FOCUS: Ethics in Business and Health

"The NHS may not, on a tight definition, be a business, but it has an obligation to its financial stakeholders (the tax-payers), and this implies an ethical obligation to be business- like. This means it must be as well-managed as it is well-meaning." The author is Chairman of St George's Healthcare NHS Trust. Until 1988 she was Head of the Department of Politics at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, where she is now Visiting Professor. She is a non-executive director of Norwich Union and of the HMV Group and her most recent book is Business Ethics at Work , Cambridge University Press, 1995.     

The Role of Law in Models of Ethical Behavior

In attempting to improve ethical decision-making in business organizations, researchers have developed models of ethical decision-making processes. Most of these models do not include a role for law in ethical decision-making, or if law is mentioned, it is set as a boundary constraint, exogenous to the decision process. However, many decision models in business ethics are based on cognitive moral development theory, in which the law is thought to be the external referent of individuals at the level of cognitive development that most people have achieved. Other theoretical bases of ethical decision models, social learning, and experientialism, also imply a role for law that is rarely made explicit. Law is a more important aspect of ethical decision-process models than it appears to be in the models. This paper will derive explicit roles for the law from the cognition, experientialism, and social learning theories that are used to build ethical decision-making models for business behavior. Sandra Christensen is Professor of Management at Eastern Washington University, where she teaches courses in Business & Society, International Business, and Leadership & Ethics. She has published in Business and Society, Business Ethics Quarterly, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Academy of Management Review.     

Living (not learning) ethics

Much has been written recently about both the urgency and efficacy of teaching business ethics. The results of our survey of AACSB member schools confirm prior reports of similar surveys: The teaching of business ethics is indiscriminate, unorganized, and undisciplined in most North American schools of business. If universities are to be taken seriously in their efforts to create more ethical awareness and better moral decision-making skills among their graduates, they must provide a rigorous and well-developed system in which students can live ethics instead of merely learn ethics. A system must be devised to allow students to discover and refine their own values rather than simply learning ethical theories from an intellectual point of view.After reviewing the literature on business ethics in undergraduate curricula, we make a series of recommendations to deliver experiential ethical education for business students. The recommendations include student and faculty written codes of ethics, emphasis on ethical theory within the existing required legal environment course, applied ethics in the functional area capstones using alternative learning, a discussion of employee (and employer) rights and responsibilities during the curriculum capstone course, and a public service requirement for graduation. These recommendations may be implemented without substantive additional cost or programming requirements.Joseph Solberg is an Assistant Professor of Business Law at Illinois State University. His teaching and research interests are centered on the legal and ethical environments of business and the pedagogy of business ethics. He is a member of the American and Midwest Academies and Legal Studies in Business.Kelly Strong is an Assistant Professor of Management at Illinois State University. His teaching and research interests include business ethics, business and society, and strategic issues management. He has published articles in the Journal of Business Ethics and other scholarly outlets in the areas of ethics education, business and society, and ethical decision making.Charles McGuire, Jr. is Professor of Business Law and Chair of the Finance, Insurance and Law Department at Illinois State University. His interests are in the areas of business law and the legal environment of business as well as government regulation. He has published text-books and supplements on the legal environment of business in addition to scholarly works in the American Business Law Journal, among others.     

Emotion As Well As Reason: Getting Students Beyond "Interpersonal Accountability"

