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  1. Let Slip the Dogs of Commerce: The Ethics of Voluntary Corporate Withdrawal in Response to War.Tadhg Ó Laoghaire - 2024 - The Journal of Ethics 28 (1):27-52.
    Over 1000 companies have either curtailed or else completely ceased operations in Russia as a response to its invasion of Ukraine, a mass corporate exodus of a speed and scale which we’ve never seen. While corporate withdrawal appears to have considerable public support, it’s not obvious that it has done anything to hamper the Russian war effort, nor is it clear what the long-run effects of corporate withdrawal as a regularised response to war might be. Given this, it’s important the (...)
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  • Engaging, Distancing and Surrendering: Moral Legitimation of Controversial Organizational Decisions in the Media.Niina Erkama & Jo Angouri - 2024 - Journal of Business Ethics 194 (1):37-59.
    Although there is a vast body of work on legitimacy, we still have a limited understanding of the discursive aspects of moral legitimation. This is surprising considering the increase in morally laden societal discussions, for example related to understanding gender, rights and regulations during a pandemic, political scandals and ethics of global business amongst others. In particular, from an organization studies perspective, we lack knowledge on how journalists negotiate moral legitimation of controversial organizational decisions such as closures or shutdown decisions (...)
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  • Deliberative Democracy and Corporate Constitutionalism: Considering Corporate Constitutional Courts.Sandrine Blanc - 2023 - Journal of Business Ethics 188 (1):1-15.
    Committees multiply in firms, whether stakeholder boards or committees, multi-stakeholder initiatives, ethics committees, or oversight boards. These arrangements aim to organise and legitimise the social and political activities of corporations. This article raises the question of the appropriate form of such governance structures. The examples above illustrate three possible ways of legitimising corporate quasi-public social and political activities: deliberation within the company, deliberation outside, and an approach we label _corporate constitutionalism_. While the first two models have been tested in practice (...)
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  • Young’s Social Connection Model and Corporate Responsibility.Robert Phillips & Judith Schrempf-Stirling - 2022 - Philosophy of Management 21 (3):315-336.
    Recent structural innovations in global commerce present difficult challenges for legacy understandings of responsibility. The rise of outsourcing, sub-contracting, and mobile app-based platforms have dramatically restructured relationships between and among economic actors. Though not entirely new, the remarkable rise in the prevalence of these “not-quite-arm’s-length” relationships present difficulties for conceptions of responsibility based on interrogating the past for specifiable actions by blameworthy actors. Iris Marion Young invites investigation of a “social connection model of responsibility” (SCMR) that is, in many ways, (...)
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  • Assessing the Legitimacy of “Open” and “Closed” Data Partnerships for Sustainable Development.Erik Wetter, Mette Morsing & Andreas Rasche - 2021 - Business and Society 60 (3):547-581.
    This article examines the legitimacy attached to different types of multi-stakeholder data partnerships occurring in the context of sustainable development. We develop a framework to assess the democratic legitimacy of two types of data partnerships: open data partnerships and closed data partnerships. Our framework specifies criteria for assessing the legitimacy of relevant partnerships with regard to their input legitimacy as well as their output legitimacy. We demonstrate which particular characteristics of open and closed partnerships can be expected to influence an (...)
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  • Public Actors Without Public Values: Legitimacy, Domination and the Regulation of the Technology Sector.Linnet Taylor - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (4):897-922.
    The scale and asymmetry of commercial technology firms’ power over people through data, combined with the increasing involvement of the private sector in public governance, means that increasingly, people do not have the ability to opt out of engaging with technology firms. At the same time, those firms are increasingly intervening on the population level in ways that have implications for social and political life. This creates the potential for power relations of domination, and demands that we decide what constitutes (...)
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  • Dissent in Consensusland: An Agonistic Problematization of Multi-stakeholder Governance.Martin Fougère & Nikodemus Solitander - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 164 (4):683-699.
    Multi-stakeholder initiatives involve actors from several spheres of society in collaborative arrangements to reach objectives typically related to sustainable development. In political CSR literature, these arrangements have been framed as improvements to transnational governance and as being somehow democratic. We draw on Mouffe’s works on agonistic pluralism to problematize the notion that consensus-led multi-stakeholder initiatives bring more democratic control on corporate power. We examine two initiatives which address two very different issue areas: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the (...)
