Employees remaining silent about ethical aspects of work or organization-related issues, termed employee ethical silence, perpetuates misconduct in today’s business setting. However, how and why it occurs is not yet well specified in the business ethics literature, which is insufficient to manage corporate misconducts. In this research, we investigate how and when exploitative leadership associates with employee ethical silence. We draw from the conservation of resources theory to theorize and test a cognitive resource pathway (i.e., work meaningfulness) and a moral (...) resource pathway (i.e., moral potency) to explain the association between exploitative leadership and employee ethical silence. Results from two studies largely support our hypotheses that work meaningfulness and moral potency mediate the effect of exploitative leadership on ethical silence contingent on performance reward expectancy. Theoretical and practical implications are thoroughly discussed in the paper. (shrink)

In this paper, we employ bibliometric analysis to empirically analyse the research on social entrepreneurship published between 1996 and 2017. By employing methods of citation analysis, document co-citation analysis, and social network analysis, we analyse 1296 papers containing 74,237 cited references and uncover the structure, or intellectual base, of research on social entrepreneurship. We identify nine distinct clusters of social entrepreneurship research that depict the intellectual structure of the field. The results provide an overall perspective of the social entrepreneurship field, (...) identifying its influential works and analysing scholarly communication between these works. The results further aid in clarifying the overall centrality features of the social entrepreneurship research network. We also examine the integration of ethics into social entrepreneurship literature. We conclude with a discussion on the structure and evolution of the social entrepreneurship field. (shrink)

Ethics are of interest to business scholars because they influence decisions, behaviors, and outcomes. While scholars have increasingly shown interest in business ethics as a research topic, there are a mounting number of studies that examine ethical issues at the organizational level of analysis. This manuscript reports the results of a systematic review of empirical research on organizational ethics published in a broad sample of business journals over a 33-year period. A total of 184 articles are analyzed to reveal gaps (...) in the literature and, subsequently, lead to suggestions for future research; this is done in an effort to stimulate and perpetuate high quality research that more broadly impacts business scholars and practitioners. (shrink)

Business & Society’s 60th anniversary affords an opportunity to reflect on the journal’s achievements in the context of the wider field. We analyze editorial commentaries to map the evolving mission of the journal, assess the achievement of the journal’s mission through a thematic analysis of published articles, and examine Business & Society’s distinctiveness relative to peer journals using a machine learning approach. Our analysis highlights subtle shifts in Business & Society’s mission and content over time, reflecting variation in the relative (...) emphasis on scholarly quality versus policy/practice relevance, and building the journal and its academic community versus addressing issues of concern to wider society. While Business & Society’s intended missions have been substantially and sequentially achieved, an increased emphasis on the society-business nexus and a critical approach to interdisciplinarity could further enhance Business & Society’s leading role within business and society research and attract new generations of contributors and readers. (shrink)

Management accounting and control seeks to provide information that substantiates decision-making at all firm levels and thus may also foster ethical decision-making. Against this background, this article presents a systematic literature review of research on management accounting and control and business ethics that has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics. Through this review, we intend to bring to the forefront a research topic that has been widely neglected in broader literature reviews on accounting ethics research and that has (...) been covered by a small number of articles published by traditional leading accounting journals only. Our systematic literature review is guided by a theoretical framework that integrates the decision-facilitating and decision-influencing roles of management accounting and control information and the stages of the ethical decision-making process. Through this theoretical lens, we analyze 64 management accounting and control articles published in the Journal of Business Ethics over more than three decades. Synthesizing and structuring this research, we discuss prior accomplishments and elaborate on avenues for future research. (shrink)

In spite of the considerable development of research in the fields of business ethics and family business, a comprehensive review and integration of the area where both disciplines intersect has not been undertaken so far. This paper aims at contributing to the call for more research on family business ethics by answering the following research questions: What is the status of the current research at the intersection of business ethics and family business? Why and how do family firms differ from (...) non-family firms regarding business ethics? And, what are the key directions for further research? To answer these questions, this study combines a systematic approach for the selection of articles, resulting in a sample of 31 articles over 35 years, with a narrative review to analyze the literature. This paper finds that research on family business ethics is scarce but increasing and that family firms are considerably different from non-family firms regarding ethical issues. Particular stakeholders, goals, relationships, and practices are found to be the forces behind the peculiarity of family business ethics. Ultimately, research development on family business ethics is encouraged and future research directions flowing from the key findings and reflections of this review are provided. (shrink)

This paper explores links between different ethical motivations and kinds of corporate social responsibility activities to distinguish between different types of business cases with regard to sustainability. The design of CSR and corporate sustainability can be based on different ethical foundations and motivations. This paper draws on the framework of Roberts which distinguishes four different ethical management versions of CSR. The first two ethical motivations are driven either by a reactionary concern for the short-term financial interests of the business, or (...) reputational, driven by a narcissistic concern to protect the firm’s image. The third responsible motivation works from the inside-out and seeks to embed social and environmental concerns within the firm’s performance management systems, and the fourth, a collaborative motivation, works to bring the outside in and seeks to go beyond the boundaries of the firm to create a dialogue with those who are vulnerable to the unintended consequences of corporate conduct. Management activities based on these different ethical motivations to CSR and sustainability result in different operational activities for corporations working towards sustainability and thus have very different effects on how the company’s economic performance is influenced. Assuming that corporate managers are concerned about creating business cases for their companies to survive and prosper in the long term, this paper raises the question of how different ethical motivations for designing CSR and corporate sustainability relate to the creation of different business cases. The paper concludes by distinguishing four different kinds of business cases with regard to sustainability: reactionary and reputational business cases of sustainability, and responsible and collaborative business cases for sustainability. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to identify the elements that can be implemented to achieve an ethical infrastructure, in small and medium enterprises. The ethical infrastructure is considered as a set of formal and informal systems, leadership, climate and culture, related to ethical issues. The research was carried out through interviews and focus groups with managers from 28 companies in Madrid, all signatories to the Global Compact. The identified key elements in SMEs are leadership, informal managerial and formal communication. (...) This study also explores different factors that influence the effectiveness, implementation, and sustainability of the ethical infrastructure in SMEs, discovering some factors that can act as both accelerators and barriers such as pressure from customers. Additional findings regarding the concepts of ethics and corporate social responsibility in SMEs, dilemmas and characteristics of the culture and climate are also presented. (shrink)

