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This scholarly work aims to investigate the business career of Alfred J. Kohlberg, an American importer of hand-embroidered handkerchiefs in 1922-1957.

This paper uses archival resources from the National Archives, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the Hoover Institution Archives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Custom Courts records, Japanese Government records and other government documents.

Scholars have focused on how Kohlberg’s political activities paved the way for McCarthyism. The sources of his vast wealth have not received attention. Kohlberg parlayed a 1922 trip to Asia into a highly lucrative importing business specializing in Chinese napery. By 1930, he mostly imported hand-embroidered handkerchiefs for sale in upscale American department stores. He employed as many 12,000 people in his Shantou godown and contracted for the employment of at least 100,000 embroiderers and perhaps many hundreds of thousands more. Despite American Government policy and the wishes of other importers, Japanese occupation authority documents show that Kohlberg negotiated a bribe to keep the port open. This paper concludes that Kohlberg’s business reflected traditional Chinese business organization. While he stressed his patriotic activities during the Second World War, Kohlberg promoted his business interest over the national interest. Finally, the Chaoshan Region prospered by providing the modern world with traditional hand-produced goods.

This work explains how the Chaoshan Region functioned in the global economy. It calls for a deeper examination of this entire industry in China and around the world.

This work uses documents from multiple archives, including Japan and the USA. It also includes declassified documents from the Federal Bureau Investigation. This work constitutes a template for international business history.

This paper aims to provide a new methodological approach by applying Neo-Kohlbergian considerations in historical context to an analysis of the late speaker of Deutsche Bank Dr Alfred Herrhausen’s moral reasoning process.

A wide range of methods is used, including analyzing Herrhausen interviews, biographies, speeches, statements and further written material, as well as interviews of his contemporaries conducted by this researcher to derive the most accurate posthumous depiction of Herrhausen’s moral reasoning.

The study reveals that Herrhausen was indeed a person of significant moral character when judged by his activist stance on several highly salient global issues.

The thought construct Kohlbergian scholars have been providing is deeply imbedded in a tradition of continental philosophy. While the underlying philosophy in Kohlberg’s cognitive moral development model provides much more than is often considered when used in the field of business ethics, discourse ethicists still consider Kohlberg’s ideas a cornerstone of their philosophical ventures.

Herrhausen has become an iconic figure in Germany, often used by politicians as an aspirational standard and corrective to the current management elites’ mishaps. Internationally, he played an important role as a global manager on the political stage by arguing for a Chapter 11 solution for highly indebted countries during the late 1980s.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of personal and moral intensity variables on specific processes, namely, ethical recognition, ethical judgment and ethical intention, involved in the ethical decision making (EDM) of accounting professionals.

A structured questionnaire containing four vignettes of ethical dilemmas is used in the paper to obtain data from 329 accounting professionals. The data are analyzed using Pearson correlation matrix, independent sample t-test, one-way analyses of variance and multiple regression estimation techniques.

The findings of the paper suggest that age, economic status, upbringing, moral idealism and relativism, magnitude of consequence and social consensus are significant determinants of the EDM process of accounting professionals.

The paper provides evidence to guide accounting regulatory bodies on ways to strengthen extant measures that ensure strict compliance with ethics codes among accounting professionals in Nigeria.

The paper provides support for Kohlberg’s cognitive reasoning and moral development theory and Rest’s EDM theoretical model, which will aid the development of a structured curriculum for accounting ethics instruction in Nigeria, as hitherto, there is yet to be a provision for a stand-alone ethics course in the undergraduate accounting programs in Nigeria.

To develop theoretical frameworks to discuss high profile scandals, where responsible accountants and other executives could have saved themselves, many investors and others severe personal and financial loss by considering the costs of improper or immoral behavior. These cases emphasize the importance of ethics driving accountants' decisions.

The paper discusses these ethical lapses in light of applying Kohlberg's models, biblical examples from the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, and other ethical systems.