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  • (1 other version)Addressing Governance Gaps in Global Value Chains: Introducing a Systematic Typology.Stephanie Schrage & Dirk Ulrich Gilbert - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 170 (4):657-672.
    Multinational enterprises dominate the governance of global value chains, such that according to the concept of political corporate social responsibility, they are responsible to address governance gaps throughout the chains, even at the level of their independent suppliers. In practice, MNEs often struggle to cope with the complexity of these governance gaps, and PCSR does not provide a clear definition nor offer guidance for how to analyze and address them. By adopting the notion of governance mechanisms from GVC literature, this (...)
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  • Stakeholder Dialogue as Agonistic Deliberation: Exploring the Role of Conflict and Self-Interest in Business-NGO Interaction.Teunis Brand, Vincent Blok & Marcel Verweij - 2020 - Business Ethics Quarterly 30 (1):3-30.
    ABSTRACT:Many companies engage in dialogue with nongovernmental organizations about societal issues. The question is what a regulative ideal for such dialogues should be. In the literature on corporate social responsibility, the Habermasian notion of communicative action is often presented as a regulative ideal for stakeholder dialogue, implying that actors should aim at consensus and set strategic considerations aside. In this article, we argue that in many cases, communicative action is not a suitable regulative ideal for dialogue between companies and NGOs. (...)
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  • How Friedman’s View on Individual Freedom Relates to Stakeholder Theory and Social Contract Theory.Rolf Brühl & Johannes Jahn - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 153 (1):41-52.
    Friedman’s view on corporate social responsibility is often accused of being incoherent and of setting rather low ethical standards for managers. This paper outlines Friedman’s ethical expectations for corporate executives against the backdrop of the strong emphasis he puts on individual freedom. Doing so reveals that the ethical standards he imposes on managers can be strictly deduced from individual freedom and that these standards involve both deontological norms and the fulfillment of particular stakeholder expectations. These insights illustrate the necessity to (...)
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  • Communicating Moral Legitimacy in Controversial Industries: The Trade in Human Tissue.A. Rebecca Reuber & Anna Morgan-Thomas - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 154 (1):49-63.
    Globally active companies are involved in the discursive construction of moral legitimacy. Establishing normative conformance is problematic given the plurality of norms and values worldwide, and is particularly difficult for companies operating in morally controversial industries. In this paper, we investigate how organizations publicly legitimize the trade of human tissue for private profit when this practice runs counter to deep-seated and widespread moral beliefs. To do so, we use inductive, qualitative methods to analyze the website discourse of three types of (...)
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  • Dialogic Collaboration across Sectors: Partnering for Sustainability.Nathan Colaner, Jessica Ludescher Imanaka & Gregory E. Prussia - 2018 - Business and Society Review 123 (3):529-564.
    A substantial body of literature in the management discipline has evolved to make the case for and analyze the impacts of cross‐sector partnerships (CSPs). Yet, not all of these CSPs manifest the requisite collaborative propensities to achieve much more than superficial sustainability. Moreover, other disciplines like economics need to be brought to bear on analyses of such partnerships. In this article, we frame sustainable development challenges as collective action problems. We argue that over‐emphasizing the role of a single actor or (...)
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  • How to Overcome Structural Injustice? Social Connectedness and the Tenet of Subsidiarity.Michael S. Aßländer - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 162 (3):719-732.
    Referring to the phenomenon of structural injustice resulting from unintended consequences of the combination of the actions of many people, Iris Marion Young claims for a new understanding of responsibility. She proposes what she calls a social connection model of responsibility which assigns responsibility to individuals also for participating in ongoing structural and social processes. To remedy structural injustice Young claims for collective action of various actors in society and assigns different degrees of responsibility depending on the agent’s position within (...)
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  • Revisiting the Effect of Family Involvement on Corporate Social Responsibility: A Behavioral Agency Perspective.Victor Cui, Shujun Ding, Mingzhi Liu & Zhenyu Wu - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 152 (1):291-309.
