This article explores the motives underlying corporate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis begins with Thomas Dunfee’s Statement of Minimum Moral Obligation (SMMO), which specifies, more precisely than any other contribution to the business ethics canon, the level of corporate beneficence required during a pandemic. The analysis then turns to Milton Friedman’s neoliberal understanding of human nature, critically contrasting it with the notion of stoic virtue that informs the works of Adam Smith. Friedman contends that beneficence should play no (...) role in corporate settings. Smith, by contrast, emphasizes the need for prudence, beneficence and self-command in all human endeavours. The article then uses these competing frameworks to reflect on a published survey of 145 corporate responses to COVID-19. In many of these responses, the benefit to a non-financial stakeholder is clear, while the financial consequence to the firm remains nebulous. This supports the contention that during a pandemic, beneficence provides a more complete explanation of many corporate actions than the profit motive alone. The article contests Friedman’s Chicago School profit imperative and goes beyond Dunfee’s SMMO by endorsing the more full-throated embrace of beneficence and stoic virtue found in the works of Smith. (shrink)

Arguing that psychology and business ethics are best brought together through a multi-level, broad-based agenda, this essay articulates a vision of psychology and business ethics to frame a future research agenda. The essay draws upon work published in JBE, but also identifies gaps where published research is needed, to build upon psychological conceptions of business ethics. Psychological concepts, notably, are not restricted to phenomena “in the head”, but are discussed at the intra-psychic, relational, and contextual levels of analysis. On the (...) basis of this presentation, I discuss future directions for development in psychology and business ethics, including but not limited to studies of personality, emotion, decision making, motivation, and the biological bases of psychology and business ethics. An inclusive approach to these and related areas, it is argued, will both bring about depth of understanding on the psychological bases of business ethics, and allow dialogue across disciplinary areas within JBE. (shrink)

There is an impressive history associated with the evolution of the concept and definition of corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this article, the author traces the evolution of the CSR construct beginning in the 1950s, which marks the modern era of CSR. Definitions expanded during the 1960s and proliferated during the 1970s. In the 1980s, there were fewer new definitions, more empirical research, and alternative themes began to mature. These alternative themes included corporate social performance (CSP), stakeholder theory, and business (...) ethics theory. In the 1990s, CSR continues to serve as a core construct but yields to or is transformed into alternative thematic frameworks. (shrink)

Few novel or emerging infectious diseases have posed such vital ethical challenges so quickly and dramatically as the novel coronavirus SARS‐CoV‐2. The World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern and recently classified Covid‐19 as a worldwide pandemic. As of this writing, the epidemic has not yet peaked in the United States, but community transmission is widespread. President Trump declared a national emergency as fifty governors declared state emergencies. In the coming weeks, hospitals will become overrun, stretched (...) to their capacities. When the health system becomes stretched beyond capacity, how can we ethically allocate scarce health goods and services? How can we ensure that marginalized populations can access the care they need? What ethical duties do we owe to vulnerable people separated from their families and communities? And how do we ethically and legally balance public health with civil liberties? (shrink)

This article presents a three-stage model of how isomorphic mechanisms have shaped corporate social responsibility reporting practices over time. In the first stage, defensive reporting, companies fail to meet stakeholder expectations due to a deficiency in firm performance. In this stage, the decision to report is driven by coercive isomorphism as firms sense pressure to close the expectational gap. In the second stage, proactive reporting, knowledge of CSR reporting spreads and the practice of CSR reporting becomes normatively sanctioned. In this (...) stage, normative isomorphism leads other organizations to look to CSR reporting as a potential new opportunity for achieving the firm’s goals. In the third stage, imitative diffusion, the defensive reporters together with the proactive reporters create a critical mass of CSR reporters that reaches a threshold at which the benefits of CSR reporting begin to outweigh any costs due to mimetic isomorphism. The study finds support for the model in an examination of Fortune 500 firms from 1997 to 2006. (shrink)

This paper carries forward the conceptual clarification of normative theories of business ethics ably begun by Hasnas in the January 1998 issue of BEQ. This paper proposes a normatively neutral framework for discussing and assessing such normative theories. Every normative theory needs to address these seven issues: it needs to specify a moral principle that identifies (1) recommended values and (2) the grounds for accepting those values. It also must specify (3) a decision principle that business people who accept the (...) theory can use. It must determine (4) who the normative theory applies to and (5) whose interests need to be considered. It must also outline (6) in what contexts it applies, and (7) what legal and regulatory structures it assumes. Once clarified, this paper applies the framework to the normative versions of stockholder theory, stakeholder theory, and ISCT. It is concluded that ISCT is the most promising normative theory currently under discussion, but that there are some major issues that ISCT has not dealt with yet. (shrink)

A research instrument is developed and preliminarily validated to formally measure the level of national business ethics activity for any country in the world. The seven dimensions measured include (a) academia, (b) business, (c) social or ethical investment, (d) business ethics organizations, (e) government activity, (f) social activist groups, and (g) media coverage. Results from the validation survey and examples are provided for each of the dimensions. The article concludes with future research directions for the instrument.

