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Environmental ethics has become an established subject of philosophy in recent decades in response to the contemporary environmental crisis. This paper aims to provide an overview of the key theories and concepts and critically evaluate the extent of their application in tourism studies.

The paper is based on a systematic literature review of published academic papers that link environmental ethics to tourism. It subsequently attempts to provide a comprehensive review of what is currently a nascent field of research enquiry to comprehend and evaluate the relevance and implications of environmental ethics for tourism. Using a theoretical ethical framework of libertarian extensionism, eco-holism and the conservation ethic, moral debates that arise from their use in tourism are analysed. As a field of academic study that presently lacks research enquiry areas for future research investigation are subsequently identified.

The paper forms a part of the “State of the Art” series and subsequently does not present empirical findings. However, through critical evaluation, it demonstrates the complexity of the application of environmental ethics to tourism through differing perspectives within the subject and when nature’s interests are juxtaposed to concerns of anthropic ethics. To develop a stronger environmental ethics amongst tourism stakeholders that recognises the intrinsic value of nature, it is recommended that ecological virtue and literacy are key elements in this process.

The originality of the paper rests in providing a comprehensive overview of the existing level of application of the theories of environmental ethics to tourism; the appliance of theory to debates of tourism’s environmental challenges; and identifying research directions to help fill knowledge gaps.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a functional framework encapsulating a wide range of contributions to the ongoing debate on virtue as a critical dimension of contemporary organizations. In so doing, the authors elaborate and develop an encompassing framework that is in a position to capture the diversity of research in this very field.

Extant literature on virtue in organizational settings is properly categorized through a taxonomy articulated around the potential foci, as well as loci of virtuous behavior. Virtuousness denotes an ethical attribute of managers, leaders or employees and as such, it may be situated at the micro-individual, meso-organizational or macro-societal level, respectively.

Based on the potential foci and loci of virtuous behavior, the paper differentiates between virtuous managerial, leaders’ and employees’ attitudes on one hand, and virtuous management and leadership development, as well as virtuous employee training on the other. Furthermore, ethically grounded managerial initiatives and leaders’ responsibilities to further the common good are entwined with endeavors to transform employees into virtuous corporate citizens affirming organizational ethicality.

By identifying both targeted group and level of analysis, organizations can effectively design and implement interventions promoting virtuousness as a valued end in itself.

The paper introduces a framework that can help integrate varying trends on organizational virtuousness that substantially differ in terms of both scope and perspective. In addition, the taxonomy will facilitate both researchers and practitioners to better navigate into the dispersed, and ultimately fragmented streams of literature on the role of virtue in business environments.

The view is taken that the study of diverse cultures can contribute to the development of environmental accounting and reporting. The focus is upon seeking to articulate insights from three indigenous cultures: the Australian Aboriginal, the Maori and the Native American. These cultures, alive today, provide relevant insights for those concerned with challenging mainstream and Western practices and seeking to develop alternatives. Attention is focused on these insights and it is hoped that further research will be stimulated.

Niche products and environmental ethics.

The case is suitable for undergraduate students who have some understanding of competitive advantage in emerging economies, of niche products, the resource-based perspective and environmental ethics.

The case concerns the Indonesian coffee industry, specifically the production of Kopi Luwak, a coffee that involves a type of local wild animal as an essential part of the process. The case outlines a typical problem for a new leader who has to start his tenure with a creditable performance. The company is a resource-based one that has to manage a potential risk of violating environmental ethics.

The case reveals the value of the international value chain for a cup of coffee. Through investigating the intersection between business feasibility and conservation issues, students should be able to understand what are appropriate business opportunities with environmental ethics considerations.

Teaching notes are available; consult the librarian for access.

This paper aims to explore the biodiversity and threatened species extinction reporting of 54 biodiversity-indexed companies on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX). The primary objectives are to explore the rhetoric of biodiversity disclosure as a practice of virtue ethics and to identify instances of emancipatory extinction accounts on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.

The research sample comprised 54 biodiversity-indexed companies on the IDX. A content analysis of the narrative text of their annual and sustainability reports for 2020 was conducted to discern the rhetoric of biodiversity disclosure as an ethical practice using Aristotle’s rhetoric (ethos, logos and pathos). The identification of extinction accounts listed on the IUCN Red List was conducted based on criteria established in the conceptual framework of Atkins and Maroun (2018).

All 54 companies used ethos, logos and pathos in their biodiversity disclosure as a virtuous practice. These disclosures improve the tone of corporate communications and enhance accountability and transparency. Low-profile companies showed a greater propensity for reporting biodiversity disclosures compared to high-profile companies. Additionally, the authors identified 14 companies informing extinction accounts that qualify as emancipatory accounts, with high-profile companies disclosing extinction more frequently than low-profile ones. Emancipatory accounting highlighted species such as turtles, orangutans, elephants, rhinos, turtles and medicinal plants. These accounts are intended as a form of accountability to the species.

The limitation of this research is the observation of annual reports in one period. Future studies can add more observation periods to see the consistency of companies in disclosing biodiversity and extinction.

Companies can adopt the rhetorical strategy of ethos, logos and pathos in disclosing their biodiversity. For policymakers, it is important to establish regulations to encourage companies to disclose biodiversity. The implications for accountants, to contribute more to biodiversity and extinction reporting, considering that previously sustainability accounting reporting was mostly carried out by nonaccountants.

