This article analyses supplier–buyer relationships where the suppliers adapt to the buyers’ needs and expectations to gain mutual advantages. In some cases, such closely knit relationships lead to violations of the autonomy of one or both partners. A concept of corporate autonomy is developed to analyze this problem. Three different facets can be distinguished: rule autonomy, executive autonomy, and control autonomy. A case study of Mattel’s problems with lead-contaminated toys produced in China shows that the CA of buyer and supplier (...) can be restricted as a result of a dysfunctional partnership involving a moral dilemma. (shrink)

This article analyses supplier-buyer relationships where the suppliers adapt to the buyers' needs and expectations to gain mutual advantages. In some cases, such closely knit relationships lead to violations of the autonomy of one or both partners. A concept of corporate autonomy (CA) is developed to analyze this problem. Three different facets can be distinguished: rule autonomy, executive autonomy, and control autonomy. A case study of Mattel's problems with lead-contaminated toys produced in China shows that the CA of buyer and (...) supplier can be restricted as a result of a dysfunctional partnership involving a moral dilemma. (shrink)

This article develops an "ordonomic" approach to business ethics in the age of globalization. Through the use of a three-tiered conceptual framework that distinguishes between the basic game of antagonistic social cooperation, the meta game of rule-setting, and the meta-meta game of rule-finding discourse, we address three questions, the answers to which we believe are crucial to fostering effective business leadership and corporate social responsibility. First, the purpose of business in society is value creation. Companies have a social mandate to (...) organize mutually advantageous cooperation. Second, business ethics should teach the management competencies necessary to fulfill business's societal mandate. These competencies are optimization competence in the basic game of value creation, governance competence in the meta game of (political) rule setting, and the three discourse-related skills of orientation competence, reception competence, and communication competence necessary for engaging in the meta-meta game. Third, companies can help solve global problems through global corporate citizenship if they participate as political and moral actors in rule-setting processes and rule-finding discourse aimed at laying the foundation for value creation on a global scale. (shrink)

This article begins with a detailed analysis of how the choice situation of a social contract for international business ethics can be constructed and justified. A choice situation is developed by analyzing conceptions of the multinational firm and the domain of international business. The result is a hypothetical negotiation between two fictional characters, J. Duncan Grey and Elizabeth Redd, who respectively represent the interests of businesses and communities seeking to engage in international trade. The negotiators agree on ethical principles governing (...) wages, the environment, and compliance social and cultural norms. These principles are then shown to rest in wide reflective equilibrium with considered moral judgments on international business ethics, which are drawn from international agreements, such as the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and voluntary business initiatives, such as the Global Sullivan Principles and the UN Global Compact. (shrink)

Existing debates on business ethics under-represent consumers’ perspectives. In order to progress understanding of ethical judgement in the marketplace, we unpack the interconnections between consumer ethical judgment, consent and context. We address the question of how consumers judge the morality of threat-based experiential marketing communications. Our interpretive qualitative research shows that consumers can feel positively about being shocked, judging threat appeals as more or less ethical by the nature of the negative emotions they experience. We also determine that the intersection (...) between ethical judgement, consent and context lies where consumers’ perceptions of fairness and consequences lend contextualised normative approval to marketing practice. Our research makes three original contributions to existing literature. First, it extends theory in the area of ethical judgement, by highlighting the importance of consent for eliciting positive moral responses. Second, it adds to embryonic research addressing the role of emotions in ethical judgement, by ascertaining that negative emotions can elicit positive consumer ethical judgement. Third, our research contributes an original concept to ethical judgement theorisation, namely consumer-experienced positive shock. We define CEPS as a consensual shock value judged as ethical due to its ephemerality, commercial resonance, brand alignment, target-audience appropriateness and contextual acceptability. We also extrapolate the dimensions of CEPS into an ethical judgement typology, elucidating how consumers judge some threat-based communications as ethical, but not others. Consequently, our work dovetails with wider business ethics debates on ethical judgement, adding value by clarifying the conditions that generate positive consumer ethical judgement. (shrink)

Prior studies have provided explanations for the presence, use and dissemination of codes of corporate ethics or codes of corporate conduct of business corporations. Most such explanations are functional in nature, and are descriptive as they are derived from the codes and their associated documents. We search for more underlying explanations using two complementary theories: first, social contract theories explaining the exogenous and endogenous reasons of organizational behavior, and then institutional theory explaining why organizations take similar measures in response to (...) institutional pressures. Based on our explanations, we contend that the codes and their use and dissemination are arising from underlying social and institutional pressures for firms to continuously validate their existence in the face of increasing changes and recurrent uncertainties. (shrink)

Contractualist work in business ethics as well as in economic organization theory views opportunistic behaviors as problematic since they create economic harm and are often considered to violate ethical norms. Yet, much of the empirical literature on opportunism has adopted a rather simplistic definition of opportunistic behaviors as behaviors that violate formal and/or relational contracts and assumed that instances of opportunism can be unequivocally defined by simply referring to the content of contracts. The consequence of this assumption has been a (...) disregard for factors other than the content of contracts that may influence whether exchange partners judge an unexpected behavior they face during exchange relationships as opportunistic or not. The present investigation explores the factors that shape exchange partners’ subjective opportunism judgments through two vignette-based laboratory experiments. Results from the first experiment, where subjects were asked to take the perspective of a harmed party, show that opportunism judgments are influenced by the type of the behavior, type of the causal account provided for the behavior, perceived type of the exchange, and personality traits of the actor making the judgment. The second experiment, in which subjects were asked to take the perspective of the transgressor, demonstrates the influence of perspective. In particular, victims are more likely to assess a given unexpected behavior as opportunistic than transgressors, and their judgments do not relate to the underlying factors in the same way as the victims’ judgments. I discuss implications in terms of the governance of interfirm exchange relationships. (shrink)