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This study aims to focus on the purpose and legitimacy of business, notably, the organizational purpose, the conventional view that the purpose of business is to optimize the returns to shareholders, and the emerging view that organizations serve multiple purposes including economic returns.

This study applies Habermas’s discourse ethics to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stakeholder management (SHM) and argues that discourse ethics is a balanced philosophical approach, which can effectively address the limitations of CSR and SHM.

The analysis demonstrates that discourse ethics is a distinctive philosophical approach to ethical theory and has high relevance to the field of CSR and SHM.

The discursive approach to CSR and SHM is unique because it allows assimilating various ethical situations – from pragmatic to normative – under one theoretical framework. The potential of the proposed approach is illustrated through a thorough discussion of its application to CSR and SHM.

The purpose of this paper is to get a deeper understanding how not-for-profit organizations (NPOs) discursively legitimize their corporate engagement through cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) in general, and particularly how they construct legitimacy for partnering with firms involved in the commodification of water. The paper seeks to shed light on the values embedded in these discursive accounts and the kind of societal effects and power relations they generate, and the authors are particularly interested in understanding the role of modernity in shaping their responsibilities (or lack of them) via various technologies and practices

Drawing on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995), the authors analyze the discursive accounts of three water-related CSPs involving the three biggest bottled water producers in the world (Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Danone) and three major non-profits (The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the World Wildlife Foundation and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

The NPO’s legitimate their corporate engagement in the water CSPs through the use of two global discourses: global governance discourse and the global climate crisis discourse. Relief from responsibility is achieved through three processes: replacement of moral with technical responsibility, denial of proximity and the usage of intermediaries to whom responsibility is outsourced.

This paper explores the processes of legitimizing accounts for CSPs, particularly focusing on NPO discourse and their use of CSR elements and the consequences of such discursive constructs, and this has received little to no attention in previous research.

Critically examines the ways in which the boundaries of business ethics are being established within business schools, consulting firms and corporations. Contrasts this official discourse on ethics with an alternative, more socially informed, and potentially disruptive approach to the ethics of business.

Communication ethics, this paper argues, is a discipline ready for application to communication management and is particularly relevant as we enter an “age of information”. With a moral foundation firmly set in the social and human sciences, communication ethics offers managers a means to face unpredictable futures with greater certainty and purpose. This paper outlines an approach in which all decision making and its communication are understood as having an ethical grounding. Such an application empowers managers to act with integrity across the spectrum of their varied communication roles: through management and internal communications, public affairs and marketing; in advertising, media and publishing, and in the use of information technology. Positioned independently from the professional bodies of communication, an interdisciplinary ethics offers practitioners skills and moral frameworks that can be shared across professions and used to compare and evaluate their practice. This paper concludes by presenting a model of communication ethics that individual managers can use to prescribe a more sensitive and dynamic human‐ethical environment.

The aim of the study is threefold: understanding the interconnections amongst visual and verbal multimodal communication strategies used in food discourse; identifying the themes of celebrity chef's food discourse with respect to pro-environmental behaviour; and providing a methodological framework to visually analyse food-themed videos.

This study uses mise-en-scène and critical discourse and multimodal analyses to gain insights on food discourse from 20 videos shared by a Michelin starred chef on social media platforms.

Results show that a pro-environmental cooking philosophy challenges the normative discourse on food and educates general audiences and foodies alike. Mise-en-scène and discourse analyses of Instagram visual content reveal that leftovers are central to the ethical message and are intertwined – through the aesthetic of the videos-with concepts of inclusivity, diversity and nourishment.

Chefs, and restaurants, are encouraged to recognise their responsibility as role models, thus able to influence the societal production of food discourse.

The findings provide new insights into the role of a celebrity chef in promoting sustainable food preparation and consumption.

The paper aims to integrate central ideas about corporate ethics into an overall framework of corporate governance in modern market economies. A proposal for an adequate understanding of corporate ethics is outlined and, with this understanding as a background, problems of justification and implementation of corporate ethics are to be discussed.

In its philosophical part, the paper draws heavily on ideas developed around the German philosophical school of “methodological constructivism” (not to be confused with “radical constructivism”) which goes back to the works of Lorenzen, Mittelstraß, Kambartel, Gethmann, Janich, Wohlrapp et al. and which unfolds and defends a concept which C.F. Gethmann proposed to designate as “cultural pragmatism” as against the concept of “natural pragmatism” which originated in the USA. In its management part the paper relies on an interpretive approach to understand (reconstruct) the “raison d'être” of the private corporation in today's market economies and its implications for management and management theory.

The process of justification of norms, intended to give useful orientation to our common life, must start on the pragmatic (instead of the semantic) level by reconstructing those basic differences and notions which have (thus far) proven as being successful for the coordination human actions. This is in our case the difference between peaceful conflict resolution (which is dialogic in character) and the use of power (in its manyfold forms). Corporate ethics is, thus, understood here as a dialogical concept which contributes to the public interest (and national law) of making peace in and between societies more stable, and this by peacefully solving such conflicts with corporate stakeholders which result (or may result) from the choice of means (strategy) with which a corporation tries to make profits. It is in this capacity that corporate ethics adds a second dimension to the economic responsibility of management of private corporations which is to make sufficient profits (for the firm to survive under competitive conditions). This second dimension is part of what is called today corporate social responsibility. Integrating corporate ethics into the management process (planning, organizing, staffing, directing, control) requires that the principle of “primacy of corporate ethics” dominates all decisions and activities of the corporation, especially in dilemma situations.

The paper is part of the old dispute (in management theory, company law, etc.) about the “modern corporation and private property” stimulated (anew) through the seminal work of Berle/Means as early as 1932 and, later on, through institutional economics (“corporate governance”). It contributes to this discussion the proposal to integrate some (new) philosophical ideas of “cultural pragmatism” (a term proposed by the German philosopher C.F. Gethmann to mark the difference to the well‐known “natural pragmatism” which originated in the USA) into management theory; moreover, some steps are made towards a conceptional framework of corporate ethics with the aim in mind to gain a new understanding of the relationship between private business and the public interest.

In recent years, Australian minerals companies have increasingly considered Aboriginal communities to be “stakeholders”, suggesting that new practices of respect have superseded past colonial practices of dispossession, and apparently challenging neoliberal ideology. The increasing pervasiveness of the term “community engagement” exemplifies this apparent transformation. However, in common with the similar interdiscursive notions, “sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility” (CSR), the meaning of “community engagement” may be contestable. In this case study of a minerals‐processing site in eastern Australia, discourses of “community engagement” among company staff and local indigenous community members are critically compared. The overall aim is to illuminate discursive tensions and multiple subjectivities among participants' assumptions and worldviews.

Broadly speaking, the paper uses a discourse analytic approach to demonstrate how apparently rational processes are contestable, unstable and discursively constructed. Using transcripts of interviews with 12 indigenous community members, and five company staff, the study firstly describes participants' conceptual relationships and identifies the discursive formations from which participants draw. Using closer textual analysis, it then investigates how participants' meanings and worldviews are constituted through discursively produced texts.

The paper finds that both company and community participants interdiscursively draw on competing discourses, but sometimes they do so in different ways. Most notably, company participants implicitly see indigeneity as static, non‐negotiable and non‐problematic, while community participants view indigeneity as inextricably bound up in identity, land and respect. Furthermore, participants have competing understandings of notions such as development, industry and money.

Concepts such as “sustainable development”, “CSR” and now “community engagement” are often cited as evidence that corporations are responding adequately to criticisms regarding their historical misdemeanours. The implicit assumption is that the contemporary capitalism can satisfactorily address social concerns. Yet, this study suggests that it does so by internalising antithetical discourses, thereby neutralising opposition, and maintaining both capitalism's legitimacy and colonialism's power relations. Thus, the capacity to challenge assumptions underlying the colonial‐capitalist project may be constrained by historical relations of power.

As Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) proliferate, calls have emerged for ethical reflection. Ethics guidelines have played a central role in this respect. While quantitative research on the ethics guidelines of AI/Big Data has been undertaken, there has been a dearth of systematic qualitative analyses of these documents.

Aiming to address this research gap, this paper analyses 70 international ethics guidelines documents from academia, NGOs and the corporate realm, published between 2017 and 2020.

The article presents four key findings: existing ethics guidelines (1) promote a broad spectrum of values; (2) focus principally on AI, followed by (Big) Data and algorithms; (3) do not adequately define the term “ethics” and related terms; and (4) have most frequent recourse to the values of “transparency,” “privacy,” and “security.” Based on these findings, the article argues that the guidelines corpus exhibits discernible utilitarian tendencies; guidelines would benefit from greater reflexivity with respect to their ethical framework; and virtue ethical approaches have a valuable contribution to make to the process of guidelines development.

The paper provides qualitative insights into the ethical discourse surrounding AI guidelines, as well as a concise overview of different types of operative translations of theoretical ethical concepts vis-à-vis the sphere of AI. These may prove beneficial for (applied) ethicists, developers and regulators who understand these guidelines as policy.

The evaluation of information systems (IS) is a major concern of business, and a variety of approaches have been developed to tackle the issue. These approaches vary in their use and usefulness, yet few consider or incorporate ethical aspects of the process and the outcomes. A framework for assessing the ethics of information systems evaluation approaches is developed and investigated. It is argued that ethical issues are an important and unavoidable feature of IS evaluation, despite their lack of consideration. A framework is developed that demonstrates that ethical considerations are implicit in the concept of evaluation in terms of its purposes, its processes and its involvement of people. Concludes by considering how evaluation approaches might be extended to include a more substantial ethical content.

This paper aims to focus on accounting for human rights. It explores the validity of conflicting theoretical perspectives on accounting and their ability to reduce the gap between accounting and accountability for human rights.

This study relies on the notion of topos to develop a pragmatic constructivist perspective on conventional accounting and social accounting with respect to human rights. Applying pragmatic constructivism permits a better understanding and assessment of the ethics underpinning the conventional and social accounting approaches.

The ethics underpinning the topos of conventional accounting offer a reductive explanation of the agency of organizational actors, so inhibiting moral and social responsibility. Furthermore, the calculative logic that dominates this topos promotes a monovocal form of communication (to shareholders) and translates values per se into instrumental values. By contrast, the social accounting topos sheds new light on the role that accounting may play in detecting human rights violations, by focusing more on communication and social values. However, for this topos to be valid, alternative management practices that go beyond voluntary social reporting need to be further developed.

Human rights accountability is an urgent challenge for companies in today’s society. However, scholars have largely disregarded the role of accounting in the process of holding companies accountable for human rights violations. By questioning the relationship between accounting and human rights, this paper takes a first step towards resolving this issue.