Regarding social implications, emancipatory accounts aimed at preventing the extinction of animals such as birds, orangutans and rhinos will have significant social and natural impacts.

This research represents the first use of Aristotelian rhetoric and virtue to understand biodiversity disclosure as virtue rhetoric and extinction disclosure as emancipatory accounting. This rhetoric is a benevolent persuasion tool that can shape the audience’s thinking and behavior in a more ethical manner concerning biodiversity issues. It provides evidence of the role of accounting as a social and moral practice, which is particularly relevant in the face of a complex reality and increasing concerns, notably regarding the threat of biodiversity loss and extinction.

This chapter is an exploratory study of business ethics as it relates to family firms; it primarily aims to explore virtue ethics as an alternative proposal for the ethical concerns that family firms face in their management, thus overcoming the limitations of relevant business ethics approaches and integrating them into an overarching paradigm. Ethics can be classified into three main streams: (1) deontology, (2) utilitarianism, and (3) virtue ethics. The former two approaches have been widely used in the realm of business and family firms for many years and they tend to instrumentalize ethics for business purposes. Yet, they are mostly powerless to explain and promote the ethical concerns surrounding the family firm’s culture. Virtue ethics regained philosophical interest in the second half of the twentieth century, shifting the focus of morality from “the right thing to do” to the “best way to live.” By bringing together two consolidated research fields, family firms and virtue ethics, this chapter contributes a rich perspective to current research in both fields and opens up new ways of answering many of the cultural questions that family firms bring to the table.

This study investigates what causes businesses to increase their environmental stewardship beyond the governmental standards. This “beyond compliance behavior” is examined by analyzing the influence of organizational slack and institutional pressures in the European paper and paperboard industry. Beyond compliance behavior is measured as the adoption of a sustainable forestry certificate issued by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The longitudinal (10-year period) dataset consists of adoption events per company, their business characteristics and historic socio-economic data per region in the respective European countries. Examination was done by means of an event history analysis using the program “R.” The results show differences between antecedents of compliance and beyond compliance behavior. The authors discuss the results in the light of institutional and stakeholder theories. Due to institutional shifts in environmental demands, adoption of an FSC certificate has become an off-the-shelf compliance answer to legitimacy issues disguised as a progressive environmental stewardship program.

This chapter deals with global sustainability, in its old and modern concepts, typologies, and theories. Most concepts of sustainability, we contend, are anthropocentric, a self-serving attitude that believes in the utmost superiority of man over the rest of the nonhuman universe, which seemingly privileges humans to use, extract, and exploit planetary resources for industrialization and infrastructure development and presumably lead to human growth and prosperity (the Anthropocene). The cost of this however is terrestrial depletion, deterioration, degradation, and decadence that manifest in the current global phenomena of global warming, global climate change, Arctic meltdowns, ocean acidity, massive deforestation, and global carbon footprints, which have collectively rendered human habitability on this earth drastically reduced and jeopardized. In this context, we review the timeline (1992–2022) of the United Nations' sustainability negotiations and accords, several nonanthropocentric and nonanthropomorphic conceptualizations of global sustainability such as Leopold Aldo's land ethic, deep ecology of Naess and associates, Thomas Berry's ecozoic ecology (updated by Spethmann). Combining the best nonanthropocentric developments, we propose a holistic concept of “natural sustainability,” more consonant with critical thinking, which mandates reduced or disciplined use of planetary resources such that Nature can regenerate and renew herself.

Natural sustainability advocates a more fruitful integrative ecozoic paradigm of “sustainability centrism,” which seeks cosmic sustainability of Mother Nature for herself as an end in herself, and we spell out its implications for organizational science and corporate responsibility as an extended global community.

This chapter runs into three parts. Part I: Major Sustainability Types versus Ecozoic Worldview of Cosmic Sustainability; Part II: Conceptualization of Natural Sustainability and Its Justification based on Environmental Ethics, Ecozoic Sustainability, and Deep Ecology; and Part III: Capturing Nature as Nature and Her Moral Imperatives for Understanding Natural Sustainability. Toward the end of this chapter, we also discuss managerial implications and directions for future research.

Wineries today are faced with the prospect of having to include environmental sustainability into their practices but implementation can be hard, complicated or even undesired. This research aims to examine firm features, specifically winery size and foreign direct investment, as potential sources of variability regarding environmental sustainability attitudes and practices.

Questionnaires were administered via telephone interviews with 63 wineries in France. Production surface and wine activities in other countries were the independent variables examined as potentially predicting environmental sustainability attitudes and practices, leading to competitive positioning and perceived firm success.

The findings clearly show that bigger wineries are more likely to practice environmental sustainability, but they do not necessarily have more positive attitudes toward environmental sustainability. For winery managers, firm size and environmental sustainability practices interact because they are perceived to lead to competitive advantages such as augmented product quality and better innovations. Larger firms are also more sensitive to micro pressures emanating from customers, competitors and distributors regarding environmental sustainability. Finally, wineries engaging in foreign direct investments have more positive attitudes toward and engage in more environmental sustainability practices than firms that remain domestic.

Rather than comparing firms that are environmentally sustainable versus firms that are not, this research examined actual firm characteristics that may influence management’s propensity to engage in environmental sustainability practices. This research provides explanations for why there are augmented environmental sustainability practices by larger wineries and the sources of subjective norms encouraging larger wineries, versus smaller wineries, to practice environmental sustainability.