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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

This chapter covers basic concepts, ethical theories, and moral paradigms of corporate ethics for identifying, understanding, and responding to the turbulent market challenges of today. The concept, nature, and domain of ethics, business ethics, managerial ethics, and corporate executive ethics are defined and differentiated for their significance. The domain, scope, and nature of related concepts such as legality, ethicality, morality, and executive spirituality are distinguished and developed. Among normative and descriptive ethical theories that we briefly review and critique here are teleology or utilitarianism, deontology or existentialism, distributive justice, corrective justice, and ethics of malfeasance and beneficence. Other moral theories of ethics such as ethics of human dignity, ethics of cardinal virtues, ethics of trusting relations, ethics of stakeholder rights and duties, ethics of moral reasoning and judgment calls, ethics of executive and moral leadership, and ethics of social and moral responsibility will be treated in a later book. The thrust of this book is positive: despite our not very commendable track record in managing this planet and its resources, our basic questions are: Where are we now? What are we now? Where should we as corporations go, and why? What are the specific positive mandates and metrics to corporate executives to reach that desired destiny? This chapter explores responses to these strategic corporate questions.

This study seeks to explore the relationship between corporate ethical values and person‐organization fit (P‐O fit) and the effects on organization commitment and job satisfaction. Further, it aims to examine the construct of moral intensity as a moderator of the P‐O fit‐commitment relationship as well as the P‐O fit‐job satisfaction relationship.

Using a sample of 489 members of the National Purchasing Association in the USA, a structural model was examined in which it was hypothesized that corporate ethical values would be positively related to person‐organization fit and P‐O fit in turn would be positively related to commitment and job satisfaction. It was further hypothesized that the outcomes associated with P‐O fit would be moderated by moral intensity such that high moral intensity would strengthen the P‐O fit outcomes relationships.

All of the hypotheses were supported.

All data stem from one data source, introducing the possibility of mono‐source bias. Additionally, all scales use self‐reports, introducing the possibility of mono‐method bias.

These results highlight the importance of corporate ethical values and moral intensity in building and maintaining an ethical and committed workforce.

The findings of this study contribute to the ethics and P‐O fit literature by establishing a link between corporate ethical values and P‐O fit. It further construes moral intensity as a subjective variable based on the perceiver rather than an objective characteristic of ethical issues. Moral intensity was found to strengthen the relationships between P‐O fit and satisfaction and P‐O fit and commitment.

This paper aims to explore how directors understand the “how” and “why” of their personal moral values in their task of governing the organisation.

This paper is based on a qualitative study. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews of 33 New Zealand directors.

Three major themes emerged: Directors’ personal moral values are a powerful driver in ethical decision-making of directors; codes of ethics are seen to be effective to the extent that individuals have a strong moral compass; great value is placed on their personal moral code as being consistent with it, defines who they are.

This study reveals how and why directors’ personal ethics are important in their task of governance and demonstrates that they are extremely influential in their ethical decision-making.

Appraisal processes could also make sure this factor is given equal importance along with other skills and competencies. In the area of director selection, proven moral integrity could become a point to investigate prior to the appointment of a director.

There have been very few studies investigating the subjective ethical experience in ethical decision-making. Investigating the antecedents of ethical or unethical outcomes only provides a partial understanding of the ethical experience.

This paper seeks to determine whether family ties and structure correlate with the ethical and moral values that are important underpinnings of economic activities.

The analysis uses data from the World Values Survey (WVS). Given the multilevel nature of the data in a cross-country setting, the paper utilizes a multilevel linear mixed-effects model with maximum likelihood estimation.

Families with strong ties and those with traditional family structures are less tolerant of unethical conduct and have more restrictive moral values than households where ties are weak and the household is not married. There also appears to be a bi-causal relationship in the data.

This paper considers a broad array of values in a cross-country setting and utilizes a multilevel modeling approach that has not been done in studies linking both family ties and structure.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2021-0730.

“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter… It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil.” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West, 1975.

Our paper discusses the need for continued focus on ethical leadership and the importance and benefits of ethical leadership development. We propose integrating ethical leadership development, that uses cognitive development theory, into the Center for Creative Leadership’s Assess, Challenge, and Support (ACS) leader development model to help address the continued failures of ethical leader development. Our extended framework includes values and morals as a component of the model, and ethical organizational culture as its backdrop, thereby incorporating an examination of ethical leadership into each component of the ACS model. We conclude with practical implications and suggestions for future research.

Motivated by the heated discussion with regard to the Chinese milk powder incident, this paper aims to explore the determinants of Chinese managers’ moral judgment. Are Chinese professional managers’ moral judgments on an ethical dilemma influenced by their commitment to the norms and values recognized by a prestigious professional association outside of China? Do Chinese managers’ moral development and level of relativism impact their ethical decisions?

A structured survey was conducted, generating 544 valid responses from Chinese managers.

The results showed that moral maturity and relativism, independently and together, were significantly related to Chinese managers’ moral judgment on a hypothetical business dilemma, though no significant effect was found for their commitment to ethics codes.

The findings confirm the important role of moral development and relativism in Chinese mangers’ moral judgment and suggest the need for further research on the impact of professional ethics codes.

This paper explores why and how, and in what context, individuals' accounting of self, ethics and morality and self-knowledge of the limits of accountability can frame their account giving and judging in an organisational formal performance evaluation process.

Building upon the Butlerian notions of accountability as advanced by Messner (2009) and Roberts (2009), the authors conducted a qualitative field study at a Vietnamese public university, involving face-to-face interviews, observation of performance evaluation meetings and examination of archival documents.

The authors found that individuals experience conflicting ethical and moral values when they rely on their self-knowledge of accountability (the ability to self-account) in their account giving and judging in the university's formal academic performance evaluation process. In addition, the authors found that when individuals want to provide the best account to the account demander, their understanding of their ability to self-account and the formal organisational accountability process influence their views on what authentic account giving means. As a result, enhanced ethics-to-others has the potential to be an ethical burden and may not lead to authentic or beyond minimum accounting of “self”. Yet, in the Vietnamese socio-cultural and political context within which the university operates, and in the situation of ethical and moral conflicts in self-accountability, the authors found evidence of individuals' self-accountability behaviours that is based on the co-existence of a sense of responsibility to others and self-knowledge of the limits of accountability.

Although this study was limited to one Vietnamese public university, its findings enhance the knowledge about how individual ethical and moral values, self-knowledge of the limits of accountability and the formal organisational accountability process connect with each other in the socio-cultural and political context within which an organisation operates.

The study highlights the role of the context of local socio-cultural norms and values and of physical social interaction in developing the sense of connection to others, which influences the way individuals' ethical and moral values are mobilised to shape account-giving and judging behaviours.

The emphasis on the role of the sense of connection to others on personal accountability and the emphasis on physical, face-to-face interaction in developing sense of connection to others leads to an interesting issue regarding the sense of connection in the virtual social interaction setting, which has become increasingly popular globally, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and its implication for the use of personal ethical and moral values in organisational accountability practices.

Adding to the conversation on how a formal organisational accountability process can be effective, this study identified (1) the unpredictable outcomes of using ethics as rules for accountability practices due to potentially conflicting ethical values; (2) the diverse understandings of self-accounting, leading to different ideas of authentic accounting; and (3) the possibility of moral accountability behaviours based on the co-existence of a sense of connection to others and an understanding of the limits of accountability.

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.