M.B.A. programs in the United States continue to admit foreign students in record numbers, yet we know little about how this cultural diversity may impact the values and ethical decision making behavior of either American or foreign students. The research discussed here examined this issue within the context of a large M.B.A. program where non-U S. citizens comprise over twenty percent of the student population.

Comparisons of U.S. and Asian students supported existing notions about the independent vs. interdependent conceptions of the role of the individual within each culture. However, these differences were not a major factor in explaining the significantly different choices made by U.S. and Asian students in selected decision making vignettes.

There is a moral dimension in all business decisions. When planning a corporate takeover, which substance to use for a product, whether to hire temps or full-time workers, or where to invest, all reflect values and hence moral considerations. It is not enough to change people, we must change the structure. Within the corporate structure it is important to have special divisions dedicated to the implementation of ethics such as internal audit committees. The same might be said about business schools; to enhance ethicality, we need both that all faculty become more committed to moral education and special departments dedicated to it. Also the neo-classsical, deontological paradigm needs to be combined with deontological, social paradigms. The challenge that one cannot teach ethics because it's unclear whose values we are going to teach, can be dealt with by teaching values we all share, and knowledge and respect for those that divide us.

The current literature in business ethics is tending toward an unacknowledged moral pluralism, with all the problems this position entails. An adequate moral pluralism cannot be achieved by a synthesis of existing theoretical alternatives for moral action. Rather, what is needed is a radical reconstruction of the understanding of the moral situation that undercuts some of the traditional dichotomies, provides a solid philosophical grounding which is inherently pluralistic, and offers a new understanding of what it is to think morally. The philosophical position of American pragmatism, as briefly sketched in this paper, offers one such possible reconstruction.

Although a research focus on the increasing involvement of corporations in shaping and maintaining the global rules of the game points out promising avenues for future research, it simultaneously makes clear how little currently established, mostly managerial conceptual frameworks have to offer in making sense of these developments. It is argued that we need to expand the rather restricted perspectives that these frameworks provide, in order to explore new conceptual foundations that will not only enable us to travel the confines of the different disciplines involved with the study of the changing role of business in shaping the global rules of the game, but that can also systematically connect normative and positive research questions at the conceptual level. Three directions for this search for new foundations are briefly explored.

Are there any advantages to thinking and speaking about ethical business in the language of citizenship? We will address this question in part by looking at the possible relevance of a vast literature on individual citizenship that has been produced by political philosophers over the last fifteen years. Some of the central elements of citizenship do not seem to apply straightforwardly to corporations. E.g., “citizenship” typically implies membership in a state and an identity akin to national identity; but this connotation of citizenship is obviously problematic for multinational corporations. However, the language of citizenship does help to focus our attention on various legal and political virtues (or vices) for corporations—topics that have been largely neglected by discussions under other rubrics, such as CSR or sustainability. We finish with an evaluation of the potential benefits and costs of conceptualizing and talking about ethical business practices in the language of citizenship.

Individuals often lie for psychological rewards (e.g., preserving self image and/or protecting others), absent economic rewards. We conducted a laboratory experiment, using a modified dictator game, to identify conditions that entice individuals to lie solely for psychological rewards. We argue that such lies can provide a ready means for individuals to manage others’ impression of them. We investigated the effect of social distance (the perceived familiarity, intimacy, or psychological proximity between two parties) and knowledge of circumstances (whether parties have common or asymmetric information) on the frequency of lying. We found that lying occurs more frequently when social distance is near and that the effect is exacerbated when information is asymmetric. Our theoretical development suggests that, under these conditions, individuals’ need to manage others’ impression is magnified. We discuss the implications of our findings.

In this article, we describe evolutionary psychology and its potential contribution to business ethics research. After summarizing evolutionary theory and natural selection, we specifically address the use of evolutionary concepts in psychology in order to offer alternative explanations of behavior relevant to business ethics, such as social exchange, cooperation, altruism, and reciprocity. Our position is that individuals, groups, and organizations all are affected by similar natural, evolutionary processes, such that evolutionary psychology is applicable at multiple levels of analysis (e.g., individual and group). We introduce a variety of experiments and instruments employed by evolutionary psychologists to illustrate how ethics-relevant cultural norms and practices evolve and are regulated, and to raise the prospect that these experiments and instruments can be useful in future business ethics research.

The distinction between what I call nonelective obligations and discretionary obligations, a distinction that focuses on one particular thread of the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, helps us to identify the obligations that carry over from principals to agents. Clarity on this issue is necessary to identify the moral obligations within “shareholder primacy” (i.e., “shareholder theory”), which conceives of managers as agents of shareholders. My main claim is that the principal-agent relation requires agents to fulfill nonelective obligations, but it does not always require (and sometimes actually prohibits) discharging discretionary obligations. I show that the requirement to fulfill nonelective obligations is more far-reaching than has been acknowledged by most defenders and critics of shareholder primacy. But I also show that managers are not bound by certain discretionary obligations like charity, showing that their moral obligations are more circumscribed than the obligations that apply to human beings in general.

The problem this paper is concerned with is the politics of reforming embedded, parasitic, sometimes predatory, network-based, corruption subsystems. The politics of corruption subsystems is often embedded in social structures sustained by the collective action of interest groups who benefit from the corruption. Therefore, the long-term effectiveness of approaches that focus solely on isolated, individual acts of corruption are limited. The politics of long-term corruption reform can benefit from a combined action-learning and social movement–based collective approach.