The paper notes the recent spread of business ethics courses in American higher education, observing that teachers trained in economics have not readily incorporated ethical notions or theory into regular courses, such as finance, management, accounting, and marketing. The presumed ethically neutral, value-free approach of economists, who dominate business courses, is increasingly inadequate to meet the needs of business managers – or of business students. Technological and political changes, creating an interdependent environment within which managers operate, have eroded older ethics based on tradition and common backgrounds. They have also raised ethical issues of new orders of complexity. With corporate business managers finding ethical concerns more pressing matters than do many teachers, the paper offers some tentative answers to three questions about how to interest business students in ethical issues: What Approach to Business Ethics Gets student's Attention? What Is the Value of Simulations and Games? What Can Be Said About the Business System And Its Values? The answer to the first question is simulations and games. Case method analysis is serviceable, engaging students' intellect, but all too often without emotional involvement or self-revelation. Experiential learning through class-room games accomplish both engagement and involvement in ways that are exceedingly helpful to business students, who have had "less occasion for critical reflection on self and world than have others of their age." The answer to the second question is: They engage the whole student, stimulating the player to examine the source of her ethical strengths and the reasons for ethical lapses. Generating emotional involvement the games leverage and enhance reasoning, allowing students to learn more about their own values and question their own behavior. The answer to the third question is: A socially justifiable (community-legitimated) competitive market system requires of its managerial participants an emotionally informed response – as well as a rational analysis and use of business techniques. Business operates with enhanced effectiveness efficiency at appropriate levels of such virtues as loyalty, trustworthiness and cooperativeness; they ensure externality benefits as well as promote justice for its own ultimate social justification.     

Business Ethics in South Africa

In this paper an assessment will be made of the state of Business Ethics as an academic discipline as well as on the extent to which theory on Business Ethics has been translated into practice within the South African society. First the way in which Business Ethics is defined will be examined. Then the issues within the field of Business Ethics that is considered to be most important will be addressed, as well as the reasons why it is believed to be important to address them. From there the attention will be shifted to the way in which Business Ethics has been institutionalised at tertiary education level. An overview of important initiatives taken by the business sector themselves will also be reviewed. Then co-operation between business and academia on Business Ethics will be discussed. Finally an assessment will be made of what can be learned from Business Ethics elsewhere in the world and what can be offered in this regard. Also some future prospects of Business Ethics in South Africa will be explored.     

The course in business ethics: Can it work?

An examination of ninety-nine syllabi for undergraduate courses in business ethics, collected by the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College, reveals that half the courses are offered to freshmen and sophomores. Because of the fact that these students will have minimal knowledge of the functional areas of business firms, and because these courses rely heavily on case analysis, it is likely that the students in these courses are not able to deal effectively with the material in the course. Therefore, any expectation that the business ethics course will raise the students' ethical sensitivity when considering business problems or decisions is unrealistic.Dr. Pamental teaches Business, Government and Society and Business Ethics in Literature at Rhode Island College, and is a Research Fellow of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. He has written extensively on the subject of business ethics and its relationship to business programs.     

Ethical congruency of constituent groups

This research investigates the perceptions of five constituent groups of an accredited business school — their perceptions of others' ethics, of their own ethics and ideal values, and of how business ethics can be improved. Self-described behavior from the constituent groups is quite similar, yet is decidedly different from that which respondents felt others would do. Undergraduate business students tended to have the lowest estimation of others' ethics in addition to the least ethical self-described behavior compared with other constituent groups. All constituents were solidly in favor of improving ethics by developing principles of business ethics, requiring ethics courses in business schools and introducing industry codes of ethics. People are much more ethical than they are perceived to be. Knowing that others are more ethical may in turn cause other people to act more ethically. Similarly, believing that others are less ethical may encourage less ethical behavior.Harriet Stephenson, Professor of Management in the Albers School of Business and Economics, Robert D. O'Brien Chair, is Director of The Entrepreneurship Center at Seattle University. She teaches Entrepreneurship, Small Business Management, and Business Policy and Organization, and does research in the areas of business ethics, entrepreneurship, and marketing for small business.Sharon Galbraith, is an Assistant Professor in the Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University, Seattle Washington. She teaches Marketing and Marketing Research and does research in the areas of consumer information processing, pedagogy, business ethics, and small business.Robert B. Grimm, an Associate Professor of Management in the Albers School of Business and Economics, and also currently Rector of the Seattle University Jesuit Community, teaches and consults in the area of business ethics. He has published inConsultation and a number of proceedings.     

