Beware of the Watchdog: Rethinking the Normative Justification of Gatekeeper Liability

One of the prevailing explanations of the corporate scandals of the Enron era and the recent financial crisis is the failure of professional gatekeepers—such as auditors, corporate lawyers, and securities analysts—to detect and disrupt corporate misconduct. The alleged solution to this failure—typically proposed and justified on consequentialist grounds—is to impose legal liability on professionals. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the normative foundations of gatekeeper liability. In the course of this paper, I shall defend the claim that gatekeeper liability may be morally objectionable not only on grounds of fairness but also on consequentialist grounds. The expected contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it systematizes the framing and moral justification of gatekeeping duties. Second, it calls into question the normative underpinnings for targeting intermediaries instead of primary wrongdoers. Third, it anticipates some negative (and often overlooked) results of gatekeeping strategies in the accounting profession, specifically in the realm of clientele selection, the expectation gap, and auditor compensation.     

Ensuring Independent Auditors: Increasing the Saliency of the Professional Identity

We conceptualize threats to auditor independence as conflicts of social identity rather than interest and hypothesize that the greater the saliency of the professional identity among auditors, the more likely the auditor will engage in independent decision-making. Furthermore, we assert that saliency of non-professional identities and weakness of the professional image threaten independence. We hypothesize that a return to the traditional will relate positively to the saliency of the professional identity among auditors and ultimately, to independent decision-making. Actions for re-establishing the external image of the profession are drawn from historical references to the traditional image.     

Decent Work: The Moral Status of Labor in Human Resource Management

Historically, whistleblowing research has predominantly focused on psychological and organisational conditions of raising concerns about alleged wrongdoing. Today, however, policy makers increasingly start to look at institutional frameworks for protecting whistleblowers and responding to their concerns. This article focuses on the latter by exploring the roles that trade unions might adopt in order to improve responsiveness in the whistleblowing process. Research has consistently demonstrated that the two main reasons that deter people from reporting perceived wrongdoing are fear of retaliation and a belief that the wrongdoing is unlikely to be rectified. In this article, we argue that trade unions have an important part to play in dealing with both these inhibiting factors but this requires them to be appropriately engaged in the whistleblowing process and willing to take a more proactive approach to negotiations. We use Vandekerckhove’s 3-tiered whistleblowing model and Kaine’s model of union voice level to structure our speculative analysis of the various ways in which trade unions can interact with whistleblowers and organisations they raise concerns about alleged wrongdoing in, as well as agents at a regulatory level. Our articulation of specific roles trade unions can play in the whistleblowing process uses examples from the UK as to how these trade union roles are currently linked to and embedded in employment law and whistleblowing regulation.     

Quality in Electronic Commerce B2C: Perceptions,Expectations and Importance

There are two academic and professional fields that are strategically important to today's firms: electronic commerce B2C (business to consumer) and Total Quality Management. Their joint appearance in the present scenario gives rise to opportunities and challenges on quality literature that need to be tackled. On that basis, this paper studies the predictive value of the alternative scales of quality in electronic commerce B2C: scale of perceptions, scale of difference (perception minus expectations) and scale of weighted differences. As a result, the measures of perceptions have more predictive value than other measures. However, the measures of expectations and the measures of importance have been considered for diagnostic proposes.     

Character and Environment: The Status of Virtues in Organizations

Using evidence from experimental psychology, some social psychologists, moral philosophers and organizational scholars claim that character traits do not exist and, hence, that the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics is empirically inadequate and should dispose of the notion of character to accommodate the empirical evidence. In this paper, I systematically address the debate between dispositionalists and situationists about the existence, status and properties of character traits and their manifestations in human behavior, with the ultimate goal of responding to the question whether virtue ethicists need to abandon the very enterprise of building a character-based moral theory in business ethics and organizational behavior. In the course of this paper, I shall defend the claim that the situationist argument relies on a misinterpretation of the experimental evidence. Miguel Alzola is a Fulbright Fellow from Argentina completing his Ph.D. in Business Ethics at Rutgers University. He is doing research on moral psychology, virtue ethics and organizational behavior at the Prudential Business Ethics Center.