South Asia is a region that two billion world citizens call home. It connotes not only a geographical place but a discursive space that, despite its heterogeneities of ethnicity and political experience, is joined at the hip by a shared experience of colonialism, sovereignty, and globalized neoliberalism. As a result, South Asia is also a site of aspiration and struggle, as well as emancipation and exploitation. Research in business ethics has not adequately addressed the challenges faced by this region, and (...) consequently overlooked the possibility that a fine-grained analysis of the organizational issues faced by this region can generate new insights on ethical organizations across the world. This special issue marks an important step in that direction and reveals potentially translocal insights about how ethical organizations can be reimagined. (shrink)

Community development, or the socio-economic transformation of local communities, has been a significant focus of organizational ethics. Such community development programmes—whether led by state, civil society, or businesses—are animated by modernization and have involved, I argue, the production of a new moral order. As part of which, communities were imagined in particular ways, historically. Drawing on a periodization of history of philanthropy of the Tata Group (India’s leading multinational conglomerate) from the 1860s onwards, I outline the four stages involved in (...) the production of this new moral order—each with a distinct formulation of community—as part of India’s development. The shifts in imaginaries of community, I conclude, were justified and legitimized by the elites as part of the wider nation-building efforts. (shrink)

Scholars of business and management studies have recently turned their attention to inequality, a key issue for business ethics given the role of private firms in transmitting—and potentially challenging—inequalities. However, this research is yet to examine inequality from a subaltern perspective. In this paper, we discuss the alleviation of inequalities in organizational and institutional contexts by drawing on the ideas of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a jurist, political leader and economist, and one of the unsung social theorists of the twentieth (...) century. Specifically, we focus on Ambedkar’s critique of the Indian caste system, his outline of comprehensive reform, and prescription of representational politics to achieve equality. We contend that an Ambedkarite ethical manifesto of persuasion—focussed on state-led institutional reforms driven by the subaltern—can help management researchers reimagine issues of inequality and extend business ethics beyond organizational boundaries. (shrink)

Over the last decade, scholars across the wide spectrum of the discipline of sociology have started to reengage with questions on morality and moral phenomena. The continued wave of research in this field, which has come to be known as the new sociology of morality, is a lively research program that has several common grounds with scholarship in the field of business ethics. The aim of this thematic symposium is to open constructive dialogues between these two areas of study. In (...) this introductory essay, we briefly present the project of the new sociology of morality and discuss its relevance for business ethics. We also review the contributions to this thematic symposium and identify four specific domains where future research can contribute to fruitful dialogues between the two fields. (shrink)