This article is a tribute to the late Dr. W. Michael Hoffman's life and professional career (1943–2018), including his important contribution to the business ethics academic community, as well as to the practical world of business. Following a brief summary of Dr. Hoffman's professional achievements, several tributes are provided including from Professor Richard De George, columnist Gael O'Brien, and Professor Patricia Werhane. The tributes are followed by synopses of a small sample of Dr. Hoffman's many journal articles published in several (...) different business ethics journals spanning 35 years (1982–2017). The tribute concludes with a personal note of gratitude by the author to Dr. Hoffman. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between business ethics and philosophy, specifically in relation to the field and persons working in it. The starting point is a grammatical one: business ethics by the rules of grammar belongs to ethics. In terms of academic disciplines, it belongs to applied ethics, which belongs to ethics, which belongs to practical philosophy, which belongs to philosophy. However, in the field of business ethics today one will seldom meet colleagues from philosophy; instead, they will come from (...) business, applying business studies perspectives, approaches, and increasingly quantitative methods. This article provides empirical evidence that today the three top journals with “business ethics” in their titles are mostly run by business scholars with PhDs in business. The article compares the three journals today with their inaugural issues and finds that at their inception all three were run by a majority of philosophers. The article discusses six possible explanations for this shift and provides suggestions for how to bring business ethics back to philosophers. (shrink)

Developing and applying a framework for understanding the complexities of economic and legal considerations in two recent Supreme Court rulings was the focus of this research. Of especial concern was the protection of intellectual property in the pharmaceutical industry. Two cases from 2013 were selected: FTC v. Activis and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.. Part of the rationale for the selection was the importance of the Supreme Court rulings and the importance of the pharmaceutical sector. A qualitative (...) content analysis of the Court’s reported decision in each case was analyzed. Since ethical considerations may or may not be consistent with efficiency considerations of plaintiffs, defendants, or the courts, both efficiency and ethical arguments were included. Equally important to the understanding of the economic and ethical issues in the two above- mentioned cases was the development of a rationale for including and excluding a variety of ethical theories, ultimately influenced by Markkula Center For Applied Ethics Of Santa Clara University and Schumann :93–111, 2001). The refinement and use of a levels analysis approach portrays societal, organizational, and individual impacts, and allows for deeper understanding of litigated cases, irrespective of the country in which the litigation takes place :385–393, 2004; Foss et al., J Manag Stud 47:455–482, 2010). A rationale for this framework is the societal and organizational impacts on the myriad of stakeholders in the pharmaceutical sector. We suggest that this framework can be applied to other industries and other complex conflicts among stakeholders as well. (shrink)

This study focuses on examining the thematic landscape of the history of scholarly publication in business ethics. We analyze the titles, abstracts, full texts, and citation information of all research papers published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Business Ethics, from its inaugural issue in February 1982 until December 2016—a dataset that comprises 6308 articles and 42 million words. Our key method is a computational algorithm known as probabilistic topic modeling, which we use to examine objectively the field’s (...) latent thematic landscape based on the vast volume of scholarly texts. This “big-data” approach allows us not only to provide time-specific snapshots of various research topics, but also to track the dynamic evolution of each topic over time. We further examine the pattern of individual papers’ topic diversity and the influence of individual papers’ topic diversity on their impact over time. We conclude this study with our recommendation for future studies in business ethics research. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss quantitative content analysis as established in communication sciences as a method for research in business ethics. We argue that communication sciences and business ethics are neighboring disciplines, which allow the transfer of quantitative content analysis from communication sciences to business ethics. Technically, quantitative content analysis can be applied through human as well as software coding. Examples for both applications are provided and discussed. We make reference to the software solutions ‘Leximancer’, ‘Crawdad’, and (...) ‘Wordle’, and examine their suitability and limitations with regard to ethical questions for researching business ethics. We recommend a mixed‐method approach, combining human and software coding. Furthermore, we propose a three‐step process that discusses quantitative content analysis as a method for business ethics, including an ethical research objective, and most importantly, concluding with ethical reasoning and interpretation of the quantitative results. (shrink)

This article examines how employees form their perceptions of managerial responsibility in a concrete organizational setting. Drawing on negotiated order theory, it shows that these perceptions are the result of complex processes of social construction and negotiation, rather than the application of predetermined ethics models or norms. Employees’ perceptions appear to be unstable; they are subject to constant alterations, fluctuating with the organizational circumstances, and are likely to create considerable organizational perturbations, especially when managers make complex and ambiguous decisions. This (...) process is illustrated through an ethnographic study that analyzed the evolution of employee perceptions during a three-year crisis—one that led managers to repeatedly postpone salary payments to save jobs. The process approach adopted by the study highlights important dynamics that traditional business ethics approaches overlook, such as the fragility of the construct of managerial responsibility, which cannot be coherent unless it is constantly renegotiated among an organization’s various employee groups. (shrink)