An Optimally Viable Version of Stakeholder Theory

This article is the final one in a series of four papers investigating the stakeholder approach to running businesses. It argues that the optimally viable version of that approach is one in which employees have a co-equal status as stakeholders with shareholders (the maximum allowed for under stakeholder theory) while other groupings only have a minimal status as stakeholders and are generally restricted to just customers, suppliers, and lenders. This version is argued for on the grounds that it both overcomes the implementation problems attendant upon having to serve the interests of a range of groupings and is justified in terms of stakeholder membership being confined to those groupings with a claim on the services of a business in virtue of directly contributing to its economic functioning. The ranking of non-shareholder stakeholders in the recommended version and, in particular, the maximal ranking granted to employees is argued to reflect the scale of the various contributions as measured by the degree to which making it exposes those stakeholders to both financial risk and a non-financial “work-related” risk peculiar to employees. It is concluded that although this is the best available version of the stakeholder approach it may not be the best of all possible ways of running a business. John Kaler is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth Business School. He is the co-author of the books An Introduction to Business Ethics and Essentials of Business Ethics, and was co-editor for Teaching Business Ethics, a website hosted by the Institute of Business Ethics. He is an ex-member of the Executive Committee of the European Business Ethics, U.K., and has published on a wide range of business ethics topics.     

Editorial Adieu: Cultivating Moral Courage in Business

Leaving an editorial chair provides an opportunity for the departing incumbent to deliver a final message to his readers. Seven years after founding Business Ethics. A European Review the editor can offer no better valedictory than to explore the role of moral courage in the ethical conduct of business. Not only does this provide an excellent illustration of the recent recovery of the subject of “virtue” ethics in moral philosophy in general, as well as in the application of morality to business. It also serves to highlight the important difference between ‘business ethics’ as a term applied to the study of right and wrong behaviour in business, and ‘ethical business’, which is business actually conducted on ethical lines. For the difference between behaving rightly and wrongly in any area of human activity, including that of business, is not simply a matter of knowledge, or of finding the “correct” answer. There is a crucial psychological gap between knowing what one ought to do and then actually doing it; as Ovid ruefully observed, we see and approve the better things, yet we follow the worse. This is where courage comes in, for the gap between ethical perception and ethical performance is bridged by moral courage, as the following article suggests. More colloquially, the author is accustomed to conclude his classroom teaching on business ethics by observing that it is one thing to work out, often laboriously and hesitantly, what is the correct line of behaviour to follow; it is quite another thing to have the guts to follow it. An early version of this paper was delivered in Gresham College, London, while a more developed account dates from the First World Congress of the International Society of Business, Economics and Ethics, held in Tokyo in 1996. The following is reprinted from International Business Ethics: Challenges and Approaches , edited by George Enderle earlier this year and published by the University of Notre Dame Press and Hong Kong University Press.     

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 Nietzschean re‐evaluation of values as a way of re‐imagining business ethics

Whereas a range of business and management scholars have argued that business is in an ethical crisis, Nietzsche makes it possible to see that it is ethics itself that is in crisis, and that only as the crisis in ethics is dealt with can ethics in specific areas such as business be addressed. Nihilism is the name that Nietzsche gives to the crisis in ethics. The failure to fully appreciate nihilism and its pervasiveness as the root cause of the problem, as evident in the perpetual quest to obliterate nihilism through the creation of ethical frameworks and foundations, has plunged business and ethics scholarship in the field, ever deeper in the quagmire of nihilism. In response to nihilism, Nietzsche offers a re‐evaluation of all values. To re‐evaluate all values means to accept nihilism and see it as a basis for questioning taken for granted assumptions that have supported the notion of ethics or values in order to re‐imagine an ethics which is responsive to the crisis of nihilism. The paper thus proposes that rather than trying to invent new ethics or ethical foundations, or figuring out “how” to be ethical, we need to turn our attention on the “why to be” of ethics.     

