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Fences Outside Fences: The Uses of Heroic Marginality in Ethical Behavior

The Next Phase of Business Ethics: Celebrating 20 Years of REIO

ISBN: 978-1-83867-005-4, eISBN: 978-1-83867-161-7

Publication date: 4 September 2019

Abstract

Despite the existence of a variety of approaches to the understanding of behavioral and managerial ethics in organizations and business relationships generally, knowledge of organizing systems for fidelity remains in its infancy. We use halakha, or Jewish law, as a model, together with the literature in sociology, economic anthropology, and economics on what it termed “middleman minorities,” and on what we have termed the Landa Problem, the problem of identifying a trustworthy economic exchange partner, to explore this issue.

The article contrasts the differing explanations for trustworthy behavior in these literatures, focusing on the widely referenced work of Avner Greif on the Jewish Maghribi merchants of the eleventh century. We challenge Greif’s argument that cheating among the Magribi was managed chiefly via a rational, self-interested reputational sanctioning system in the closed group of traders. Greif largely ignores a more compelling if potentially complementary argument, which we believe also finds support among the documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza as reported by Goitein: that the behavior of the Maghribi reflected their deep beliefs and commitment to Jewish law, halakha.

Applying insights from this analysis, we present an explicit theory of heroic marginality, the production of extreme precautionary behaviors to ensure service to the principal.

Generalizing from the case of halakha, the article proposes the construct of a deep code, identifying five defining characteristics of such a code, and suggests that deep codes may act as facilitators of compliance. We also offer speculation on design features employing deep codes that may increase the likelihood of production of behaviors consistent with terminal values of the community.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Nancy Kurland, Manuel London, Scott Eckers, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We are especially grateful to one reviewer who wrote a paper-length review filled with extremely thoughtful, helpful observations, and not a few corrections that we greatly appreciated the opportunity to fix. This reviewer certainly built us a fence outside our fence and enabled us to write a much better paper. We would also like to thank the editors, Howard Harris and Michael Schwartz, for being willing to consider and publish a paper whose content is unusual, though the research question it addresses – the problem of identifying and maintaining fidelity in business relationships – is not unusual at all. Any remaining errors are most certainly ours. Scholarship support from the David Berg Family Fund partially supported one of the authors during this research, and is gratefully acknowledged.

Citation

Mitnick, B.M. and Lewison, M. (2019), "Fences Outside Fences: The Uses of Heroic Marginality in Ethical Behavior", Schwartz, M., Harris, H. and Comer, D.R. (Ed.) The Next Phase of Business Ethics: Celebrating 20 Years of REIO (Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations, Vol. 21), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 103-156. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-209620190000021011

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited