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The purpose of this paper is to explore the impacts of product harm, consumers' product knowledge and firms' negative information disclosure on ethical evaluation of a firm, especially, the moderating effects of product knowledge and negative information disclosure.

A 3×2×2 between‐subject design with three levels of product harm, two levels of product knowledge, and two treatments of negative information was used in this study. The experimental product is diet food.

The findings reveal that the level of product harm affects consumers' ethical evaluation. Furthermore, the individual's ethical evaluation will influence his or her purchase intention. The main effect of subjective knowledge is significant while its moderating effect is not significant. It is also found that the negative information disclosure will lower consumer's ethical evaluation of a firm, and the effect of product harm on ethical evaluation will be stronger for harmful products than for harmless products when the negative information is disclosed.

Marketers might need to be especially responsive if their practices result in a diminished reputation for their firms and lost sales. Exploiting the vulnerability of consumers or worsening their situation by marketing harmful products might be evaluated as unethical under principles of justice. It is suggested that marketers include increased disclosures of actual product harm levels relative to industry norms.

Consumers' product knowledge and firms' negative information disclosure are integrated into the model, exploring the effect of product harm on consumer's ethical evaluation of a firm and their moderating effects are discussed.

Confirms the empirical test of Hunt and Vitell’s general theory of marketing ethics by Mayo and Marks across four cultures. Uses path analysis to show the core relationships of the general theory of marketing ethics were successfully replicated using over 1,500 students from seven universities in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia. States that tomorrow’s managers appeared to use a more deontological approach to making ethical judgements about personal selling. Extends its original research by confirming the positive relationship between the probability and the desirability of consequences. Concludes that, although the model was originally intended to explain management ethical decision making, the study shows that it may be possible to generalize as to how individuals make ethical life decisions.

For the financial service industry, company–customer conflict is a topic that deserves special attention. This study explores the impacts of ethics institutionalization on the life insurance agents' ethical decision-making under the company–customer conflicts.

Two types of company–customer conflicts are studied. In one situation, selling the life insurance product is profitable to the life insurance company, but the product is unsuitable for the customer. In another situation, selling the life insurance product is unprofitable to the life insurance company, while the product will fully satisfy the customer's interests. The study selects Taiwan's full-time life insurance agents as a sample.

The main results show that implicit ethics institutionalization has a stronger influence on teleological evaluations and deontological evaluations. This study then finds that different types of company–customer conflicts would change the influences of teleological evaluations on ethical intentions and cause different influences of implicit ethics institutionalization on teleological evaluations and deontological evaluations.

Ethics institutionalization and company–customer conflicts are important issues in the literature. This is the first study to discuss the roles that ethics institutionalization and company–customer conflicts play in the ethical decision-making of life insurance agents.

This paper aims to examine to what extent congruity between ethical attributes (i.e. product attributes with positive implications for the environment, human rights, social issues and animal welfare) and brand concept (i.e. the unique meaning associated with a brand in consumers’ minds) influences consumers’ evaluations of brands offering ethical attributes.

Four studies involving North American consumers empirically tested the moderation effect of brand concept on consumer evaluations of ethical attributes and the mediating role of perceived congruity.

This research finds an interactive effect of ethical attribute type and brand concept on brand evaluations, such that congruent ethical attribute–brand concept pairings (i.e. a utilitarian [symbolic] ethical attribute offered by a brand with a utilitarian [symbolic] brand concept) result in more favorable brand evaluations (Studies 1, 2, 3 and 4). Consumers’ perceptions of congruity between ethical attributes and brand concepts mediate this interactive effect (Studies 2 and 3). Moreover, a positive congruity effect of ethical attributes and brand concepts emerges at higher levels of conspicuous brand consumption (Study 4).

It is important to acknowledge that the current research did not specifically consider the case of utilitarian and symbolic ethical attribute offerings by luxury brands. This is a question that is left to future investigations.

For marketing managers, findings indicate that brands gain from ethical attribute introductions only when these attributes are congruent with the brand concept. In addition, brands benefit to a greater extent from offering congruent ethical attributes when brand consumption is conspicuous.

The findings of this research contribute to the literature on the effect of ethical attributes on consumers’ responses to brands and highlight the importance of brands’ choice of ethical attributes.

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.

The main aim of the present study is to discover whether the managers’ self‐evaluations of their ethical leadership style are associated with their assessments of the ethical organisational culture (measured with an eight‐dimensional Corporate Ethical Virtues‐model). It aims to hypothesise that the more ethical the managers evaluate their own leadership style to be, the higher evaluations they give on the ethical culture of their organisation. The underlying assumption is that ethical managers can enhance the ethical culture by behaving in accordance with their own values.

This quantitative research was based on a questionnaire study with 902 respondents throughout Finland. A linear regression analysis was conducted to examine how ethical leadership was related to ethical organisational culture.