A Study of the Adjustment of Ethical Recogntion and Ethical Decision-Making of Managers-to-be Across the Taiwan Strait Before and After Receiving a Business Ethics Education

This study conducted an empirical survey of 126 Business Ethics students in business and management departments within two universities across the Taiwan Strait to evaluate the impact on these managers-to-be of receiving an education in Business Ethics. The results show that, after receiving that Business Ethics education, students in both universities demonstrated significant improvements in the ethical weighting of their individual values, their recognition of ethical issues and their performance as ethical decision-makers. However, in respect of ethical decision-making, the behavior of these students is still sub-optimal, indicating a need for further improvements in the ethical education of managers-to-be across the Taiwan Strait.     

Religiousness, Love of Money, and Ethical Attitudes of Malaysian Evangelical Christians in Business

Recent research suggests there may be a link between religiousness and business ethics. This study seeks to add to the understanding of the relationship through a questionnaire survey on Malaysian Christians in business. The questionnaire taps into three different constructs. The religiousness construct is reflected in the level of participation in various common religious activities. The love of money construct is captured through the Love of Money Scale as used in Luna-Arocas and Tang [Journal of Business Ethics 50 (2004) 329]. Response to 25 business vignettes taken from Conroy and Emerson [Journal of Business Ethics 50 (2004) 383] would surface ethical attitudes. A convenience sample of 300 was drawn from three large churches in the Kuala Lumpur area each with a congregation exceeding 1000 together with some representation from the smaller churches. The study finds some differences in the ethical attitudes of Malaysian Christians in business with different levels of religiousness. The study also finds that those longer in the faith are less accepting of unethical behavior. As such it can be concluded that there are ethical attitude differences between Christians in business with different levels of religiousness. This lends support to the claim of a positive relationship between religion and business ethics. The more significant finding is that even within a somewhat homogenous religious group there are different love of money profiles resulting in significant differences in ethical attitudes. This suggests that moderating money attitudes can contribute towards stronger ethical attitudes. Hong Meng Wong BEcons(Hons)(Malaya), MBA(Cranfield), DBA(UniSA), FCA, ACIS, is the National Secretary of the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship Malaysia. His more than 30 years of professional experience had been in management consulting, merchant banking, commercial banking and stock broking. Since becoming a Christian in 1981 he has been actively involved in ministering to men in the marketplace. His burden is to help improve the ethics of Christians in business.     

Ethical Entrepreneurship and Fair Trade

Due to several recent scandals, Business Ethics is now firmly embraced. Whereas in the 1980s and early 1990s there were serious doubts expressed about combining ethics and business, the link now seems to have become self-evident. Fundamental questions about the tensions between business and ethics however continue to receive little attention. In this paper, based upon a debate concerning the Fair Trade company, the strains between business and ethics are analyzed. The article shows how several great thinkers have already considered this tension. Three ways to conceptualize the tension between business and ethics have been distinguished, and these are outlined in the paper. In one approach, ethical entrepreneurship, value tensions are perceived as a source for entrepreneurship. However, this approach presupposes pluralistic ethics. Thinking only in terms of black and white is seen as blocking the ability to adequately handle the tension between business and ethics. Opting for ‘‘ethical entrepreneurship’’, as by Fair Trade, has fundamental and important consequences for the company’s communication policy.     

Using Stakeholder-Theory into Case-Method

In order to draw some attention to the subject of business ethics and to achieve the inclusion of business ethics into the official curricula of the sixth form courses in secondary schools in Flanders, the Flemish Network for Business Ethics set up a pilot project. It includes about twelve lessons. The main object is to teach students how to cope with an ethical problem. Therefore an educational map has been edited – titled Ethics ...none of my business? (Siebens, 1998) – in which a procedure to handle an ethical problem is proposed. The procedure rests on the stakeholders-approach (Freeman, 1984). Other theoretical items are: ethical intuition, traditional moral norms and communication, a procedure approach, the limitation of acting, and the metaphysical basis (especially the existentialistic philosophy of Lévinas).

