Umpire and batsman: Is it cricket to be both?

The paper is a response to Richard De George's essay, Theological Ethics and Business Ethics. It defends the possibility of theologically oriented approaches to business ethics by pointing out certain deficiencies in business ethics narrowly based on the premisses of analytic moral philosophy. In particular it argues, in a manner consistent with Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), that such a program of business ethics is insufficiently critical of its own roots in the social fiction of bureaucratic rationality. After showing how this ideology governs De George's negative judgments on theological approaches to business ethics, the author outlines a program of critical reflection that would draw from the intellectual traditions of both theology and philosophy in order to facilitate a dialogue in business ethics that no longer is captive in the Iron Cage of bureaucratic rationality. Dennis P. McCann is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at De Paul University. He has served on the faculties of Reed College and Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Christian Realism and Liberation Theology (1981) and a co-author of Polity and Praxis: A Program for American Practical Theology (1985).     

Does your religion make a difference in your business ethics? The case of consolidated foods

While the literature in business ethics abounds with philosophical analyses, perspectives from religious thinkers are curiously underrepresented. What religious analysis has occured has often been moralistic in tone, more fit to the pulpit than the classroom or the boardroom. In the three essays that follow, presented originally at a panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in 1989, ethicists from the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish traditions analyze a case study familiar to many who teach and research in business ethics — the Consolidated Foods Case. Each author shows how a particular religious tradition might react to the case. The authors show how insights from their traditions would affect corporation's moral deliberations about policy. Specific policy recommendations are offered to CEO John Bryan. Louke Siker recieved her Ph.D. in 1987. She has taught Christian ethics and business ethics at Wake Forest University and Loyola Marymount University. Her research interests include methodology in business ethics. She is the author of An Unlikely Dialogue: Barth and Business Ethicists on Human Work, Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, 1989. James Donahue is an Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. His research and publications focus on methodology in ethics, ethics and institutions, and ethics and the professions. He has published in Horizons, Religious Studies Review, Social Thought, Bioethics Books, and The Annual of the College Theology Society. Ronald M. Green is the John Phillips Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion, Dartmouth College. He also serves as Adjunct Professor of Business Ethics at Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, where he is responsible for first and second year courses on business ethics. He has written many articles in theoretical and applied ethics. He is the author of three books, Population Growth and Justice (Scholars Press, 1975), Religious Reason (Oxford University Press, 1978) and Religion and Moral Reason (Oxford University Press, 1988). Professor Green is currently working, with Dr. Robbin Derry, on a textbook in business ethics entitled The Ethical Manager to be published by Macmillian.This is a summary of the Consolidated Foods Corporation Case # 382–158, Harvard Business School, 1982. It is used with the permission of its author, Kenneth E. Goodpaster.Author of A Protestant Response to the Consolidated Food Case.Author of A Catholic Response ...Author of A Jewish Response ...     

Integrating ethics into the business school curriculum

A project on teaching business ethics at The Wharton School concluded that ethics should be directly incorporated into key MBA courses and taught by the core business faculty. The project team, comprised of students, ethics faculty and functional business faculty, designed a model program for integrating ethics. The project was funded by the Exxon Education Foundation.The program originates with a general introduction designed to familiarize students with literature and concepts pertaining to professional and business ethics and corporate social responsibility. This may be accomplished through orientation sessions, readings, packages, short classes and lectures.The key segment of the plan is to have ethics modules developed and systematically integrated throughout key business courses. In the project experiment, sample modules were developed for courses in introductory marketing, introductory management, corporate finance and business policy.The modules are designed to respond to the concerns of functional business faculty that they cannot be sufficiently authoritative in teaching ethics and that inserting coverage of ethics will displace critically important topics in their already crowded courses. On the other hand, the functional instructors found that, once encouraged, students were very willing to discuss ethical issues and that their sophistication increased throughout the course. Thomas W. Dunfee is the Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Author of numerous textbooks (Random House, Prentice-Hall, John Wiley), he teaches courses on business ethics and commercial law. He has published numerous articles in law reviews and business periodicals and has consulted to many corporations, government agencies and law firms. Currently President-Elect of the American Business Law Association, he is a former editor-in-chief of the American Business Law Journal. Diana C. Robertson is a Senior Fellow in Business Ethics in the Department of Legal Studies at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her publications in business ethics include Corporate Restructuring and Employee Interests: The Tin Parachute, The Ethics of Organizational Transformation: Mergers, Takeovers and Corporate Restructuring, Quorum Books, 1988, Why Superimposing Ethics on the Corporation Won't Work, Corporate University Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, July 1988, 18–23, and Work-Related Ethical Attitudes: Impact on Business Profitability with Thomas W. Dunfee, Business and Professional Ethics Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter 1984), 25–40.     