The new push to move political issue activity from the federal to the state and local levels—a new New Federalism—has implications for the ethical and political legitimacy of business political activity. While business political activity at the federal level may be both less costly and less risky than when action shifts to states or localities, at the state or local level it is likely to be more visible, and individual firms may be perceived to have more power. Increased corporate power raises questions about the legitimacy of firm involvement in the political process at the state and local levels. The issue of legitimacy is viewed in the context of the literature on political subcultures being used to study state economic development.

Ethics surely matters to people, but to ignore the fact that other things matter as well is to oversimplify human motivation and behavior. Human action is often the ungainly resolution of conflicts between ethical and egotistical impulses, and the challenge for moral psychology is to understand these conflicts and their resolution.

The ethical sensemaking approach stands as an essential alternative to the dominant rational and objectivist paradigm of ethical decision-making in organizations. From this perspective, this research explores the intrapersonal interplay of emotions and reflexivity in ethical sensemaking. We analyzed thirty-seven semi-structured interviews conducted with executive coaches sharing a critical incident about an issue they framed as ethical. Our findings show that their ethical decisions unfolded over a three-phase emotional reflexive sensemaking process, where reflexivity allowed for the management of emotions in the form of emotional awareness, emotional unpacking, and emotional (dis)engagement. Therefore, we portray ethics as a fabric, produced through the knitting of emotions and reflexivity. And, while ethics certainly appear to be produced by the subject, we suggest a reciprocal relationship, whereby the very fabric of ethics contributes to the production of the ethical subject.

Underlying this paper is the conviction that it is of utmost importance that business ethics should indeed become an integral part of business culture in all, and therefore also in developing countries. It is not to be denied that business ethics has to a much larger extent become part of the business culture in developed countries than in developing countries. In this paper, I first of all wish to provide an explanation for the fact that business ethics is fighting an uphill battle in becoming part of the business culture in developing countries. Secondly I want to give a thumbnail sketch of the preconditions that have to be fulfilled in order to stimulate the development of a moral business culture in developing countries. In order to achieve these goals I will focus mainly on Africa, and more specifically on South Africa.

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?

There are over 300 centers for the study of applied ethics in this country—why? The events which face our society today (income and wealth disparity, environmental degradation, etc.) are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beliefs that set our public policy agenda. Our beliefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.

Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call “business science,” e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own unique self in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long.

We extend the behavioral ethics literature to examining emotional labor as an antecedent to unethical behavior. We hypothesize that surface acting is positively associated with unethical behavior. In contrast, we produce competing hypotheses for the relationship between deep acting and unethical behavior. In Study 1, with a field sample of 123 full-time employees, surface acting was positively associated with unethical behavior, and emotional inauthenticity explained some of this relationship. In contrast, deep acting was not associated with unethical behavior. In Study 2, with a field sample of 117 full-time employees, we replicated the effect of surface acting in Study 1 and found a positive relationship between deep acting and unethical behavior via emotional inauthenticity. In Study 3, using a two-wave design, we replicated the results in Study 2 and found perceived fairness strengthens the relationship between surface acting and unethical behavior through emotional inauthenticity.

This essay explains how intangible asset management oriented toward enhancing corporate performance increasingly embeds ethical concerns, primarily to address stakeholder expectations. We discuss how ethical dimensions in intangible asset management may be co-constructed and intertwined in organization-stakeholder interactions to generate collaborative meaning making according to a stakeholder-centric view of the firm. In so doing, we adopt an ethical view that acknowledges that stakeholders beyond the firm have equal status and agency to engage in a social construction process of intangible assets nurtured by ongoing dialogue and reciprocal understanding between organization and stakeholders. The essay concludes by envisioning how the dialogic process of social construction of intangible assets involving both organization and stakeholders is best conceived as a social contract between the two that enacts a cultural bond between intangible assets together with ethical and societal resources that are collectively generated, owned, and maintained.

Anomie is a condition in which normative guidelines for governing conduct are absent. Using survey data from a sample of U.S. manufacturing firms, we explore the impact of internal (cultural) and external (environmental) determinants of organizational anomie. We suggest that four internal organizational factors can generate or suppress organizational anomie, including strategic aggressiveness, long-term orientation, competitor orientation, and strategic flexibility. Similarly, we argue that external contextual factors, including competitive intensity and technological turbulence, can influence organizational anomie. We extend anomie and ethics research by considering the impact of these firm cultural and environmental factors according to whether firms are publicly-traded or privately-held. Findings demonstrate that a number of firm cultural and environmental factors can generate or reduce anomie in firms. Moreover, strategic aggressiveness, long-term orientation, and strategic flexibility influence organizational anomie differently depending on whether the firm is publicly-traded or privately-held. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.

This paper deals with the ethical perceptions of business people and the current state of business ethics in east China. After surveying 800 business people in 59 enterprises and interviewing 42 chief executive officers, chairs and senior managers among them, the following conclusions can be drawn: First of all, business ethics has become a new and popular topic in east China. Second, quite a lot of business people are pessimistic about the ethical standards of their superiors and co-workers, and about the ethical climate of their enterprises. Third, more and more business leaders begin to realize the importance of business ethics. Finally, in east China, the establishment of the market economy and the improvement of business ethics will depend on each other. In short, business people in east China have various ethical perceptions, and the current state of business ethics in east China is also complex and changeable.