Dismemberment,divorce and hostile takeovers: A comment on corporate moral personhood

We can explain our intuitions about corporate takeover cases by appeal to Peter French's picture of the corporation as a moral person. He argues that corporations are persons in much the same sense as you and I, and are entitled to the same rights as humans. On this analysis, takeovers are murders, attempted murders, attempts to enslave, etc. I want to explore the consequences of this view for corporate takeovers. I shall argue that, though French can explain why our moral intuitions seem to arise in response to some concern about the corporations themselves, his analysis commits us to the wrong intuitions in some cases. I shall then offer an account of these intuitions which focuses on the character of corporations.Rita C. Manning is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University. She has published widely — on Artificial Intelligence, Ancient Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, and Informal Logic, in addition to Business Ethics. She is currently working on a Feminist critique of Moral Philosophy.     

Technology,workplace privacy and personhood

This paper traces the intellectual development of the workplace privacy construct in the course of American thinking. The role of technological development in this process is examined, particularly in regard to the information gathering/dissemination dilemmas faced by employers and employees alike. The paper concludes with some preliminary considerations toward a theory of workplace privacy.William S. Brown is assistant professor of Management at Babson College, Babson Park, Massachusetts. Prior to entering academia he had over 17 years human resource management experience in the corporate headquarters of Fortune-ranked firms such as the Prudential Insurance Company of America and Philip Morris, Inc. as well as in non-profits as Barnard College, Columbia University and the Pittsburgh Board of Education. He has published in various professional journals and practitioner magazines.     

Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet

This paper examines workplace surveillance and monitoring. It is argued that privacy is a moral right, and while such surveillance and monitoring can be justified in some circumstances, there is a presumption against the infringement of privacy. An account of privacy precedes consideration of various arguments frequently given for the surveillance and monitoring of employees, arguments which look at the benefits, or supposed benefits, to employees as well as to employers. The paper examines the general monitoring of work, and the monitoring of email, listservers and the World Wide Web. It is argued that many of the common justifications given for this surveillance and monitoring do not stand up to close scrutiny.     

Defining privacy in employee health screening cases: Ethical ramifications concerning the employee/employer relationship

Issues of privacy and employee health screening rank as two of the most important ethical concerns organizations will face in the next five years. Despite the increasing numbers of social scientists researching personal privacy and the current focus on workplace privacy rights as one of the most dynamic areas of employment law, the concept of privacy remains relatively abstract. Understanding how the courts define privacy and use the expectation of privacy standards is paramount given the strategic importance of the law as a legal socializing agent. This article reports on two federal court decisions involving employer drug and HIV testing whose determinations relied on assumptions about the psychological dimensions of privacy. How the courts define privacy, the outcome of this definition and the ethical ramifications as it affects the employee/employer relationship are discussed.Michele Simms, as an adjunct professor of business communication and organizational behavior, has taught at the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Oakland University schools of business in Michigan. In addition to teaching, she consults in the areas of worksite wellness, alternative dispute resolution, transition management and change.     

A Formal Study of Distributed Meeting Scheduling

Automating routine organizational tasks, such as meeting scheduling, requires a careful balance between the individual (respecting his or her privacy and personal preferences) and the organization (making efficient use of time and other resources). We argue that meeting scheduling is an inherently distributed process, and that negotiating over meetings can be viewed as a distributed search process. Keeping the process tractable requires introducing heuristics to guide distributed schedulers' decisions about what information to exchange and whether or not to propose the same tentative time for several meetings. While we have intuitions about how such heuristics could affect scheduling performance and efficiency, verifying these intuitions requires a more formal model of the meeting schedule problem and process. We present our preliminary work toward this goal, as well as experimental results that validate some of the predictions of our formal model. We also investigate scheduling in overconstrained situations, namely, scheduling of high priority meetings at short notice, which requires cancellation and rescheduling of previously scheduled meetings. Our model provides a springboard into deeper investigations of important issues in distributed artificial intelligence as well, and we outline our ongoing work in this direction.     

Corporate Social Responsibility,Product Differentiation Strategy and Export Performance

This article examines why an organization might wish to manage workplace romance, and describes a number of alternative approaches to managing dating. At first sight the ethics of dating bans balances the need to protect female employees from harassment against employee rights to privacy and freedom of association – a rights versus rights issue. However, dating bans seem not to be directed at protecting female employees from harm, but rather protect employers from sexual harassment liability claims – an employer self-interest versus employee rights issue. This article advocates a consequentialist approach to the problem, via the factoring in of other harms caused by prohibiting workplace romance. Given that most workplace romances end up in marriage or long-term partnerships, a ban on workplace romance is argued to be antisocial. The incidence of sexual harassment is very low in comparison to the number of long-term relationships initiated in the workplace. This article concludes by citing examples of firms that encourage romance, showing that is feasible to manage any resulting problems within these firms’ existing conflict of interest and sexual harassment rules.     

