As founder of modern political economics and prominent theorist of the commercial society, Adam Smith’s importance is universally recognized. Little, however, has been done so far to develop Adam Smith’s virtue ethics in the context of modern business, characterized by digitalization. This article aims to rediscover Adam Smith’s virtue of prudence and its relevance for the “e-commercial society”: It presents a framework that considers the central place of prudence in the relationship between a prosperous e-commercial system and societal flourishing. In (...) Smith’s view of the commercial society, prudence enables people to develop habits of character related to industriousness, genuineness, spirit of sacrifice, and self-command, which help in the conduct of a prosperous business activity. This article translates Smith’s virtue of prudence into a language typical of consumers in the current e-commerce scenario, considering their development as persons and the contribution of their activities to the good of society. (shrink)

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature (...) of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

The sharing economy has transformed economic transactions, created new organizational forms, and contributed to changes in consumer culture. Started as a movement with promises of a more sustainable, democratic, and inclusive economy, the sharing economy, and its impact on issues such as privacy, discrimination, worker rights, and regulation, is now the subject of heated debate. Many of these issues root in the changes that digital technologies have brought and the unresolved moral and ethical questions emerging therefrom. This special issue contributes (...) to this ongoing debate with five articles that develop theoretical frameworks and conduct empirical investigations, providing fine-grained analyses of urgent issues in the sharing economy. In this article, we highlight these and other issues that we believe deserve further attention from business ethics scholarship. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are value and design-based problems in current ambitions for the Metaverse. With the Metaverse deepening longstanding commercial surveillance practices, the paper focuses on data protection harms from biometric and emotion data, the gauging of first-person perspectives, and sensitivities around profiling of avatars. The paper advances two notions to address harms and data protection: _surveillant physics_ and _virtual realist governance_. _Surveillant physics_ refers to surveillance informing the laws of how that reality operates: this is a useful (...) concept given the granular control that platforms have over virtual worlds and the laws by which they function. _Virtual realist governance_ builds on the longstanding principle of virtual realism and David Chalmer’s recent theorising of Reality+ that demands that the virtual is taken to be real, meaning that experiences of virtual objects and what occurs in-world are treated as meaningful. The paper progresses to further consider governance questions, both around technical and ethical standards, but also data protection ideas such as personal data stores, and data trusts, that were not conceived as Metaverse-based ideas, but have greater chance of being realised as basic premises of the Metaverse are being designed. Although this paper is regretfully pessimistic, finding that a root problem of current ambitions for the Metaverse is that the public good and the commons are missing, it sees virtual realist scope for modes of resistance unseen in other digital realms. (shrink)

In this 60th anniversary of Business & Society essay, we seek to make three main contributions at the intersection of governance and artificial intelligence. First, we aim to illuminate some of the deeper social, legal, organizational, and democratic challenges of rising AI adoption and resulting algorithmic power by reviewing AI research through a governance lens. Second, we propose an AI governance framework that aims to better assess AI challenges as well as how different governance modalities can support AI. At the (...) heart of our framework lies the governance forces that apply to institutions, organizations, and individuals, who ultimately provide, regulate, and use AI decision-making. We discuss how businesses may harness AI’s economic power through governance solutions without creating or amplifying societal biases and inequalities. Third, as part of our section on future research, we identify a set of governance trade-offs in AI adoption, suggest future research avenues to conceptually strengthen research on the governance of AI, and lay out key policy recommendations. (shrink)

This review argues that the role of technology in business and society debates has predominantly been examined from the limited, narrow perspective of technology as instrumental, and that two additional but relatively neglected perspectives are important: technology as value-laden and technology as relationally agentic. Technology has always been part of the relationship between business and society, for better and worse. However, as technological development is frequently advanced as a solution to many pressing societal problems and grand challenges, it is imperative (...) that technology is understood and analyzed in a more nuanced, critical, and comprehensive way. The two additional perspectives invite a broader research agenda, one that includes questions, such as “Which values and whose interests has technology come to emulate?”; “How do these values and interests play out in stabilizing the status quo?”; and, importantly, “How can it be contested, disrupted, and changed?” Any research that endorses green, sustainable, environmental, or climate mitigating technologies potentially contributes to maintaining the very thing that it seeks to change if questions such as these are not being addressed. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Technology, Megatrends and Work. Of all the profound changes in business, technology is perhaps the most ubiquitous. There is not a facet of our lives unaffected by internet technologies and artificial intelligence. The Journal (...) of Business Ethics established a dedicated section that focuses on Technology and Business Ethics, yet issues related to this phenomenon run right through all the sections. Kirsten Martin, editor of the Technology and Business Ethics section, joins our interim social media editor, Hannah Trittin-UIbrich, to advance a human-centric approach to the development and application of digital technologies that places Business Ethics at centre of the analysis. For Shuili Du, technology is the defining condition for a new era of Corporate Social Responsibility—CSR 3.0—which she defines as “a company’s socially responsible strategies and practices that deal with key ethical and socio-technical issues associated with AI and related technologies on the one hand and leverage the power of AI and related technologies to tackle social and environmental problems on the other hand.” It is not just technologies that are a determining feature of our lives but technology companies, an argument made by Glen Whelan as he examines Big Business and the need for a Big Business Ethics as we try to understand the impact of Big Tech on our post-work world. Indeed, as noted by Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, megatrends in addition to advancement in technologies, namely globalization, the greening of economies, and changes in demographics and migration, are shaping the future for workers in ways previously unimaginable. Contributing to this important debate, Praveen Parboteeah considers the influence of another longstanding but oft overlooked megatrend, the role of religion in the workplace. Given the enormity of the influence of technology and other megatrends in our world, it is not surprising that this essay introduces ground-breaking ideas that speak to the future of business ethics research. (shrink)