    This paper sheds light on the incongruent findings concerning the relationship between family involvement and firms’ corporate social responsibility. While prior studies have mainly taken the perspective of families’ socioemotional wealth preservation, we approach this relationship from the perspective of behavioral agency theory, highlighting the important role played by CEOs’ family memberships. Specifically, we posit that family firms are more likely to invest in CSR when their CEOs are members of the controlling families. Furthermore, we examine how family firms can (...)
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  • Do ESG Controversies Matter for Firm Value? Evidence from International Data.Amal Aouadi & Sylvain Marsat - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 151 (4):1027-1047.
    The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between environmental, social, and governance controversies and firm market value. We use a unique dataset of more than 4000 firms from 58 countries during 2002–2011. Primary analysis surprisingly shows that ESG controversies are associated with greater firm value. However, when interacted with the corporate social performance score, ESG controversies are found to have no direct effect on firm value while the interaction appears to be highly and significantly positive. Building on (...)
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  • State Power: Rethinking the Role of the State in Political Corporate Social Responsibility.Judith Schrempf-Stirling - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 150 (1):1-14.
    Key accomplishments of political corporate social responsibility scholarship have been the identification of global governance gaps and a proposal how to tackle them. Political CSR scholarship assumes that the traditional roles of state and business have eroded, with states losing power and business gaining power in a globalized world. Consequently, the future of CSR lies in political CSR with new global governance forms which are organized by mainly non-state actors. The objective of the paper is to deepen our understanding of (...)
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  • Old Wine in New Bottles? Parentalism, Power, and Its Legitimacy in Business–Society Relations.Helen Etchanchu & Marie-Laure Djelic - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 160 (4):893-911.
    This article proposes a theoretical re-conceptualization of power dynamics and their legitimation in contemporary business–society relations using the prism and metaphor of parentalism. The paper develops a typology of forms of parentalism along two structuring dimensions: care and control. Specifically, four ideal-types of parentalism are introduced with their associated practices and power-legitimation mechanisms. As we consider current private governance and authority through this analytical framework, we are able to provide a new perspective on the nature of the moral legitimation of (...)
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  • Accountable to Whom? Rethinking the Role of Corporations in Political CSR.Waheed Hussain & Jeffrey Moriarty - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 149 (3):519-534.
    According to Palazzo and Scherer, the changing role of business corporations in society requires that we take new measures to integrate these organizations into society-wide processes of democratic governance. We argue that their model of integration has a fundamental problem. Instead of treating business corporations as agents that must be held accountable to the democratic reasoning of affected parties, it treats corporations as agents who can hold others accountable. In our terminology, it treats business corporations as “supervising authorities” rather than (...)
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  • Talk Ain’t Cheap: Political CSR and the Challenges of Corporate Deliberation.Cameron Sabadoz & Abraham Singer - 2017 - Business Ethics Quarterly 27 (2):183-211.
    ABSTRACT:Deliberative democratic theory, commonly used to explore questions of “political” corporate social responsibility, has become prominent in the literature. This theory has been challenged previously for being overly sanguine about firm profit imperatives, but left unexamined is whether corporate contexts are appropriate contexts for deliberative theory in the first place. We explore this question using the case of Starbucks’ “Race Together” campaign to show that significant challenges exist to corporate deliberation, even in cases featuring genuinely committed firms. We return to (...)
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  • Corporate or Governmental Duties? Corporate Citizenship From a Governmental Perspective.Janina Curbach & Michael S. Aßländer - 2017 - Business and Society 56 (4):617-645.
    Recent discussions on corporate citizenship highlight the new political role of corporations in society by arguing that corporations increasingly act as quasi-governmental actors and take on what hitherto had originally been governmental tasks. By examining political and sociological citizenship theories, the authors show that such a corporate engagement can be explained by a changing conception of corporate citizens from corporate bourgeois to corporate citoyen. As an intermediate actor in society, the corporate citoyen assumes co-responsibilities for social and civic affairs and (...)
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  • Democratizing Corporate Governance.Nicolas Dahan - 2013 - Business and Society 52 (3):473-514.
    This article addresses the democratic deficit that emerges when private corporations engage in public policy, either by providing citizenship rights and global public goods (corporate citizenship) or by influencing the political system and lobbying for their economic interests (strategic corporate political activities). This democratic deficit is significant, especially when multinational corporations operate in locations where national governance mechanisms are weak or even fail, where the rule of law is absent and there is a lack of democratic control. This deficit may (...)