The basic procedure contains four steps. But the map makes a distinction between a procedure for a ‘choice’ directed situation and a procedure for an ‘evaluation’ directed situation. The subject of the project is business ethics, but the organizing commission hopes the students will learn to look at their entire world from an ethical angle. Because real ethical intuition hasn't to do with external hierarchical power and regulation but with selfregulation, argumentative authority and internalized values and principles.

     

Ethical Corporate Consultancy

As ethical consultancy to business develops what are its principles, its methods and its possible pitfalls? The author is Professor of Business Ethics at the Netherlands School of Business, Nijenrode, and Chairman of the European Business Ethics Network.     

Achieving Ethics and Fairness in Hiring: Going Beyond the Law

Since the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and more recent Federal legislation, managers, regulators, and attorneys have been busy in sorting out the legal meaning of fairness in employment. While ethical managers must follow the law in their hiring practices, they cannot be satisfied with legal compliance. In this article, we first briefly summarize what the law requires in terms of fair hiring practices. We subsequently rely on multiple perspectives to explore the ethical meaning of fairness in hiring. Ethical fairness underlies the law and regulations in this area, but goes beyond them as well. We conclude by demonstrating that ethical hiring practices enable managers to make better hiring decisions.G. Stoney Alder is Assistant Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research interests include organizational justice, electronic monitoring, and ethics. Dr. Alder’s work has appeared in a number of journals including Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Human Resource Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics, and the Journal of High Technology Management Research, among others.Joseph Gilbert is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He teaches in the areas of business strategy and business ethics. His research is primarily in the area of business ethics. Prior to receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, he had extensive management experience in the financial services industry.     

Evaluating Ethical Approaches to Crisis Leadership: Insights from Unintentional Harm Research

Leading a corporation through a crisis requires rational decision making guided by an ethical approach (Snyder et al., Journal of Business Ethics, 63, 2006, 371). Three such approaches are virtue ethics (Seeger and Ulmer, Journal of Business Ethics, 31, 2001, 369), an ethic of justice, and an ethic of care (Simola, Journal of Business Ethics, 46, 2003, 351). In this article, I consider the effectiveness of these approaches for leading a corporation after a crisis. The standard I use is drawn from recent studies that examine how people tend to react to corporate unintentional harms. I conclude from these studies that an ethic of care approach is most effective for managing corporate crises when it comes to stakeholder concerns. I conclude the article with strategies for managing a crisis using an ethic of care.     

The Business Ethics Index as a Leading Economic Indicator

Theoretical justification for the Business Ethics Index (BEI) from the emerging economics of trust literature is discussed. The BEI results for 2007, 2008, and 2009 are presented. While the Personal/Past BEI component shows no significant difference from the previous years, the Vicarious/Past component shows a dramatic drop to levels previously never recorded. However, when it came to the perception of the future business ethical behavior, respondents were signifi- cantly more optimistic than in previous measurements. This finding was more than a little surprising given the depth of the economic crisis. A possible explanation is that consumers hopefully perceived the economic crisis as already abating and/or that at least the worst was over.     

Australian Business Majors and Their Attitudes Toward the Teaching of Business Ethics

Seven hundred seventy-three questionnaires were completed by students enrolled in an undergraduate business administration program at a university in Victoria. The survey instrument was adapted from one used by Professor John Milton-Smith (1992) in his Australian Business Ethics Project. The results indicated that (a) students place importance on business ethics education, (b) students who have taken a business ethics course found that experience to be valuable, (c) students view ethical behavior as leading to positive outcomes for the corporation and (d) some measures are underway in Australian higher education and in the community at large to enhance learning in this area.