Understanding the moral right and wrong in the context of business practice has long captivated the attention of researchers and business leaders (Brenkert, 2019). Fueled by ethical failures recoun...

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)

Can private companies legitimately regulate sharing markets, and if yes, how? Whereas scholars have either criticized sharing platforms for expanding into private and public arenas or welcomed them to counterbalance encroaching government regulations, studies document their unbridled popularity. On the basis of a special version of social contracts theory pioneered by James Buchanan, we develop a heuristics that helps guide reasoning about the legitimacy of the sharing economy’s regulatory function. First, we discuss the conditions under which free and responsible individuals (...) deliberately subject themselves to rules without their prior direct participation, that is, exit, voice, and constitutional limits. Second, we suggest sharing platforms can use novel ordo-responsibilities to establish a sharing constitution that takes these conditions into account. Third, we argue that sharing platforms can legitimately do so within an enabling institutional environment in society, the provision of which relies on the joint efforts of sharing platforms, political actors, and civil society. (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)

We review articles about corporate political activity published in Business & Society since its beginnings 60 years ago and in a set of other leading management journals over the past decade. We present evidence that most studies of CPA use the political markets’ perspective. Under the premise that the contemporary political environment has changed significantly since the inception of the political markets’ perspective, our review asks two interconnected questions. First, to what degree have changes in the political environment challenged the (...) ability of the political markets’ perspective to understand the pillars of politics: issues, institutions, interests, and information? Second, to what degree have CPA scholars augmented or diversified their theoretical arguments to accommodate these changes in the political environment? We document the CPA literature across these dimensions and questions and note that many scholars are already adopting other theories side by side with the political markets’ perspective. (shrink)

Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) between nonprofits and businesses are increasingly implemented in response to humanitarian crises. These partnerships are motivated by ideals of alignment as stakeholders strive to find the “sweet spot” between humanitarian and business interests. However, this article shows that the ideals of alignment differ from the actual practices of alignment in the CSPs, and sweet spots are not merely found but constructed in and through changing relations of power. Based on an ethnographic case study of partnerships between a (...) global humanitarian organization and five technology companies, the article deploys a theoretical lens from critical humanitarian studies to analyze how alignment in CSPs comes about in practice. This analysis demonstrates that in the construction of alignment, the companies’ interests become the priorities with which humanitarian organizations must align their and their beneficiaries’ needs. Consequently, while the discourse of sweet spots perpetuates an ideal of alignment where all partners benefit equally from the partnership, it legitimates power imbalances and asymmetrical alignment in practice. (shrink)

The power of the digital platforms and the increasing scope of their control over individuals and institutions have begun to generate societal concern. However, the ways in which digital platforms exercise power and organize immaturity—defined as the erosion of the individual’s capacity for public use of reason—have not yet been theorized sufficiently. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capitals, and habitus, we take a sociosymbolic perspective on platforms’ power dynamics, characterizing the digital habitus and identifying specific forms of platform power (...) and counterpower accumulation. We make two main contributions. First, we expand the concept of organized immaturity by adopting a sociological perspective, from which we develop a novel sociosymbolic view of platforms’ power dynamics. Our framework explains fundamental aspects of immaturity, such as self-infliction and emergence. Second, we contribute to the platform literature by developing a three-phase model of platform power dynamics over time. (shrink)

As information technologies have become synonymous with progress in modern society, several ethical concerns have surfaced about their societal implications. In the past few decades, information technologies have had a value-laden impact on social evolution. However, there is limited agreement on the responsibility of businesses and innovators concerning the ethical aspects of information technologies. There is a need to understand the role of business incentives and attitudes in driving technological progress and to understand how they steer the ethics discourse on (...) technology. In the information technology industry, there is an observed trivialization of ethics supported by a business driven and technology-centric approach to ethics. This trivialization rests on hardened beliefs, ideologies, and arguments which hint at reduced accountability for business and tend to individualize social responsibility. The phenomenon of ethics trivialization needs to be duly addressed to resolve the tensions between business needs and ethical concerns. This paper has identified from literature and conceptually analyzed the beliefs and ideologies underlying ethics trivialization which undermine ethics in business contexts. The paper has attempted to address the business concerns indicated by this phenomenon as well as highlight the weaknesses of its assumptions, rhetoric, and justifications. The aim of this paper is to systematically present the justifications in favor of and against the practice of ethics trivialization in the information technology domain, thereby highlighting the need to develop frameworks for assessment of ethical responsibility, accountability, and democratization of the value trade-offs involved in the design of technologies. (shrink)