Managers who appraised their own leadership style as ethical also evaluated the ethical culture of their organisations more positively. The result implies that an ethically behaving leader can develop the culture of his/her organisation towards more ethical practices. The results also showed that differences in evaluating both ethical leadership and culture emerged concerning background variables.

The data collected were based only on self‐assessments from one data source, and therefore future studies, e.g. including employee ratings, are needed.

Promoting ethical virtues in organisations can lead to a virtuous circle, which supports both ethical culture and ethical leadership.

This empirical study contributes to the research on ethical leadership by examining it in relation to ethical organisational culture.

The aim of this exploratory research is to compare three sectors of the auditing profession – internal auditors, external auditors from larger international firms, and external auditors from smaller/regional firms – in regard to the influence of situational context on their ethically‐related decision‐making and judgment evaluations.

Against the backdrop of five vignettes applied with a survey, the paper examines the potential influence of social consensus and magnitude of consequence on the ethical decision path of these three auditor groups.

The paper finds that, in all cases, social consensus and magnitude of consequences exert influence on the ethical decision path. In the case of social consensus, however the paper finds that the ethical decision path is fully mediated for large firm auditors but is only partial mediated for the other two groups of auditors.

This research examines responses from both internal and external auditors. Comparison between such groups is unique because these groups have not been well researched in the past literature.

While many companies begin to promote ethically produced products, much remains to be known about consumers' buying intention toward these products. This paper attempts to integrate the theory of planned behavior and the Hunt–Vitell theory of marketing ethics to explore the buying intention toward ethically produced food products in a developing economy.

Data were collected through a questionnaire survey in Bangladesh. Structural equation modeling technique was used to test the research model.

Research findings showed that deontological evaluation and teleological evaluation have significantly positive effects on perceived behavioral control and subjective norm. Perceived behavioral control, subjective norm, attitude, hedonic and utilitarian value have significantly positive effects on buying intention toward ethically produced foods.

The results are practically and theoretically meaningful because the integrated model holds well explanatory power to predict consumers' intention toward buying ethical foods and thereby understand consumers' ethical decision-makings.

Despite its perceived benefits, organic food has very limited uptake in the consumer market. Many studies have investigated the causes of this slow adoption, but limited attention has been paid to the ethical motives of consumer preference for organic food. Also, no research has addressed this issue through an unobtrusive data collection method. Therefore, this netnography-based qualitative study explores the deontological and teleological ethical motives for organic food consumption through the lens of Hunt and Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics.

User-generated content in the form of posts and comments from a food-related Facebook page, Food Matters (https://www.facebook.com/foodmatters), with over 2.3m followers, was thematically analysed using Hunt and Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics. Over 1.5m posts and comments were mined through Facepager 4.0.4 after due approvals. Organic-food-related content was manually screened. Netnography, an Internet-based ethnography technique which is a relatively underutilised and unobtrusive method of data collection, was employed on selected content to understand the consumer behaviour towards organic food in an online environment.

This study analysed a total of 158,583 posts and comments generated between March 2008 and December 2019. Out of these, 2,243 posts and comments were focussed on organic food. A total of seven themes emerged out of which six were found to be inextricably linked to ethical values of organic food consumption; three deontological (moral obligations, moral accountability and moral outrage) and two teleological (perceived risk and perceived benefits) themes. However, the seventh theme, consumers' lack of trust in organic food retailers, emerged as a major barrier in the proliferation of organic food.

This study is the first application of Hunt and Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics in organic food. The novel findings are that trust is a bigger issue than the price differential of organic food. Implications for marketers, policymakers, retailers and certification bodies are discussed to extend the current knowledge of motives and barriers to organic food.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between advocacy on behalf of libraries and impact evaluation in a national public library development context in which the boundaries between these two roles are likely to be blurred, creating ethical issues for all concerned.

The authors draw upon their broad experience of helping various international organisations to develop strategic approaches to impact planning and evaluation for public libraries, as well as their work in helping to develop library practice at national level, in order to focus on and examine the creative tensions between impact evaluation and advocacy.

There are particular issues for all key participants (international programme funders, policy shapers, service managers, evaluators and advocates) in planning, supporting and delivering impact evaluation programmes. Most of these can be addressed directly but some (such as balancing programme requirements against local priorities, or achieving a balance between collecting evidence based on predetermined impact indicators and progressive focusing) entail management of the tensions between conflicting pressures.

Specific ways forward are offered to encourage ethical advocacy and impact evaluation at national library development level. These principles are equally applicable to education and health library development and to public library development at regional or local levels.

The particular issues of advocacy and impact evaluation in the national public library development context have not previously been recognized in the international development literature addressing advocacy and evaluation or in the library and information services research literature.