The paper shows that this concept is not new. Throughout history, people have taken actions that cost them their freedom, their money and most importantly, their good names. Upon reflection, many of these people are astounded at the seriousness of their action given what little they had to gain from continued involvement. In reinforcing lessons that should be learned from cases of business malfeasance and highlighting many well‐known accounting and other scandals, we develop recurrent themes in the nature of business scandals and show that many people are responsible for or complicit in the malfeasance. These individuals could have prevented the fraud or minimized any adverse impact if they had considered their behavior ex ante. We show that the employees portrayed demonstrated very low‐levels of ethical development and seemed to underestimate the probability of getting caught and the resulting punishment. We also elicit many reasons from several viewpoints for not becoming involved in fraud.

It is hoped that the next generation of business leaders and middle level staff alike will consider the results/messages of this paper when faced with ethical dilemmas.

The paper concludes that the best internal control in a business structure remains the hiring and training of morally upstanding employees and managers who recognize the values of their good names before temptations arise. Incentive plans can encourage ethical behavior.

Practitioners must consider fully the potential consequences of their actions no matter how small the perceived probability of a bad outcome.

A multidimensional understanding of human nature based on biology can provide a very useful framework of analysis and bring some understanding and coherence to the very fragmented perspectives within moral, political, and legal philosophy. A useful four-part framework of analysis can be based on the evolution of the brain as described by Paul MacLean (1973, 1990) and Sir John Eccles (1989). A similar pattern of development of our mental and moral capacities through experience in childhood was also described by Jean Piaget (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958) and Lawrence Kohlberg (1981). This multidimensional understanding of human nature considers the individual, social, rational, and metaphysical perspectives. Because this four-part multidimensional understanding of human nature is based on a naturalized epistemology related to the development of our mental capacities in both evolution and through experience, this pattern can be seen across a wide variety of disciplines. Medical ethics, US constitutional democracy, and legal philosophy will be used as examples of the usefulness of this multidimensional understanding of human nature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of selected sociodemographic variables in the ethical decision-making (EDM) process of professional accountants in Nigeria.

The study obtained data from 329 professional accountants with the aid of a structured questionnaire containing four dilemmatic ethical vignettes. The data were analysed using Kendall correlation, Kruskal–Wallis and Jonckheere–Terpstra tests.

The results revealed that upbringing, especially parental discipline, and education are significant sociodemographic determinants of EDM. Religion and experience played little or no significant role in predicting accountants’ EDM in the face of ethical dilemmas.

The study used a questionnaire to measure its variables, which may bias and somewhat inflate the findings. Hence, caution should be applied regarding its conclusion.

The evidence in this study could stimulate policy change and review to include a separate ethics course in the accounting education curriculum, which could enhance the ethics training of future accountants. This is important for countries like Nigeria, where no provision is made for a discrete ethics course in the curriculum for accounting under-graduate education.

The study draws attention to the fact that ethical conduct among professionals and in society could be enhanced through proper upbringing and formal education.

The study adds some uniqueness in focusing on professional accountants in Nigeria, a developing country with high corruption profile and weak government institutions, and, as such, contributes to the limited research output on accounting ethics in developing countries.

This study examines the use of deception in a dyadic negotiation context. Two independent variables—the salience of ethical standards regarding deception and the availability of alternatives to agreement— were predicted to influence negotiators' willingness to deceive. It was hypothesized the presence of ethical standards would reduce deception, even when organizational reward contingencies and other external pressures favored its use. Competing hypotheses regarding the effects of alternatives were also proposed A role‐play exercise describing a negotiation between an automotive manufacturer and a supplier of component parts was used to test the study hypotheses. Eighty MBA students participated in the exercise. Results showed that the salience of ethical standards decreased the use of deception by negotiators and led to more equal agreements. However, contrary to expectations, the availability of an alternative had no effect on deception. Implications for theory and practice are discussed and future research directions are offered.