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  • The United Nations Global Compact.Andreas Rasche - 2013 - Business and Society 52 (1):6-30.
    This article reviews the interdisciplinary literature on the UN Global Compact. The review identifies three research perspectives, which scholars have used to study the UN Global Compact so far: a historical perspective discussing the Global Compact in the context of UN-business relations, an operational perspective discussing the composition and impact of its participants, as well as a governance perspective discussing the constraints and opportunities of the initiative as an institutionalized arena for addressing global governance gaps. The authors contrast these three (...)
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  • (1 other version)Accountability in a Global Economy: The Emergence of International Accountability Standards.Dirk Ulrich Gilbert, Andreas Rasche & Sandra Waddock - 2011 - Business Ethics Quarterly 21 (1):23-44.
    ABSTRACT:This article assesses the proliferation of international accountability standards (IAS) in the recent past. We provide a comprehensive overview about the different types of standards and discuss their role as part of a new institutional infrastructure for corporate responsibility. Based on this, it is argued that IAS can advance corporate responsibility on a global level because they contribute to the closure of some omnipresent governance gaps. IAS also improve the preparedness of an organization to give an explanation and a justification (...)
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  • (1 other version)Global Rules and Private Actors: Toward a New Role of the Transnational Corporation in Global Governance.Andreas Georg Scherer, Guido Palazzo & Dorothée Baumann - 2006 - Business Ethics Quarterly 16 (4):505-532.
    Abstract:We discuss the role that transnational corporations (TNCs) should play in developing global governance, creating a framework of rules and regulations for the global economy. The central issue is whether TNCs should provide global rules and guarantee individual citizenship rights, or instead focus on maximizing profits. First, we describe the problems arising from the globalization process that affect the relationship between public rules and private firms. Next we consider the position of economic and management theories in relation to the social (...)
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  • Understanding Widespread Misconduct in Organizations: An Institutional Theory of Moral Collapse.Masoud Shadnam & Thomas B. Lawrence - 2011 - Business Ethics Quarterly 21 (3):379-407.
    ABSTRACT:Reports of widespread misconduct in organizations have become sadly commonplace. Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, accounting fraud in large corporations, and physical and sexual harassment in the military implicate not only the individuals involved, but the organizations and fields in which they happened. In this paper we describe such situations as instances of “moral collapse” and develop a multi-level theory of moral collapse that draws on institutional theory as its central orienting lens. We draw on institutional theory because of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Introduction to the Special Issue: Globalization as a Challenge for Business Responsibilities.Andreas Georg Scherer, Guido Palazzo & Dirk Matten - 2009 - Business Ethics Quarterly 19 (3):327-347.
    This article assesses some of the implications of globalization for the scholarly debate on business ethics, CSR and related concepts. The argument is based, among other things, on the declining capacity of nation state institutions to regulate socially desirable corporate behavior as well as the growing corporate exposure to heterogeneous social, cultural and political values in societies globally. It is argued that these changes are shifting the corporate role towards a sphere of societal governance hitherto dominated by traditional political actors. (...)
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  • When Organization Theory Met Business Ethics: Toward Further Symbioses.Pursey P. M. A. R. Heugens & Andreas Georg Scherer - 2010 - Business Ethics Quarterly 20 (4):643-672.
    ABSTRACT:Organization theory and business ethics are essentially the positive and normative sides of the very same coin, reflecting on how human cooperative activities are organized and how they ought to be organized respectively. It is therefore unfortunate that—due to the relatively impermeable manmade boundaries segregating the corresponding scholarly communities into separate schools and departments, professional associations, and scientific journals—the potential symbiosis between the two fields has not yet fully materialized. In this essay we make a modest attempt at establishing further (...)
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  • Managing Organizational Gender Diversity Images: A Content Analysis of German Corporate Websites.Leon Windscheid, Lynn Bowes-Sperry, Karsten Jonsen & Michèle Morner - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 152 (4):997-1013.
    Although establishing gender equality in board and managerial positions has recently become more important for organizations, companies with low levels of gender diversity seem to perceive an ethical dilemma regarding the ways, in which they attempt to attain it. One way that organizations try to move toward gender equality is through the use of their corporate websites to manage potential applicants’ impressions of their current levels of, and actions to improve, gender diversity. The dilemma is whether to truthfully communicate their (...)