Drug Testing and the Right to Privacy: Arguing the Ethics of Workplace Drug Testing

As drug testing has become increasingly used to maximize corporate profits by minimizing the economic impact of employee substance abuse, numerous arguments have been advanced which draw the ethical justification for such testing into question, including the position that testing amounts to a violation of employee privacy by attempting to regulate an employee's behavior in her own home, outside the employer's legitimate sphere of control. This article first proposes that an employee's right to privacy is violated when personal information is collected or used by the employer in a way which is irrelevant to the terms of employment. This article then argues that drug testing is relevant and therefore ethically justified within the terms of the employment agreement, and therefore does not amount to a violation of an employee's right to privacy. Arguments to the contrary, including the aforementioned appeal to the employer's limited sphere of control, do not account for reasonable constraints on employee privacy which are intrinsic to the demands of the workplace and implicit in the terms of the employment contract.     

Paternalism and Corporate Responsibility

Some writers suggest that corporations should act in ways which reflect a broad concern for the well-being of others, as opposed to a more narrow (Libertarian) conception of responsibility. But this Broad View of moral responsibility puts us on a collision course with our considered intuitions about paternalistic acts. This paper discusses several aspects of this issue: the neutrality of the Standard View of Paternalism, the nature of the defenses of paternalistic interventions allowed by the Standard View of Paternalism and their reliance on consent; and the sort of position on paternalism the Board View would have to endorse in order to justify the benevolence-motivated orientation required by its conception of moral responsibility.The conclusion is that unless we are prepared to take a different, non-standard view of paternalism the Board View of corporate moral responsibility will be untenable.     

A study of individuals' ethical beliefs and perceptions of electronic mail privacy

While electronic mail has enjoyed rapid growth in the workplace, many companies have failed to establish clear expectations among employees about their e-mail privacy rights. This has resulted in controversy and even lawsuits against employers where employees later learned that management personnel monitored or read their electronic communications. It has been speculated that most employees underestimate the legal right of their employer to engage in e-mail monitoring activities. However, this issue has been virtually unexplored from a research perspective. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to assess individuals' ethical beliefs and perceptions about electronic mail privacy. This study of more than 200 e-mail users reveals that there is significant resistance to e-mail monitoring, and that many individuals have a relatively poor understanding of their e-mail privacy rights. The results also suggest that companies need to develop and communicate a policy to employees that addresses this issue. Finally, this study suggests several possibilities for further research. Building a greater body of knowledge of this domain should assist business leaders and lawmakers as they work to formulate an effective response to this workplace challenge that will equitably balance the rights of employees and employers.James J. Cappel is a Doctoral candidate and Teaching Fellow in Business Computer Information Systems. He has published six articles in refereed journals in the United States and Great Britain, including a recent article in theJournal of Systems Management. His research interests include human-computer interaction and legal and ethical issues in information systems.     

Ontological Security, Existential Anxiety and Workplace Privacy

The relationship of workers to management has traditionally been one of control. However, the introduction of increasingly sophisticated technology as a means of supervision in the modern workplace has dramatically altered the contours of this relationship, giving workers much less privacy and making workers much more visible than previously possible. The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of technological control of workers and how it has altered the relationship of worker to organization, through the impact upon self as perceived by the worker.     

Organizational failure to ethically manage sexual harassment: Limits to #metoo

The recent deluge of sexual harassment allegations in the media serves as a reminder that sexual harassment remains a pervasive, destructive occurrence in the workplace. Organizations in the United States have taken a legal‐centric approach to managing workplace sexual harassment, resulting in impotent anti‐harassment policies, ineffective sexual harassment training, and underused reporting mechanisms. In this conceptual paper, I argue that men's differential perceptions of sociosexual behaviors have propagated this legal‐centric approach, which fails to meet organizations’ ethical obligation to provide a safe and healthy work environment. Specifically, men have a different psychological experience of sexual harassment, which may inhibit their ability to take the perspective of targets. This lack of perspective‐taking has influenced the jurisprudence on workplace sexual harassment, which has in turn informed organizations’ approach to managing the phenomenon. I contribute to research on both business ethics and workplace sexual harassment by integrating two bodies of scholarship that have developed largely independent of one another: organizational psychology and legal. In so doing, I offer an explanation for the continued pervasiveness of workplace sexual harassment despite decades of legal sanction, organizational interventions, and research.     

Economic Change,Subjective Perception and Institutional Evolution

Following Hayek's intuitions on the role of subjective perception in economics, I attempt to integrate path‐dependent dynamics in evolutionary economics, as emerging in the recent theorizing about economic change. The starting point is an open question in evolutionary economics: is there a unifying principle which characterizes change at individual, organizational and institutional levels? In the attempt to answer this question, I propose some considerations on the nature of learning processes and on the mechanisms of adjustment, discovery and selection that are consistent with cognitive psychology and contemporary neurobiology. In particular, I link imperfect perception to guided variations, like those contained in Dosi's technological paradigms. More generally, I attempt to integrate the evolutionary theory as conceived by Nelson and Winter with the evolutionary theory as conceived by Hayek.     

