According to a common assumption, truthfulness cannot have an intrinsic value in business. Instead, it is considered only instrumentally valuable for business, because it contributes to successful trust-building. Some authors deny truthfulness even this limited role by claiming that truth-telling is not an essential part of business, which is a sui generis practice like poker. In this article, I argue that truthfulness has indeed an intrinsic value in business and identify the conceptual confusions underlying the opposite view. My account of (...) truthfulness as a virtue shows that truthfulness is both valuable for its own sake and instrumental to further valuable goals. It helps pinpoint the implicit contradiction in claiming that truthfulness has an instrumental value only. I then challenge the reasons for considering business exempt from the constraints of truthfulness and elaborate on the analogy between game and business, which in fact supports instead of undermining my claim that business is a truthful practice. Finally, I illustrate my argument with a case study of the current crisis of trust faced by the pharmaceutical industry. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical dilemma of conflicting loyalties found in whistleblowing. Central to this dilemma is the internal/external disclosure dichotomy; disclosure of organisational wrongdoing to an external recipient is seen as disloyal, whilst disclosure to an internal recipient is seen as loyal. Understanding how the organisation and society have dealt with these problems over the last 30 years is undertaken through an analysis of Vandekerckhove’s project, which seeks to place the normative legitimisations of whistleblowing legislation and organisational whistleblowing policies (...) within a globalisation semantic able to contain this conflict between society and the organisation. This project fails, it is argued, because of Vandekerckhove’s particular understanding of the organisation as an autopoietic system, i.e. an operationally closed system. A case is made to understand organisations as complex systems, i.e. operationally open systems. Critical Complexity theory sees the identities of systems and components as coterminous. In the context of the organisation, this means that the identities of the corporation and its corporate members arise and die together. The whistleblower’s disclosure reconfigures the organisation by forcing the organisation to open up and make its boundaries flexible, making the designation ‘internal’ or ‘external’ to the organisation, and, therefore, who qualifies as a recipient of a disclosure of wrongdoing, flexible. The organisation is restrained from retailing against the whistleblower, because its identities are coterminous. Furthermore, as the disclosure cannot be categorically defined as either internal or external, the question of whether an external disclosure can qualify as an act of organisational loyalty becomes moot. (shrink)

This article introduces and summarizes selected papers from the first World Business Ethics Forum held in Hong Kong and Macau in November 2006, co-hosted by the Hong Kong Baptist University and by the University of Macau. Business Ethics in the East remain distinct from those in the West, but the distinctions are becoming less pronounced and the ethical traffic flows both ways.

Due to the frequent occurrence of ethical transgressions and unethical employee behaviors, there has lately been an increasing interest in the ethical foundations of contemporary organizations. However, large-scale comprehensive analyses of organizational ethics are still comparatively limited. Our study contributes to both management control and business ethics literature by empirically examining potential antecedents as well as resulting effects of ethical work climates on organizational-level outcomes. Based on a cross-sectional survey among 295 large- and medium-sized companies, we find that more informal (...) means of control constitute important elements of a broader organizational control context that are strongly related to the emergence of coherent ethical work climates with an increased awareness of ethical issues. Moreover, our results show that the relationship between ethical work climates and organizational performance can be considered as rather indirect as it is fully mediated by increased mutual trust among employees. Overall, our study thus supports the particular importance of ethical work climates and identifies appropriate means to encourage ethical conduct. (shrink)

The public’s trust in the technology sector is waning and, in response, technology companies and state governments have started to champion “tech ethics”. That is, they have pledged to design, develop, distribute, and employ new technologies in an ethical manner. In this paper, I observe that tech ethics is already subject to a widespread pathology in that technology companies, the primary executors of tech ethics, are incentivized to pursue it half-heartedly or even disingenuously. Next, I highlight two emerging strategies which (...) might be used to combat this problem, but argue that both are subject to practical limitations. In response, I suggest an additional way of augmenting the practice of tech ethics. This is to employ “trust audits,” a new form of public participation in the socio-technical environment. In the remainder of the paper, I offer a description of how trust audits work, what they might look like in practice, and how they can fit in alongside those other strategies for improving tech ethics. (shrink)

Unfortunately, business is often associated with unethical behavior. While research has offered a number of explanations for why business might encourage unethical behavior, we argue that how a person frames a situation may provide important insight. Drawing on the decision frame literature, the goal of the current research is to identify the differences in cognitive processing associated with two decision frames dominant in the business ethics literature—business and ethical—and, with that knowledge, examine ways to mitigate the detrimental influence of frame (...) on unethical behavior. We first demonstrate the causal link between frame and misrepresentation, and then identify several differences in cognitive processing—cost–benefit analyses, concern for others, and construal level—that distinguish business and ethical frames, and investigate their effects on misrepresentation. In our final set of studies, we demonstrate that the influence of these frames on misrepresentation can be altered by manipulating these cognitive processes, both mitigating and exacerbating a decision maker’s engagement in misrepresentation. We conclude by summarizing our findings and their potential impact on unethical behavior more broadly. (shrink)

This article is about the relationship between business and ethics in academic research. The purpose of this investigation is to examine the status of the separation and the integration theses. In the course of this article, I defend the claim that neither separation nor integration is entirely accurate; indeed they are both potentially confusing to our audience. A strategy of reconciliation of normative and descriptive approaches is proposed. The reconciliation project does not entail synthesizing or dividing prescriptive and empirical approaches, (...) but rather respecting the identity of both inquiries, while recognizing the limitations they place on each other. The research agenda of the reconciliation project is discussed. (shrink)