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  • Engaging Ethically: A Discourse Ethics Perspective on Social Shareholder Engagement.Jennifer Goodman & Daniel Arenas - 2015 - Business Ethics Quarterly 25 (2):163-189.
    ABSTRACT:The primacy of shareholder demands in the traditional theory of the firm has typically excluded marginalised stakeholder voices. However, shareholders involved in social shareholder engagement (SSE) purport to bring these voices into corporate decision-making. In response to ethical concerns about the legitimacy of SSE, we use the lens of discourse ethics to provide a normative analysis at both action and constitutional levels. By specifying three normative questions, we extend the analysis of SSE to identify a political role for shareholders in (...)
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  • Employee Participation in Cause-Related Marketing Strategies: A Study of Management Perceptions from British Consumer Service Industries.Gordon Liu, Catherine Liston-Heyes & Wai-Wai Ko - 2010 - Journal of Business Ethics 92 (2):195-210.
    The purpose of cause-related marketing (CRM) is to publicise and capitalise on a firm's corporate social performance (CSP) by enhancing its legitimacy in the eyes of its stakeholders. This study focuses on the firm's internal stakeholders - i.e. its employees - and the extent of their involvement in the selection of social campaigns. Whilst the difficulties of managing a firm that has lost or damaged its legitimacy in the eyes of its employees are well known, little is understood about the (...)
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  • Business Ethics without Philosophers? Evidence for and Implications of the Shift From Applied Philosophers to Business Scholars on the Editorial Boards of Business Ethics Journals.Peter Seele - 2016 - Metaphilosophy 47 (1):75-91.
    This article considers the relationship between business ethics and philosophy, specifically in relation to the field and persons working in it. The starting point is a grammatical one: business ethics by the rules of grammar belongs to ethics. In terms of academic disciplines, it belongs to applied ethics, which belongs to ethics, which belongs to practical philosophy, which belongs to philosophy. However, in the field of business ethics today one will seldom meet colleagues from philosophy; instead, they will come from (...)
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  • The debate on the moral responsibilities of online service providers.Mariarosaria Taddeo & Luciano Floridi - 2016 - Science and Engineering Ethics 22 (6):1575-1603.
    Online service providers —such as AOL, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter—significantly shape the informational environment and influence users’ experiences and interactions within it. There is a general agreement on the centrality of OSPs in information societies, but little consensus about what principles should shape their moral responsibilities and practices. In this article, we analyse the main contributions to the debate on the moral responsibilities of OSPs. By endorsing the method of the levels of abstract, we first analyse the moral responsibilities (...)
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  • How Do Firms Comply with International Sustainability Standards? Processes and Consequences of Adopting the Global Reporting Initiative.Laurence Vigneau, Michael Humphreys & Jeremy Moon - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 131 (2):469-486.
    This paper addresses the issue of the influence of global governance institutions, particularly international sustainability standards, on a firm’s intra-organizational practices. More precisely, we provide an exploratory empirical view of the impact of the Global Reporting Initiative on a multinational corporation’s corporate social responsibility management practices. We investigate standard compliance by comparing the stated intention of the use of the GRI with its actual use and the consequent effects within the firm. Based on an in-depth case study, our findings illustrate (...)
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  • Quantitative content analysis as a method for business ethics research.Irina Lock & Peter Seele - 2015 - Business Ethics: A European Review 24 (4):S24-S40.
    The aim of this article is to discuss quantitative content analysis as established in communication sciences as a method for research in business ethics. We argue that communication sciences and business ethics are neighboring disciplines, which allow the transfer of quantitative content analysis from communication sciences to business ethics. Technically, quantitative content analysis can be applied through human as well as software coding. Examples for both applications are provided and discussed. We make reference to the software solutions ‘Leximancer’, ‘Crawdad’, and (...)
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  • Adam Smith’s Contribution to Business Ethics, Then and Now.Michael Gonin - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 129 (1):221-236.
    Smith defines the business enterprise primarily as the endeavor of an individual who remains fully embedded in the broader society and subject to its moral demands. For him, the conceptions of the local community and its normative framework, of the enterprise, and of the individuals within it need to be aligned with each other and developed together. Over time, four processes have, however, led to a widening gap between the business world and the local community. These are the dissemination of (...)
