This paper argues that the personal interview method is particularly appropriate for the kind of exploratory and complicated theory-building research that ethical decision-making, as a topic, represents at present. In doing so, it examines the key tasks of the ethics researcher, the suitability of interviews for obtaining the kind of data needed to accomplish these tasks, and the ensuing problems faced by the interview methodologist. It concludes with suggestions for enhancing the validity and reliability of interview-based ethics research.

Issues of privacy and employee health screening rank as two of the most important ethical concerns organizations will face in the next five years. Despite the increasing numbers of social scientists researching personal privacy and the current focus on workplace privacy rights as one of the most dynamic areas of employment law, the concept of privacy remains relatively abstract. Understanding how the courts define privacy and use the expectation of privacy standards is paramount given the strategic importance of the law (...) as a legal socializing agent. This article reports on two federal court decisions involving employer drug and HIV testing whose determinations relied on assumptions about the psychological dimensions of privacy. How the courts define privacy, the outcome of this definition and the ethical ramifications as it affects the employee/employer relationship are discussed. (shrink)

Using 94 published empirical articles in academic journals as a data base, this paper provides a critical review of the methodology employed in the study of ethical beliefs and behavior of organizational members. The review revealed that full methodological detail was provided in less than one half of the articles. Further, the majority of empirical research articles expressed no concern for the reliability or validity of measures, were characterized by low response rates, used convenience samples, and did not offer a (...) theoretic framework, hypotheses, or a definition of ethics. Several recommendations, including a reviewer rating form addressing methodological decisions and inclusion of methodologists on the review panel, are offered to improve methodological rigor in published ethics research. (shrink)

The FASB in its Conceptual Framework has set high principles in the ethics of standard-setting in accounting. This paper concentrates on what the FASB calls the cost/benefit constraint, i.e., the commitment to setting an accounting standard only when the benefits of the standard exceeds the costs of that standard toall stakeholders. This constraint is supposed to take precedence over other concerns, such as neutrality (freedom from bias) of account information.The major conclusion of this paper is that a conflict exists between (...) the FASB's commitment and its practice. There is no evidence that the FASB has always made a costs and benefits judgement with respect to proposed standards. In the cases when such a judgement is made, the FASB discounts social costs; therefore, it is not considering costs to all stakeholders. At the same time the FASB discounts social costs, it seems to have an undue concern for standards that do not increase the volatility of net income. The Conceptual Framework explicitly defines costs as the costs to society as a whole. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between environmental scarcity, organization size, and board composition with measures of financial and social performance. All three correlates were found to be related to both measures of performance and the hypotheses were largely supported. Anomalous relationships, however, were found between organizational size and social performance as well as outsider representation and financial performance. This study demonstrates that normative explorations focusing only on financial performance can lead to misleading conclusions about organizational effectiveness.