Ethical sourcing is a crucial issue for the fashion industry, which is under intense pressure to build ethical and responsible supply chains. Despite its importance, we know little about how individual employees working in the fashion supply chain view ethical sourcing and the ethical considerations they encounter during their work. We adopted the moral agency theory to address these lacunas and conducted a longitudinal qualitative research study. We collected data from a highly heterogenous sample of employees based in the United (...) Kingdom through open-ended essays in three waves (N1 = 50, N2 = 43, N3 = 30) over 9 months that were analyzed using the grounded theory method. The analysis revealed the following themes: a contemporary outlook on boundaries, external considerations, and three levels of action for ethical considerations: Supplier, organization, and employee (i.e., individual). We offer a revitalized view of ethical sourcing as a concept from a practice perspective and discuss critical ethical issues that affect employees’ moral agency to enact ethical sourcing decisions. Our findings offer insights into avenues to advance theoretical knowledge through a comprehensive framework derived from our results. We also propose significant practical implications to promote the widespread integration of ethical sourcing. (shrink)

Business schools are the “nurseries” of the corporate world. This article offers an empirical analysis of the business student ethos on the basis of research conducted at three Dutch universities. A theoretical framework in the tradition of virtue ethics and dubbed “moral ethology” is used to identify the values business schools convey to their students. The central research question is: What types of ethos do Dutch business students have? Forty‐three undergraduate students participated in Q‐methodological research, a mixed qualitative–quantitative small‐sample method. (...) Five different types of ethos were generated: Do‐Good Managers, Market Managers, Searching Managers, Balancing Managers, and Radical Market Managers. Some general characteristics that apply to all the types of ethos were identified, such as the search for efficiency. It is argued that business schools should pay much more attention to the values that are endorsed in both life and business and should help students to address situations in which values are neglected. (shrink)

The article deals with the influence of organizational ethics program components on managerial ethical behavior. The main aim was to establish which EP components are perceived as valuable and useful to foster the ethical behavior of managers. Moreover, we also aimed to investigate the role of ethics training in this context and to explore whether it can potentially increase managers’ trust in EP components as effective tools for the promotion of ethical behavior. The article advances the EP theory in several (...) ways. It offers novel insights into both business ethics and EP development in the specific cultural and social circumstances of a former socialist country in the Central and Eastern European region, Slovakia. It shows that codes of ethics and related reporting and control mechanisms are perceived as the most effective EP components to shape managerial ethical behavior. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence, and to some extent contrary to prior theory, the article unveils three EP functions, namely the ‘compliance with group norms,’ the ‘ethics education through collective discussion,’ and the ‘counselling and resolving of ethical issues’ at workplace. In addition, the article shows that ethics trainings can help to boost the trust of managers toward EP components and might be conceptualized as a precursor for an effectively functioning EP. (shrink)

Like COVID-19, new infectious disease outbreaks emerge almost annually, and studies predict that this trend will continue due to a variety of factors, including an aging population, ease of travel, and globalization of the economy. In response to episodic public health crises, governments and organizations develop, implement, and enforce policies, procedures, protocols, and programs. The epidemiological triad is both a model of disease causation and fundamentally used to design and deploy such control measures. Here we adapt this model to the (...) workplace setting and use the epidemiological triad to characterize the related ethical challenges in implementing the control measures employers face as a guide for a workplace intervention framework. Through this approach, our aim is to show how an integrated ethical framework, grounded in epidemiological principles, has important implications for how we categorize, understand, and resolve the difficult decisions that emerge in the workplace under pandemic conditions. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of business-related conspiracy theories. Drawing on Aristotelian virtue ethics and undertaking a narratological and ethical analysis of 28 BrCTs found online, I emphasize that BrCTs are narratives with structures rooted in other latent macro- and meta-narratives, including centuries-old myths. In particular, I reconstruct the fictional world of BrCTs – one in which CSR and social contracts have failed – before identifying eight different types of actors as which people can morally situate themselves in their relationships (...) with business. Finally, I elaborate on the actors’ performances and their use of external and legitimate forces to end the story. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential future research to help combat BrCTs, as well as a call for the critical study of political CSR. (shrink)