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  • Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria: Where Do Responsibilities End?Esther Hennchen - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 129 (1):1-25.
    This case study discusses the scope of responsibilities and the basis of legitimacy of multinational corporations in a complex operating environment. In January 2013 a precedent was set when Shell was held liable in The Hague for oil pollution in the Niger Delta. The landmark ruling climaxed the ongoing dispute over the scope of Shell’s responsibilities for both the company’s positive and negative impact. Shell’s was considered a forerunner in corporate social responsibility and had even assumed public responsibilities in a (...)
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  • The Politics of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives: The Crisis of the Forest Stewardship Council.Steffen Böhm, André Spicer & Sandra Moog - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 128 (3):469-493.
    Multi-stakeholder initiatives have become a vital part of the organizational landscape for corporate social responsibility. Recent debates have explored whether these initiatives represent opportunities for the “democratization” of transnational corporations, facilitating civic participation in the extension of corporate responsibility, or whether they constitute new arenas for the expansion of corporate influence and the private capture of regulatory power. In this article, we explore the political dynamics of these new governance initiatives by presenting an in-depth case study of an organization often (...)
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  • Development of Leadership Theory in the Perspective of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy.Ove D. Jakobsen & Vivi M. L. Storsletten - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 128 (2):337-349.
    In this article, we discuss and compare various positions in leadership theory through the perspective of Kierkegaard’s modes of existence. After a brief presentation of the three modes of existence—aesthetic, ethical and religious—and a description of the ironic–reflective interpretation of the change process, we synthesize leadership theories into the three main positions of instrumental, responsible and spiritual. Later, we compare and integrate the different positions in leadership theory with the three modes of existence. We argue that the various positions in (...)
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  • (1 other version)Corporate Social Responsibility and Multi-Stakeholder Governance: Pluralism, Feminist Perspectives and Women’s NGOs.Kate Grosser - 2016 - Journal of Business Ethics 137 (1):65-81.
    The corporate social responsibility literature has increasingly explored relationships between civil society and social movements, including non-governmental organizations, and corporations, as well as the role of NGOs in multi-stakeholder governance processes. This paper addresses the challenge of including a plurality of civil society voices and perspectives in business–NGO relations, and in CSR as a process of governance. The paper contributes to CSR scholarship by bringing insights from feminist literature to bear on CSR as a process of governance, and engaging with (...)
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  • Reflexivity in Sustainability Accounting and Management: Transcending the Economic Focus of Corporate Sustainability.Anselm Schneider - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 127 (3):525-536.
    In order to enable firms to successfully deal with issues of corporate sustainability, the firms' stakeholders would need to participate in sustainability accounting and management. In practice, however, participative sustainability accounting and management are often unfeasible. The resulting consequence is the risk of misbalancing single aspects of sustainability. The purpose of this article is to show that reflexivity in sustainability accounting and management, that is, an ongoing reflection on the relationship between the goals of corporate sustainability and the overarching objective (...)
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  • Corporate Social Responsibility as Subsidiary Co-Responsibility: A Macroeconomic Perspective. [REVIEW]Michael S. Aßländer - 2011 - Journal of Business Ethics 99 (1):115 - 128.
    Recent discussion on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mainly focuses on two aspects of CSR: from a technical perspective, CSR aims to improve ethical standards in the organizational decision-making process, and should guarantee that management practices are in accordance with commonly accepted standards of behavior. From a political perspective, CSR describes corporate engagement with ecological and social issues that extend beyond the firm's economic activities. The latter perspective in particular leaves unclear whether such corporate contributions to solve environmental and societal problems (...)
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  • Pluralism in Political Corporate Social Responsibility.Jukka Mäkinen & Arno Kourula - 2012 - Business Ethics Quarterly 22 (4):649-678.
    ABSTRACT:Within corporate social responsibility (CSR), the exploration of the political role of firms (political CSR) has recently experienced a revival. We review three key periods of political CSR literature—classic, instrumental, and new political CSR—and use the Rawlsian conceptualization of division of moral labor within political systems to describe each period’s background political theories. The three main arguments of the paper are as follows. First, classic CSR literature was more pluralistic in terms of background political theories than many later texts. Second, (...)
