Contract-based approaches have been a focus of attention in business ethics. As one of the grand traditions in political philosophy, contractarianism is founded on the notion that we will never resolve deep moral disagreement. Classical philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, or recent ones like Rawls and Gaus, seek to solve ethical conflicts on the level of social rules and procedures. Recent authors in business ethics have sought to utilize contract-based approaches for their field and to apply it to concrete business (...) dilemmas. However, the application of contractarianism to management contexts can cause difficulties. Our article discusses this conceptual problem of contractarian business ethics and presents the idea of order ethics as an alternative. Order ethics, as we argue, can make a difference by conceptually bridging the gap between contractarianism and business ethics. (shrink)

Gender greatly impacts access to opportunities, potential, and success in corporate leadership roles. We begin with a general presentation of why such discussion is necessary for basic considerations of justice and fairness in gender equality and how the issues we raise must impact any ethical perspective on gender in the corporate workplace. We continue with a breakdown of the central categories affecting the success of women in corporate leadership roles. The first of these includes gender-influenced behavioral factors, such as the (...) requirements and expectations of gendered verbal and nonverbal communication styles as well as appearance. We move on to address the impact of family on corporate leadership opportunities and success, discussing the asymmetrical evaluation of an individual’s potential, authority, and competence based on gender stereotypes of familial obligations and expectations. Finally, we address how gender impacts access to networking and sponsorship opportunities and the long-term effects of systematic limitations on women’s inclusion in the upper echelons of corporate leadership. We conclude with a summary of the questions and issues raised by our discussion and direct individuals to consider how different ethical systems and moral requirements might influence their interpretations of gender and leadership in the corporate workplace. (shrink)

Disparate attempts exist to identify the key components that make an ethics pedagogy more effective and efficient. To integrate these attempts, a review of 408 articles published in leading journals is conducted. The key foci of extant literature are categorized into three domains labeled as approach, content, and delivery, and a comprehensive framework for ethics pedagogy developed. Within each of these domains, binaries that reflect two alternatives are identified. Approach, the philosophical standpoint, can be theory-laden or real-world connected. Content, the (...) constituencies addressed, can have a focus on breadth or depth. Delivery, the execution of the adopted pedagogy, can be traditional or innovative. The review of articles also identifies the lack of pedagogies that comprehensively focus on all the binaries across domains. The other substantive contribution of this article addresses this gap by developing a generic pedagogy—Integrative Live Case—based on the ACD framework. Based on an incident that is currently unfolding, this pedagogy allows integration of binaries across the three domains. It also allows for a modular course plan that can accommodate varied pedagogical preferences. Volkswagen Dieselgate is presented as a stylized example to showcase the significant advantages of using this pedagogy. (shrink)

I argue for the role of trust and cooperation as part of the foundation of digital commerce by expanding the reach of the Integrative Social Contract Theory of Donaldson and Dunfee. I propose that a digital business community can be a community in the morally relevant ways that Donaldson and Dunfee describe, and that the basic framework of ISCT can apply to the digital business world similarly to its application in the offline business world. I then analyze the roles of (...) trust and cooperation in e-commerce, showing how they are important to the digital business community and explaining their moral relevance under a digital form of ISCT. I use the ISCT framework to show that trust and cooperation are an instantiation of the hypernorm of necessary social efficiency, and that authentic microsocial norms developed for the ends of trust and cooperation carry moral responsibility. (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)

This article proposes a specific logic of dynamics for integrative social contracts theory that combines two empirically oriented process extensions strengthening concreteness of Donaldson and Dunfee’s conceptualization, namely international policy regime theory and Tiebout migration. While either would help “dynamize” and “concretize” ISCT, the two combined are even more insightful. Real-world policy regime processes can develop concrete action-guiding norms instantiating hypernorms to guide business decisions. Donaldson and Dunfee placed empirical reliance on expectation of converging parallel evolution of universal principles and (...) authentic local values. ISCT remains vague on how global or local norms can develop and change, for two reasons. First, ISCT does not explain mechanisms for how proposed hypernorms can become actual global norms and also become accepted across extant authentic communities. International policy regime theory explains how hypernorms can become instantiated as global norms expressed in policy regimes. Second, a basic element in ISCT is implied consent positing free exit from voluntary moral communities. Empirically, individuals or businesses may be unable to exit from undesired membership in authentic communities to which they do not consent. The Tiebout migration model provides valuable insights concerning how substantive mobility or its absence improves on the minimum ISCT assumption of implied consent. An integrated logic of ISCT dynamics generates a three-level framework in which instantiated hypernorms and authentic community norms can empirically change, and individuals or businesses can migrate more freely across extant communities. (shrink)