Downsizing remains a topic of great interest to both academics and practitioners. Yet, the impact of layoff decisions on perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has hardly been studied. We examine the impact of responsibility of business leaders making these layoff decisions, and characteristics of the downsizing implementation on convergence and divergence in (1) CSR perceptions, (2) victims’ perceptions of fairness, and (3) survivor commitment, in four countries. Using an experimental design, sixteen scenarios were distributed to (1) 163 managers in (...) Estonia, (2) 152 MBA students in India and 125 MBA students in France, and (3) 186 (non-traditional) undergraduate students in the USA. Results suggest that when top managers are attributed with the responsibility for downsizing, the resulting perceptions of CSR are negative. A similar pattern of results is obtained for victims’ perceptions of fairness and survivor commitment. In addition, although there are differences in effect-size based on differences in power distance, these results hold good (are similar) across the four countries, from four different society clusters. We discuss implications, limitations, and future research directions. (shrink)

In this study we seek to determine whether catastrophic events lead to corporate charitable giving unrelated to levels of firm profitability. We examine the issue relative to the corporate philanthropic response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001. Based on a sample of 489 Fortune 500 companies, we find that differences in the extent of corporate contributions following 9/11 are positively and significantly associated with differences in firms' profitability. Further, while the degree of connection to the catastrophic event led to (...) higher levels of giving in comparison to the contributions of less connected firms, differences in the extent of philanthropy are still␣related to short-term profitability for the more connected firms. The study thus provides evidence suggesting that even in the wake of catastrophic events, corporate philanthropic giving is constrained by economic concerns. (shrink)

Carroll shaped the corporate social responsibility discourse into a four-dimensional pyramid framework, which was later adapted to corporate citizenship and sustainability approaches. The four layers of the pyramid—structured from foundation to apex as economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities—drew considerable managerial attention. An important criticism of the economic foundation of the Carroll pyramid concerns the identification and ordering of the four dimensions, which are inadequately justified theoretically. The authors of this article propose an alternative approach that builds on the public (...) value concept, which integrates a microfoundation of psychological research into basic human needs. Drawing on their Swiss Dialogue process, the authors argue that a four-dimensional pyramid does have heuristic value for managers. The advantage of this alternative pyramid logic is that it may be contingently adapted to different cultural contexts, because it allows adaptive internal reordering. (shrink)

Drawing a framework from institutional and legitimacy theory, supplemented by concepts from the accounting literature, this study uses longitudinal crosssectional and cross-national data on over 500 firms listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) to empirically test whether these firms are strategic in their philanthropy as indicated by their measurement of the impact of their philanthropic activities along three dimensions -society, business, and reputation and stakeholder satisfaction. It is predicted that the variables' company size, amount of philanthropic expenditure, region (...) and industry influence the extent to which the various impact dimensions of philanthropy are measured. Though unexpected considering the lack of common practice in impact measurement, it is found that between 62 and 76% of the DJSI firms measure some sort of impact of their philanthropic activities, mostly impact on society and impact on reputation and stakeholder satisfaction. The number of firms that measure impact increases over the years and so does the number of firms that measure multiple dimensions of impact. Consist with our predictions, we find that larger firms and firms with relatively higher philanthropic expenditures are more likely to measure impact. Moreover, firms in the financial sector and firms from Europe and North America are also more likely to measure impact of their philanthropic activities. (shrink)

The literature on the interplay between geographic communities and organizations has largely ignored the role of individual residents. In adopting a meso-perspective, we examine a potentially vital relationship between corporate conduct and pro-social behavior demanding sacrifice from individuals. Drawing on Weber ), we theorize that organizations in a community legitimize personal social conduct in three ways—by serving as role models, imparting norms and values, and routinizing forms of interaction. We study the relationship between corporate social responsibility behavior by local firms (...) and the social distancing of citizens in US counties during the Covid-19 pandemic, a core ethical outcome. We argue and find that the residents of communities in which firms exhibit higher levels of CSR engaged in more SD during the Covid-19 pandemic. This was true when firms were long-established, isomorphic in their CSR, and major employers and vendors. Moreover, CSR relating to the treatment of employees as well as positive and negative extremes in CSR bore especially strong relationships with SD. Implications are drawn for the study of business ethics, as modeled by CSR, as a force for ethical personal behavior and public health in communities. (shrink)