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  • Striving for Legitimacy Through Corporate Social Responsibility: Insights from Oil Companies. [REVIEW]Shuili Du & Edward T. Vieira - 2012 - Journal of Business Ethics 110 (4):413-427.
    Being a controversial industry, oil companies turn to corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a means to obtain legitimacy. Adopting a case study methodology, this research examines the characteristics of CSR strategies and CSR communication tactics of six oil companies by analyzing their 2011–2012 web site content. We found that all six companies engaged in CSR activities addressing the needs of various stakeholders and had cross-sector partnerships. CSR information on these companies’ web sites was easily accessible, often involving the use of (...)
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  • Black Economic Empowerment Disclosures by South African Listed Corporations: The Influence of Ownership and Board Characteristics. [REVIEW]Collins G. Ntim & Teerooven Soobaroyen - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 116 (1):121-138.
    This study investigates the extent to which South African listed corporations voluntarily disclose information on black economic empowerment (BEE) in their annual and sustainability reports using a sample of 75 listed corporations from 2003 to 2009. BEE is a form of socio-economic affirmative action championed by the African National Congress (ANC)-led government to address historical imbalances in business participation and ownership in South Africa. We find that block ownership and institutional ownership are negatively associated with the extent of BEE disclosures, (...)
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  • A Social Contract for International Business Ethics.Paul Neiman - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 114 (1):75-90.
    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 (...)
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  • Development of Norms Through Compliance Disclosure.Björn Fasterling - 2012 - Journal of Business Ethics 106 (1):73-87.
    This article introduces compliance disclosure regimes to business ethics research. Compliance disclosure is a relatively recent regulatory technique whereby companies are obliged to disclose the extent to which they comply with codes, ‘best practice standards’ or other extra-legal texts containing norms or prospective norms. Such ‘compliance disclosure’ obligations are often presented as flexible regulatory alternatives to substantive, command-and-control regulation. However, based on a report on experiences of existing compliance disclosure obligations, this article will identify major weaknesses that prevent them from (...)
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  • (1 other version)Neither bad apple nor bad barrel: how the societal context impacts unethical behavior in organizations.Michael Gonin, Guido Palazzo & Ulrich Hoffrage - 2011 - Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility 21 (1):31-46.
    Every time another corporate scandal captures media headlines, the ‘bad apple vs. bad barrel’ discussion starts anew. Yet this debate overlooks the influence of the broader societal context on organizational behavior. In this article, we argue that misbehaviors of organizations (the ‘barrels’) and their members (the ‘apples’) cannot be addressed properly without a clear understanding of their broader context (the ‘larder’). Whereas previously, a strong societal framework dampened the practical application of the Homo economicus concept (business actors as perfectly rational (...)
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  • Responsible Leadership in Global Business: A New Approach to Leadership and Its Multi-Level Outcomes. [REVIEW]Christian Voegtlin, Moritz Patzer & Andreas Georg Scherer - 2012 - Journal of Business Ethics 105 (1):1-16.
    The article advances an understanding of responsible leadership in global business and offers an agenda for future research in this field. Our conceptualization of responsible leadership draws on deliberative practices and discursive conflict resolution, combining the macro-view of the business firm as a political actor with the micro-view of leadership. We discuss the concept in relation to existing research in leadership. Further, we propose a new model of responsible leadership that shows how such an understanding of leadership can address the (...)
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  • Stakeholder Governance as a Response to Wicked Issues.Sybille Sachs, Edwin Rühli & Claude Meier - 2010 - Journal of Business Ethics 96 (S1):57-64.
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  • (1 other version)Moral Commitments and the Societal Role of Business: An Ordonomic Approach to Corporate Citizenship.Markus Beckmann - 2009 - Business Ethics Quarterly 19 (3):375-401.
    This article introduces an “ordonomic” approach to corporate citizenship. We believe that ordonomics offers a conceptual framework for analyzing both the social structure and the semantics of moral commitments. We claim that such an analysis can provide theoretical guidance for the changing role of business in society, especially in regard to the expectation and trend that businesses take a political role and act as corporate citizens. The systematicraison d'êtreof corporate citizenship is that business firms can and—judged by the criterion of (...)
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