Professionalism: Foundation for business ethics

Professionalism includes the essential contents of other key notions within the field of business ethics. As a term involving the notion of vocation it may be understood as containing a religious content, since vocation refers to a man's most intimate personal decisions, destiny and providence. Professionalism also connotes respect for law and so includes a reference to commercial law as a guide to right conduct. Professionalsim thus lifts the requirements of law to the level of personal commitment.Like an honest act, professionalism may not be easy to define, but you will know it when you see it. As for professionalism's practitioners, like the practitioners of honesty, their art is learned not by seeking definitions of what they do, but by practicing professionalism. Only if this practice becomes an obsession with the Business Aristocracy can we expect professionalism to seize the soul of lesser businessmen and suffuse the entire business community. Thomas E. Schaefer, Ph. D., is Professor of Business Administration at the University of Texas, Permian Basin. He was formerly Head of the Department of Business Administration, University of Alaska, and Dean of Business Administration, Sacred Heart University, Puerto Rico. He has received a Private Sector Award of Pres. Reagan for Extraordinary Contributions to Small Business. His most important publications are: The Process of Management: What Supervisors Do (O.C. Press, 1982); Leadership Through Followership, Business Horizons (September/October, 1982) and many others.Paper presented at the 16th Conference on Value Inquiry, entitled: Ethics and the Market Place: An Exercise in Bridge-Building or On the Slopes of the Inteface.     

Meta-learning about business ethics: Building honorable business school communities

We propose extending business ethics education beyond the formal curriculum to the hidden curriculum where messages about ethics and values are implicitly sent and received. In this meta-learning approach, students learn by becoming active participants in an honorable business school community where real ethical issues are openly discussed and acted upon. When combined with formal ethics instruction, this meta-learning approach provides a framework for a proposed comprehensive program of business ethics education.Linda Klebe Trevino is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Mary Jean and Frank B. Smeal College of Business Administration, The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on the management of ethical-unethical behavior in organizations and justice in disciplinary situations.Donald L. McCabe is Associate Professor of Management at the Graduate School of Management, Rutgers — the State University of New Jersey. His research focuses on decision making and interpretive processes under conditions of uncertainty, and the management of ethical behavior in organizations.     

What is business ethics? A reply to peter drucker

In his What is Business Ethics? Peter Drucker accuses business ethics of singling out business unfairly for special ethical treatment, of subordinating ethical to political concerns, and of being, not ethics at all, but ethical chic. We contend that Drucker's denunciation of business ethics rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the field. This article is a response to his charges and an effort to clarify the nature, scope and purpose of business ethics.     

Friedman fallacies

Milton Friedman's article, The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits, owes its appeal to the rhetorical devices of simplicity, authority, and finality. More careful consideration reveals oversimplification and ambiguity that conceals empirical errors and logical fallacies. It is false that business does, or would, operate exclusively in economic terms, that managers concentrate obsessively on profitability, and that ethics can be marginalized. These errors reflect basic contradictions: an apolitical political base, altruistic agents of selfishness, and good deriving from greed. Colin Grant is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Mount Allison University. He teaches an undergraduate course on The Ethics and Ethos of Business. His article Giving Ethics the Business appeared in JBE 7 (1988), pp. 489–495. Some of the journals in which he has published are: The Christian Century, The Dalhousie Review, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Modern Theology, Religious Studies, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, The Toronto Journal of Theology.     

