. The positive social science movement operationalizes virtue through an empirical lens that emphasizes virtuous behaviors. From a virtue ethics perspective, a behaviorally based account of virtue is a weak theory of virtue. Observations are suggested for integrating the two perspectives. First, virtue should always be understood as an excellence and is often an optimal point between extreme dysfunctions on continuum of potential states. Second, an empirical exploration of virtue needs to account for character and context. Finally, the properties of organization-level virtue need to be further specified and explored. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Introduction-virtue and virtuousness: when will the twain ever meet?

This paper introduces ‘Virtue and Virtuousness: When will the twain ever meet?’ a special edition of Business Ethics: A European Review. The Call for Papers invited contributions that could inform the relationship between organisational virtuousness, as conceptualised by positive organisation studies, and the classical conception of virtues pertaining to individual women and men. While the resources of particular virtue traditions – Aristotelian, Catholic, Confucian, and the like – could inform their own debates as to whether virtue extends beyond individuals, the debate between virtue traditions and positive organisation studies has a different dimension. The question is whether the claims of positive social sciences as such are compatible with those of any virtue tradition. We argue that positive social science and virtue traditions are indeed rivals such that adherence to the claims of the one precludes adherence to the other. Resolution to such conflicts requires that one tradition is able to resolve questions that exhaust the resources of the other. This paper suggests that at least one area of incoherence in the findings of positive social sciences can be resolved by virtue traditions, and introduces the remaining papers in the special edition.     

The ethos of business students

Business schools are the “nurseries” of the corporate world. This article offers an empirical analysis of the business student ethos on the basis of research conducted at three Dutch universities. A theoretical framework in the tradition of virtue ethics and dubbed “moral ethology” is used to identify the values business schools convey to their students. The central research question is: What types of ethos do Dutch business students have? Forty-three undergraduate students participated in Q-methodological research, a mixed qualitative–quantitative small-sample method. Five different types of ethos were generated: Do-Good Managers, Market Managers, Searching Managers, Balancing Managers, and Radical Market Managers. Some general characteristics that apply to all the types of ethos were identified, such as the search for efficiency. It is argued that business schools should pay much more attention to the values that are endorsed in both life and business and should help students to address situations in which values are neglected.     

Social Responsibility and Ethics: Clarifying the Concepts

Students coming into a third-year business ethics course I teach are often confused about the use and meaning of the terms social responsibility and ethics. This motivated me to take a closer look at a sample of the management and business ethics literature for an explanation of their confusion. I found that there are inconsistencies in the way the two terms are employed and the way the concepts are defined. This paper identifies the different ways the relationship between social responsibility and ethics has been represented, the various uses of these two terms, and the contrasting views regarding the connection between morality and ethics. While this analysis does not resolve any difficult substantive questions, it does provide conceptual clarity as a necessary first step towards facilitating students critical engagement with the substantive issues.     

Similarities in Business and IT Professional Ethics: The Need for and Development of A Comprehensive Code of Ethics

The study of business ethics has led to the development of various principles that are the foundation of good and ethical business practices. A corresponding study of Information Technology (IT) professionals’ ethics has led to the conclusion that good ethics in the development and uses of information technology correspond to the basic business principle that good ethics is good business. Ergo, good business ethics practiced by IT professionals is good IT ethics and vice versa. IT professionals are professionals in businesses; a difficulty presented to these professionals, however, is the number and diversity of codes of ethics to which they may be held. Considering the existence of several formalized codes of ethics prepared by various IT professionals’ associations, a more harmonized approach seems more reasonable. This paper attempts to present a review of the purpose of codes of ethics, the persons who should be covered by such codes and to organize codes of ethics for business in general and IT professionals in particular and to make the argument that, once again, good ethics is good business practice, regardless of the profession or occupation concerned     

Paul D. Reynolds: Entrepreneurship Research Innovator,Coordinator, and Disseminator

Paul Davidson Reynolds is the 2004 winner of the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. In this article Professor Reynolds’ contributions are summarized in terms of four sets of triplets. The first is as innovator, coordinator and disseminator of novel and important empirical research studies. The second triplet concerns the main areas of his contributions: regional variations in entrepreneurial activity, nascent entrepreneurship and firms in gestation and international comparisons of the prevalence of entrepreneurial activity. The third set of triplets concerns what aspects of the research process he has contributed to: development of new empirical methods to research entrepreneurship; coining of new concepts that now permeate this field of research, and provision of important empirical results. The final set of triplets concerns the audiences to which Reynolds’ research appeal: researchers, policy-makers and business practitioners. It is concluded that although his contributions are many and of different kinds, the single most important one is that his research has made it increasingly unreasonable to theorize and design research as if the economy essentially consisted of a relatively stable core of large, established firms and entry and exit of new firms were relatively infrequent, marginal and insignificant.     

Reconceptualizing CSR in the Media Industry as Relational Accountability

In this paper, we reconceptualize CSR in the media industries by combining empirical data with theoretical perspectives emerging from the communication studies and business ethics literature. We develop a new conception of what corporate responsibility in media organizations may mean in real terms by bringing Bardoel and d’Haenens’ (European Journal of Communication 19 165--194 2004) discussion of the different dimensions of media accountability into conversation with the empirical results from three international focus group studies, conducted in France, the USA and South Africa. To enable a critical perspective on our findings, we perform a philosophical analysis of its implications for professional, public, market, and political accountability in the media, drawing on the insights of Paul Virilio. We come to the conclusion that though some serious challenges to media accountability exist, the battle for responsible media industries is not lost. In fact, the speed characterizing the contemporary media environment may hold some promise for fostering the kind of relational accountability that could underpin a new understanding of CSR in the media.