The purpose of this study was to explore if and how social media might come to bear on people’s understanding of ethics. Participants were asked to complete online surveys regarding social media interaction and respond to 14 scenarios depicting ethical dilemmas. Our results suggest that social media and people’s perceptions of ethics do share a relationship. Specifically, we found that people who reported being exposed to ethical violations on social media were more likely to find our unethical scenarios to be (...) personally unacceptable, to be of lower ethicality, and to react negatively to the content. These findings suggest that mere exposure to ethical violations is enough to produce awareness in people regarding ethical issues, which carries significant implications for ethics education. (shrink)

Using the search engine Google to locate information linked to individuals and organizations has become part of everyday functioning. This article addresses whether the “gaming” of Internet applications in attempts to modify reputations raises substantial ethical concerns. It analyzes emerging approaches for manipulation of how personally-identifiable information is accessed online as well as critically-important international differences in information handling. Itinvestigates privacy issues involving the data mining of personally-identifiable information with search engines and social media platforms. Notions of “gaming” and “manipulation” (...) have negative connotations as well as instrumental functions, which are distinguished in this article. The article also explores ethical matters engendered by the expanding industry of reputation management services that assist in these detailed technical matters. Ethical dimensions of online reputation are changing in the advent of reputation management, raising issues such as fairness and legitimacy of various information-related practices; the article provides scenarios and questions for classroom deliberation. (shrink)

Three global developments situate the context of this investigation: the increasing use of social media by organizations and their employees, the burgeoning presence of social media policies, and the heightened focus on corporate social responsibility. In this study the intersection of these trends is examined through a content analysis of 112 publicly available social media policies from the largest corporations in the world. The extent to which social media policies facilitate and/or constrain the communicative sensibilities and values associated with contemporary (...) notions of CSR is considered. Overall, findings indicate that a large majority of policies, regardless of sector or national headquarters, increasingly inhibit communicative tenets of contemporary CSR and thereby diminish employee negotiation and participation in the social responsibilities of corporations. Moreover, policies generally enact organizational communication practices that are contrary to international CSR guidelines. Findings suggest that social media policies represent a relatively unrecognized development in the institutionalization of CSR communicative norms and practices that call into question the promising affordances of social media for the inclusion of various voices in the public negotiation of what constitutes corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

With the advent of social networking websites, privacy concerns have reached a new high. One particularly problematic concern entails employers requesting login credentials to popular social media platforms. While many people may consider this request unethical, they may not agree on the reasons it is unethical. One reason may be to blame the behavior on egoism. Egoism, however, comes in multiple flavors, not all of which would agree that violating privacy is acceptable. In this paper, we articulate how one egoist (...) perspective provides a defense of privacy in the face of unjust information access requests. Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, offers an egoist approach to ethics that values individual privacy on rational, self-interested grounds. By applying Objectivist principles to a business context, we observe that businesspeople should not violate other people’s privacy for short-term gains. Furthermore, we observe that privacy can be protected without distinct right to privacy. Rather, Objectivism’s conception of rational self-interest suggests that long-term flourishing is the proper end of individuals and businesses, predicated on, among other things, respecting privacy and enforcing individual rights. (shrink)

With the introduction of new information communication technologies, employers are increasingly engaging in social media screening, also known as cybervetting, as part of their hiring process. Our research, using an online survey with 482 participants, investigates young people’s concerns with their publicly available social media data being used in the context of job hiring. Grounded in stakeholder theory, we analyze the relationship between young people’s concerns with social media screening and their gender, job seeking status, privacy concerns, and social media (...) use. We find that young people are generally not comfortable with social media screening. A key finding of this research is that concern for privacy for public information on social media cannot be fully explained by some “traditional” variables in privacy research. The research extends stakeholder theory to identify how social media data ethics should be inextricably linked to organizational practices. The findings have theoretical implications for a rich conceptualization of stakeholders in an age of social media and practical implications for organizations engaging in cybervetting. (shrink)

Understanding the ethical attitudes and concerns of future business leaders has been the focus of increasing research attention. Largely, this is due to the influence of such perspectives, as it is these presently held ideologies that ultimately translate into the actions and behaviors of the forthcoming workforce. This research examines how such business-related ethicality perspectives have evolved by administering a nationwide survey that builds on two Journal of Business Ethics studies, Beltramini et al. (J Bus Ethics 3:195–200, 1984 ) and (...) Peterson et al. (J Bus Ethics 10:733–738, 1991 ), resulting in the latest segment of a three-decade historical perspective of ethical concerns. Our findings indicate fundamental shifts regarding the nature of concerns, and provide a number of practical and theoretical contributions to the ethics literature, bringing us one step closer to more comprehensively understanding, and ultimately enhancing ethical practices in business. (shrink)