ABSTRACT:In this address, I outline a “back to basics” approach to specifying the responsibilities and role of business in relation to society. Three “basics” comprise the approach. The first is arguing that basic principles of ordinary morality, such as a duty not to harm, provide an adequate basis for specifying the responsibilities of business managers. The second is framing the role of business in society by looking to the values realized by the basic building blocks of contemporary economic activity, i.e., (...) markets and firms. The third is making explicit the basic institutions that structure the background against which business operates. The aim is to develop a plausible framework for managerial decision making that respects the fact of value pluralism in a global economy and that fosters meaningful criticism of current business practices while remaining sufficiently grounded in contemporary circumstances so as to be relevant for managers. (shrink)

ISCT arguably forms the most promising impetus to a contractarian theory of business ethics presently available. In this article, I want to pay tribute to the lasting significance of Dunfee's contribution to the field of business ethics by analyzing the vital role of the idea of extant social contracts (ESCs) in the conceptual set up of the ISCT project. The construct of ESCs can be shown to shape the problem statement from which the ISCT project proceeds – indeed it helps (...) to conceptualize the basic question which defines and delineates the domain of business ethics. (shrink)

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)

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 (...) wages, the environment, and compliance social and cultural norms. These principles are then shown to rest in wide reflective equilibrium with considered moral judgments on international business ethics, which are drawn from international agreements, such as the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and voluntary business initiatives, such as the Global Sullivan Principles and the UN Global Compact. (shrink)

For more than three decades, Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) has been lauded as a business ethics theory particularly well suited to the international arena, especially because of its alleged ability to reconcile respect for cultural idiosyncrasies and normative teeth. However, this theory has also faced various objections, many of which its authors have responded to with varying degrees of satisfaction. As a contribution to this debate, this article provides a unifying rationale for many of those objections by exploring their (...) rooting in the Separation thesis. It submits that this fact negatively impacts the theory with three major challenges, namely: significant limitations to correctly frame moral issues and situations; poor identification of hypernorms; and insufficient theoretical grounding of hypernorms. This critique highlights the need for the entanglement of the normative and the empirical in business ethics theorizing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Of the many developments in business ethics that Thomas Donaldson has helped pioneer, one is the application of social contract theory to address questions about the responsibilities of business actors. InCorporations and Morality, Donaldson develops one of the most sustained and comprehensive accounts that aims to justify the existence of for-profit corporations and to specify and ground their responsibilities. In order to further our understanding about the purpose and responsibilities of productive organizations, and as a contribution to the scholarship on (...) Donaldson’s thought, this paper gathers together the critical responses to Donaldson’s account along with Donaldson’s replies to his critics. The paper argues that we would do well to continue engaging with Donaldson’s account because of its distinctive and challenging conception of the purpose and responsibilities of productive organizations, but that many of the insights to be gained come from reframing the role played by social contract theory. (shrink)

This study involved using a mixed method research design to examine the moral philosophy difference between the ethical decision-making process of CEOs in U.S.-led and non-U.S.-led within the luxury goods industry. The study employed a MANOVA to compare the ethical profiles between the two leader types and a phenomenological qualitative process to locate themes that give indication as to the compatibility of the luxury strategy values and practices with the principles and concepts of responsible leadership and conscious capitalism. As the (...) luxury goods industry is facing the first slowdown since 2000, pressure to achieve sales targets in the U.S. to make up for losses in other markets will place these CEOs under extreme pressure from their headquarters. These leaders must possess the ethical decision-making capability to balance legal and moral dilemmas unique to multinational luxury goods organizations while delivering business results in a challenging environment. Results of the study show no evidence of difference in the ethical decision-making profiles between the two groups of leaders. The themes and emergent findings resulting from the qualitative analysis indicate a profound incompatibility between the values informing decision-makers using the luxury strategy and those employed by leaders operating within the principles and parameters of responsible leadership and conscious capitalism. Recommendations for future research include replicating the study with a larger sample, within a different geographic region or comparing leaders using the luxury strategy to those using conscious capitalism. (shrink)

Drawing on ethical principles of fairness and integrative social contracts theory, moral obligations of fair dealing exist between the firm and all shareholders. This study investigates empirically whether privileged investors of publicly traded firms engage in legal, but morally questionable, trading that at the expense of non-privileged institutional or atomistic investors. In this context, we define privilege as the access to material, nonpublic earnings surprise information. Our results show that the opportunity for procedural unfairness increases with the presence of privileged (...) investors. However, this procedural unfairness does not appear to lead to distributive unfairness even though the level of abnormal trading also increases with the presence of privileged investors. That is, our findings suggest that other shareholders are in fact better off from an outcome perspective given that the abnormal stock price returns upon the announcement of an earnings surprise are either more positive or less negative when the firm has a high proportion of privileged investors. We extract the important implications of our study for future research on the fairness of capital markets and information asymmetry amongst classes of investors, as well as for public policy. (shrink)

We critically assess integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) and show that the concept particularly lacks of moral justification of substantive hypernorms. By drawing on Habermasian philosophy, in particular discourse ethics and its recent application in the theory of deliberative democracy , we further advance ISCT and show that social contracting in business ethics requires a well-justified procedural rather than a substantive focus for managing stakeholder relations. We also replace the monological concept of hypothetical thought experiments in ISCT by a concept (...) of practical discourse to better govern business activities on the macro-level of organizational actors such as firms, governments, and NGOs. (shrink)

Integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) has been an influential theory in normative business ethics for well over a decade, drawing attention both as an object of criticism and as a source of inspiration. In this paper I argue that, despite this attention, the fact that it is a genuinely pluralistic theory, in the tradition of pluralistic theories of political philosophy, is often overlooked. It is in the notion of moral free space that this pluralism is most clearly expressed. This oversight (...) is unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly, it prevents the potential of ISCT, as a normative theory of business ethics, from being appreciated fully; secondly, it leads us to ignore resources that could help tackle its most problematic flaws. In this second respect, I show how some of these flaws could be addressed by paying closer attention to the similarities between ISCT and John Rawls' theory of Political Liberalism. (shrink)

This article employs Maak's framework of the seven "Cs" of Corporate Integrity to assess the problems faced by Chiquita Brands in dealing with extortion by left-wing guerilla and right wing paramilitary groups in Colombia from 1989 to 2004. Both types of organizations used Chiquita payments to engage in terrorist activity in Colombia. The extended and systematic dealings with these groups were antithetical to the process of corporate responsibility to which the firm was committed during the timeframe of 1998–2004, revealing a (...) "divided self" in which major corporate activities diverged dramatically from the core values of the firm. Maak's framework provides a useful tool in analyzing the division and the potential for applying lessons from the case to our understanding of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Integrative Social Contracts Theory is a popular framework to assist managers in making decisions on international moral dilemmas. Although the theory has been praised for its comprehensiveness and sophistication, commentators have raised concerns regarding the justification and identification of substantive hypernorms, fundamental moral principles valid across cultures. This paper introduces the deliberative test, a new method for testing the cross-cultural validity of ethical norms in ISCT. The test relies on the concept of Deliberative Capacity, arising from new developments in system-level (...) deliberative democracy research, which studies deliberation at the level of national societies and over time. Based on this recent stream of research, the deliberative test has the potential of providing better guidance for managers to decide which norms to follow in case of conflicting standards between home and host countries. (shrink)