Is there any ethics in business ethics

It is argued, against Richard T. De George, that while clarification of concepts, implications, and presuppositions in business ethics largely relies on a neutral territory of reason, determination of what moral intuitions are correct depends on non-neutral ethical theories. The latter posit ethics in business to varying degrees. Thus while the Kantian and utilitarian ethical theories are, for De George, proper (philosophical) approaches to business ethics, they are as reliant on affirming and encouraging moral sentiments outside parameters of pure reason as theological approaches. And hence if theological approaches can make no unique contribution by virtue of relying on more than reason or experience alone, then philosophical approaches can make no distinctive contribution either. Either both are viable or neither are. Oscillation between the mutually dependent notions of business ethics and ethics in business obfuscates what the field of business ethics is and renders De George's position inadequate.Robert Trundle, Jr., received his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado, and is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northern Kentucky University where he teaches Business Ethics. He has worked at such companies as Stearns-Roger and Rogerson-Hiller Corporation where he was a member of the Hazardous Materials Safety Committee.     

A response to “On Measuring Ethical Judgments”

This article discusses the major criticisms posed in On Measuring Ethical Judgments concerning our ethics scale development work. We agree that the authors of the criticism do engage in what they accurately refer to as armchair theorizing. We point out the errors in their comments.Dr. R. Eric Reidenbach is Professor of Marketing at The University of Southern Mississippi. He is the coauthor of two books on business ethics and writes extensively on the subject of the measurement of ethical decision making.Dr. Donald P, Robin is Professor of Marketing and Professor of Business Ethics at The University of Southern Mississippi. He is coauthor of two books on business ethics, as well as numerous articles. Dr. Robin is also a frequent lecturer on the subject of business and marketing ethics.     

Ethics in business education: Working toward a meaningful reciprocity

This paper outlines and argues against some criticisms of business ethics education. It maintains that these criticisms have been put forward due to a misunderstanding of the nature of business and/or ethics. Business ethics seeks a meaningful reciprocity among economic, social and moral concerns. This demands that business organizations autonomously develop ethical goals from within, which in turn demands a reciprocity between ethical theory and practical experience. Working toward such a reciprocity, the ultimate goal of business ethics education is a moral business point of view through which one can live with integrity and fulfillment.To everyone who proposes to have a good career, moral philosophy is indispensible. Cicero, De Officiis, 44BC W. Michael Hoffman is Chair and Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Director at the Center for Business Ethics, Bentley College, Waltham, MA. He has received the following Grants: Council for Philosophical Studies, NEH Fellow, NDEA Fellow, Matchette. His most important publications are: Kant's Theory of Freedom: A Metaphysical Inquiry (UPA, 1979); Proceedings of the National Conferences on Business Ethics, 5 volumes (1977–1984); Business Ethics (McGraw-Hill, 1984) and articles in Journal of Business Ethics, Idealistic Studies, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Journal of Thought, The Journal for Critical Analysis, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy.Paper presented at the 16th Conference on Value Inquiry, entitled: Ethics and the Market Place: An Exercise in Bridge-Building or On the Slopes of the Interface.     

A quick justification for business ethics

The article examines the question of whether business ethics courses ought to have an impact. Despite the still common attitude among students and some business professionals that ethical considerations are less pressing in business, I argue that moral obligations are just as important there as elsewhere. The emphasis on profits in business is related to other realms (e.g., hobbies and seeking and education) in which, though private goals are dominant, moral limits remain in force. Business ethics courses can play a crucial role in emphasizing the necessity of ethical analysis in business. Louis G. Lombardi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Lake Forest College and the author of Inherent Worth, Respect, and Rights in Environmental Ethics.     

A comment on ‘A Multidimensional Scale for Measuring Business Ethics: A Purification and Refinement’

This comment is offered in response to Hansen's A Multidimensional Scale for Measuring Business Ethics: A Purification and Refinement. Five issues arising from Hansen's purification and refinement efforts are addressed. These include the issues of parsimony, predictive validity, collinearity, reliability, and what we see as a confusion between normative and positive theory.Dr. R. Eric Reidenbach is Professor of Marketing, and Director of the Center for Business Development and Research at The University of Southern Mississippi. He has written extensively on business and marketing ethics.Dr. Donald P. Robin, Professor of Business Ethics and Professor of Marketing, is coauthor with R. Eric Reidenbach of two recent books on business ethics with Prentice-Hall. He is a frequent lecturer on business ethics and is the author of several articles on the subject.     