Nurturing the Whole Person: The Ethics of Workplace Spirituality in a Society of Organizations

In a world which can be increasingly described as a “society of organizations,” it is incumbent upon organizational researchers to account for the role of organizations in determining the well-being of societies and the individuals that comprise them. Workplace spirituality is a young area of inquiry with potentially strong relevance to the well-being of individuals, organizations, and societies. Previous literature has not examined ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality that organizations might expect based upon the co-existence of multiple ethical work climates, nor has previous literature accounted for the relevance of the cosmopolitan (external, societal) source of moral reasoning in the ethical treatment of workplace spirituality. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps by articulating two such ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality: the “quiet desperation” dilemma and the instrumentality dilemma. Moreover, I propose two theoretical contexts that foster “both-and” rather than “either-or” thinking, thereby mitigating (moderating) the relationships between climate combinations and conflictual aspects of the ethical dilemmas. For the “quiet desperation” dilemma, I propose a person–organization fit perspective to emphasize diversity of individual preferences instead of a managerially prescribed uniformity of spirituality. For the instrumentality dilemma, I propose a multiparadigm approach to workplace spirituality research to avoid the privileging of one research interest over another (e.g., instrumentality, individual fulfillment, societal good). I conclude with suggestions for future research.     

Moral Psychology and the Intuition that Pharmaceutical Companies Have a ‘Special’ Obligation to Society

Many people believe that the research-based pharmaceutical industry has a ‘special’ moral obligation to provide lifesaving medications to the needy, either free-of-charge or at a reduced rate relative to the cost of manufacture. In this essay, I argue that we can explain the ubiquitous notion of a special moral obligation as an expression of emotionally charged intuitions involving sacred or protected values and an aversive response to betrayal in an asymmetric trust relationship. I then review the most common arguments used to justify the claim that the pharmaceutical industry has a special moral obligation and show why these justifications fail. Taken together, these conclusions call into question the conventional ideologies that have traditionally animated the debate on whether the pharmaceutical industry has special duties of beneficence and distributive justice with respect to the impoverished in dire need of their products.     

人工智能人脸识别技术安全风险评估研究

以北京、上海、深圳、福州、广州地区42家人工智能人脸识别技术开发方为调查对象,构建了人脸识别技术安全风险评估指标体系,利用模糊综合评价法对其进行了实证研究。结果表明：被调查企业人脸识别技术应用处于较安全等级,风险水平较低,数据安全及隐私安全等级最高,管理体系最低;算法、模型可靠性和可解释性对人脸识别技术安全性影响程度最大,软件系统安全的影响程度最小;数据访问权限控制对人脸识别技术应用过程中的安全防御效用发挥得最好,而安全管理策略、制度防御效用最低。     

Drug testing and corporate responsibility: The “ought implies can” argument

Most of the debate about drug testing in the workplace has focused on the right to privacy. Proponents of testing have had to tackle difficult questions concerning the nature, extent, and weight of the privacy rights of employees. This paper examines a different kind of argument — the claim that because corporations are responsible for harms committed by employees while under the influence of drugs, they are entitled to test for drug use. This argument has considerable intuitive appeal, because it seems, at least at first glance, to bypass the issue of privacy rights altogether. The argument turns, not on rights, but on the nature and conditions of responsibility. We may therefore call it an ought implies can argument.In spite of its initial appeal, however, the argument does not succeed in circumventing the claims of privacy rights. Even responsibility for the actions of others does not entitle us to do anything at all to control their behavior; we must look to rights, among other things, to determine what sorts of controls are morally permissible. In addition, the argument rests on unjustified assumptions about the connection between drug testing and the prevention of drug-related harm. Jennifer Moore is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Delaware. She does teaching and research in business ethics and business law and is co-editor of the anthology, Business Ethics: Readings and Cases in Corporate Morality, published by McGraw-Hill.     

The Discourse of Control

I challenge the appropriateness of the discourse of managerial control of employees in four ways. First, I question arguments which suggest that employees are always subject to organizational control. Second, I contrast workplace conditions which support employee self-determination and autonomy with conditions which permit control of employees. Third, I provide an ethical assessment of the normative use of control talk and fourth, I suggest an alternative discourse, a discourse of accountability which appropriately highlights the reciprocity necessary to build ethical organizations.     

What happened to civility? Understanding rude behavior through the lens of organizational justice

The ability to have polite conversation between individuals who disagree with one another seems to be a rare quality today. Organizational justice theory may help explain why rude behavior seems so prevalent and whether the rudeness in politics and society creates a polarized environment that could impact the workplace. Three recent legal decisions concerning healthcare, same-sex marriage, and the Michael Brown case, along with three workplace examples of deliberate rudeness, are examined to analyze the polarization of opposing viewpoints and the incivility that resulted from these situations. When a decision is viewed as a win-lose situation and people perceive the decision process as unfair, losers in the decision may feel threatened and react by engaging in deviant behavior that is uncivil. Winners may also engage in behavior that is uncivil and intolerant of opposing viewpoints. The result is a cycle of incivility that may include character assassination, protests, and a diminished willingness to compromise. Managers should be cognizant of the dangers of rude behavior and create a workplace environment that counters productivity interference caused by incivility and inability to compromise. I suggest specific steps to help stop workplace incivility before it starts.