Ethical attitudes of students and business professionals: A study of moral reasoning

A questionnaire on business ethics was administered to business professionals and to upper-class business ethics students. On eight of the seventeen situations involving ethical dilemmas in business, students were significantly more willing to engage in questionable behavior than were their professional counterparts. Apparently, many students were willing to do whatever was necessary to further their own interests, with little or no regard for fundamental moral principles. Many students and professionals functioned within Lawrence Kohlberg's stage four of moral reasoning, the law and order stage. Individualism and egoism remain strong patterns in the moral reasoning of many professionals, but they influence moral reasoning patterns among students to a much greater degree.John A. Wood is Associate Professor or Religion at Baylor University.Justin G. Longenecker is Emeritus Chavanne Professor of Christian Ethics in Business at Baylor University.Joseph A. McKinney is Professor of Economics and Co-Director of Master of International Management Program at Baylor University.Carlos W. Moore is an Edwin W. Streetman Professor of Marketing at Baylor University.     

Business regulation,business ethics and the professional employee

The differences in business reactions to legal regulation, and the nature of business moralities, are examined through the eyes of an expert group — in-house lawyers. The research indicates that lawyers inevitably provide a degree of control through their technical expertise, but that they also identify strongly with their companies and emphasise shared ethics rather than ethical differences between lawyers and their employers. This can partly be explained by their integration with the company but also rests on the problematic nature of law and regulatory controls in relation to organisations within the community. In-house lawyers therefore reject a policing role in favour of a counselling role. Since they perceive themselves as part of a shared culture of ethics, they also avoid a leadership role. However, the article suggests that the nature of legal judgment should assist lawyers towards such a role, while recognising that organisational statesmanship must be constrained by organisational culture and the wider community culture of ethical standards. Dr Karl J. Mackie is Director of the Centre for Legal Studies in the University of Nottingham, where he lectures in employment law and in management skills development. Lawyers in Business: and the Law Business is published by Macmillan (London) 1989. Dr Mackie is a member of the Business Strategy Network and a consultant in business strategy.This paper has been adapted from Mackie, Lawyers in Business: and the Law Business (1989), (London: Macmillan), ch. 10.     

Justice: The root of american business ideology and ethics

Although there are many conceptions of Justice, these different perceptions can provide many interesting insights into a business person's ethical standards as well as that person's decision-making processes. Using the Bishops' Pastoral Letter on the U.S. Economy as the basis for asking questions about justice, twenty-four business executives were interviewed about their conception of justice. An analysis of these interviews reveals that this group of businesspeople operated under very different conceptions of Justice at the Macroenvironmental and Microenvironmental levels. This result has some interesting implications not only for those scholars concerned with business ethics but for everyone who has a stake in business education.Men are called good, chiefly on account of their Justice. Cicero, 56 B.C. Ideology is applied philosophy. Lodge, 1986 Richard McGowan, S. J. is an Assistant Professor of Operations and Strategic Management at Boston College. His research focus involves examining both the rationale behind business and public policy decisions as well as determining the effectiveness of these policy measures. Some of his recent publications include Deciphering the Japanese Import Quota, Policy Studies Journal (1988) and Public Policy Measures and Cigarette Sales: An ARIMA Intervention Analysis Study JAI Social Issues Management Volume (1989).     

Business ethics in Italy: The state of the art

Up until now, the work which has been done in Italy might be considered of a preparatory nature. In 1985 and in 1986, the association of Catholic businessmen produced two documents on the ethical implications of economic activity. But in those years, the world of big business, had not yet realised how central the argument was becoming.The first significant signs of interest for business ethics appeared in 1987. In June, 1988, the first Italian National Conference on Business Ethics took place in Milan. The main outcome of that conference has been the constitution of the Italian Chapter of the European Network. In 1988, I founded the first issue of the journal entitled Etica degli-Affari. Promotional efforts have developped along two lines. The first regards programs of executive training and, eventually, consulting. In the second place, efforts are being made to elaborate and introduce codes of ethics in Italian corporations. There are, however, some very fundamental difficulties involved in the promotion of Business Ethics in Italy. The first problem is the fact that Italy is a country with a low ethical temperature. We don't have a strong sense of national identity, nor do we have a strong sense of the state. The second difficulty has to do with the business environment — the Italian business community itself. As a self-conscious, self-aware nucleus of a sector of society, the Italian business community is a very recent, and rather minoritarian social phenomenon.I personally feel that a certain protagonism on the part of prominent business leaders who are quite sensitive to the theme of ethics would prove to be very influential and greatly accelerate the process.Mario Unnia is managing director of Prospecta, a research firm, Milan, Italy. He has lectured and published extensively in the fields of Business and Public Policy, Corporate Culture and Labour Relations. He has founded and is chairman of the Italian Business Ethics Network. He is editor of Etica degli Affari.     

The Morality of Bluffing: A Reply to Allhoff

In a recent paper that appeared in this journal Fritz Allhoff addresses the morality of bluffing in negotiations¹. He focuses on cases in which people misstate their reservation price in negotiations, e.g., suppose that I am selling a house and tell a prospective buyer that $300,000 is absolutely the lowest price that I will accept, when I know that I would be willing to accept as little as $270,000 for the house rather than continue to try to sell it. Allhoff criticizes my (qualified) defense of bluffing in my paper Second Thoughts on Bluffing,² and offers what he takes to be a more plausible defense of bluffing. Allhoffs criticisms rest on several serious misinterpretations of my views. He ascribes to me several arguments that I dont make. He also attributes to me an unqualified defense of bluffing that I explicitly reject. I briefly document this in Section 1. In Sections 2 and 3 I explain and criticize Allhoffs positive views about bluffing and the morality of bluffing.Thomas Carson is professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of Value and the Good Life and The Status of Morality. He is the co-editor of Moral Relativism and Morality and the Good Life. He is the author of numerous papers on ethical theory and business ethics and is a member of the editorial board of Business Ethics Quarterly and Journal of Business Ethics. He is currently working on a book entitled Lying and Deception: Theory and Practice.     

Giving ethics the business

The criminal conviction of Amway Corporation for evasion of Canadian customs duties not only belies the high ethical profession of its president, Richard DeVos, but his reissuing of the book which makes this profession, without mentioning the conviction, supports the view that ultimately ethics and business are pulling in opposite directions.Colin Grant is Professor of Religious Studies at Mount Allison University, Sackville, N. B. He teaches The Ethics and Ethos of Business and has published articles in Liberal Arts and Religious Studies Periodicals.     

Ethical considerations for streaming business publications

This exploratory ethics study of a publication and presentation practice herein defined as streaming investigates the attitudes of deans of schools of business and business professors regarding such behavior. Streaming publications is the practice of presenting or publishing an article at one outlet and then taking the same article with perhaps minor revisions and presenting or publishing it at another publication outlet. The results of the survey suggest that the most important ethical behavior regarding streaming practices is disclosure. If authors fully disclose the intellectual history of a paper's developmental process, allegations of possible professional misconduct will be minimized if not eliminated.Vern C. Vincent is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Business Administration at the University of Texas — Pan American.Wig De Moville is an Accounting Professor at the same institution.     

Management development and business ethics: A view from the U.K.

This article is written in the context of current British interest in management training and development, in which an emphasis on competency is viewed critically, as technically oriented, with little attention paid to ethics and moral values. It is suggested that a concern for ethics in management development can be expressed in terms of four requisite management attributes or qualities: theoretical knowledge and understanding; affective qualities; personal and interpersonal skills; and self-knowledge. Following Kohlberg's work on moral development, the cultivation of these attributes is viewed as a life-span process involving three broadly defined forms of management development practice, each appropriate to different circumstances and stages in a learner's career. It is concluded that the conventional teaching of theory, learning from experience and counselling/mentoring, are equally important in the contribution which management development can make to the resolution of ethical dilemmas in business practice.Patrick Maclagan is a lecturer in organisational behaviour and managerial ethics at the School of Management, University of Hull, U.K., where he is also on the Steering Committee of the Social Values Research Centre, His current research concerns the relationship between management development and ethics in organisations.