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The increasing desire of consumers for socially responsible luxury products combined with fluctuating supplies in consumer markets are leading various industries to seek alternative sources to be able to meet the needs of its customers. One possible solution that may meet the demands of the future is lab-grown products. Because these products confer multiple benefits, this study aims to investigate the most effective ways to appeal to consumers by aligning the benefits of the products with their values as marketers seek to find effective promotion for these items.

We examine the effectiveness of an ethical positioning strategy for two types of luxury lab-grown (synthetic) products among high versus low materialism consumers in three experiments.

Findings suggest that a positioning strategy stressing product ethicality is more effective for low materialism consumers, whereas the strategy is less effective, and may even backfire, for high materialism consumers. The impact on social status consumers perceive from a lab-grown product explains why this effect occurs among low materialism consumers. Therefore, marketers should take caution and use specific appeals for different segments based on values such as consumers’ materialism levels.

If lab-grown products represent the wave of the future, it is important to understand how consumers will respond to this emerging technology and how promotion strategies may enhance their evaluation.

The research sought to expand the conceptual understanding of the antecedents of decision-making under ethical conditions. This study aims to better understand the relationships among need for cognition (NFC), the individual ethical positions of ethical idealism and ethical relativism, organizational and professional socialization, work-related norms and ethical perceptions.

The study compared the impact of environmental influences (i.e. socialization and work-related norm) and individual temporally stable characteristics (i.e. NFC and ethical position) on ethical perceptions. The research surveyed marketers and tested a hypothesized model using structural equation modeling.

NFC influences marketers’ individual ethical position, their professional socialization and their work norms. The work norms of marketers are influenced by individual ethical position and organizational socialization, but not by professional socialization. Professional socialization is influenced by ethical idealism and not ethical relativism.

A judgmental sampling technique was used and the findings cannot be generalized to other populations.

This research provides managers with alternative tools to encourage compliance with professional and corporate guidelines. If managers are seeking an enduring positive influence on work norms, they should be as concerned about the thinking of their employees and their employees’ ethical positions as they are with the vocational rules their subordinates adopt.

Society will benefit from better understanding the different ways in which the ethical perceptions of individual employees are influenced and the various ways in which managers can contribute to ethically responsible corporations.

Although NFC has been examined in other vocational and decision-making contexts, its influence on individual ethical position, vocational socialization and work-related norms has not been empirically examined in ethical contexts for business decision-making.

The objective of this paper is to examine the influence of personal attributes, organizational ethics position and other factors which are rules conformance, active participation in profession activities, ethics instructions received and understanding of the professional code of conduct on the Malaysian accountants' judgment on questionable ethical scenarios.

A survey questionnaire is carried out to elicit opinions of Malaysian accountants on factors influencing ethical judgments.

Adopting 15 vignettes used in Emerson et al. to assess ethical judgments, the main findings revealed from the analysis are that older accountants, accountants attached to corporations with higher ethics scale and accountants who understand the professional code of conduct are expected to be stricter in judging questionable ethical situations.

The findings imply that perhaps one way to promote and preserve ethical organizational decisions is by employing older and experienced individuals and perhaps retaining older staff. The finding on age appears to suggest that wisdom comes with maturity.

This paper is one of the few studies which investigate factors influencing ethical judgments of accountants in Malaysia. The research is timely given the growing importance of women in decision‐making levels, the expected rise in employment and the requirement to include the business ethics course in the accounting programs in Malaysia.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual framework for studying value creation derived from an ethical perspective, in a business marketing context. Design/methodology/approach – First, a conceptual and comparative analysis is made of the ethics and value concepts in two research traditions: the stakeholder approach and the business network approach. Second, a conceptual framework is developed that contains tools for conducting research on value co‐creation in business networks from an ethical perspective. An exemplifying case study from the paper industry is included. Findings – Four key concepts are proposed for further research into ethics and value creation in business networks that enable the study of ethical embeddedness: ethical network identity, ethical role, ethical position, and ethical atmosphere. The analysis also presents fundamental differences between the stakeholder and the business network approaches when dealing with ethics and value. Research limitations/implications – The developed conceptual framework should be applied in more extended empirical settings to evaluate its usefulness. Practical implications – The paper provides an ethical perspective for understanding value in industrial markets using a network approach. Originality/value – The study presents a novel approach to incorporating ethics and value creation to an industrial marketing context. Ethical issues are traditionally studied using stakeholder, agency or institutional perspectives and such research in business‐to‐business contexts is almost non‐existent. The business network approach contains very few studies from an ethical point of view. The paper covers this gap and offers a starting‐point for further inquiry into this field.

It is argued that ethical ideology espoused by an individual provides the framework within which individuals contemplate the issues and determine the right way to behave. This paper aims to report the findings of a study designed to examine the ethical orientations of managers.

This study was conducted on a sample of 175 managers and was drawn from 12 large manufacturing organizations in the state of Punjab, India, using Forsyth's ethics position questionnaire.

It was found that the large majority of managers were situationists and only a small percentage were absolutists.

The sample in this study is restricted to large manufacturing enterprises only and reports espoused values only.

An understanding of the value orientations of managers is valuable for business representatives from other cultural contexts when working with their Indian counterparts. It is also a useful input in establishing organisational strategies for management development and training for expatriate assignments and leadership roles.

The author is of the belief that, at the present time, this is the largest study of personal ethical orientations of practising managers in the manufacturing sector in Punjab, India. It adds to the work done by various researchers into ethical beliefs and values of managers in various cultural contexts.

This paper aims to examine the effects of personal attributes (greed and desire for personal gains, behaviour of peers and superiors, personal values, family influences and pressures, religious background, ego strength, etc.), organisational attributes (company policies, codes of conduct and visionary leadership, etc). and the moderating role of ethical codes of conduct on the ethical attitudes of professional accountants.

The study uses data from a survey of 340 professional accountants in Ghana, using the ordinary least square regression analysis to test hypothesized relationships.

The results suggest that personal attributes collectively have positive and significant influence on ethical attitudes. Similarly, organisational attributes collectively have positive and significant influence on ethical attitudes. Moreover, ethical codes of conduct moderate the positive relationship between personal and organisational attributes and ethical attitudes of accountants.

In the light of the social contingent theory, the findings imply that personal and organisational attributes, when interacted with professional code of conduct strengthens ethical attitudes of accountants. To the best of the knowledge, this is the first paper to have examined the moderating effect of professional code of conduct on ethical attitudes of accountants from a developing country context.

Providing a framework for integrating aspects of externally directed corporate and marketing communication efforts, this paper makes a case for the communication of positive and credible ethical values as a potentially critical component in communications strategy and sustainable competitive advantage. Using an uncertainty‐reduction model adapted from the diffusion literature, it is suggested that appropriately communicated moral and ethical values can have a role in underpinning an organisation’s reputation and “trusted capacities”, thereby heightening confidence in likely future actions, offering a predictive mechanism for lowering uncertainty in market transactions, and facilitating a potential to trade by offering a rationale for an organisation’s secure market position. Underpinned by ethical principles, the paper proposes implications for the role of “reputation for trustworthiness” and its symbolic evocation. It is argued that a reputation can become accepted as a social “fact”, able to endure critical interrogation in its social environment.

Human resource professionals (HRPs) remain challenged by ethical conundrums in the workplace. Business leaders are asked to respond to demands for efficiency in an environment of distrust or skepticism amongst employees and customers. HRPs who understand ethical decision-making as well as ethical perspectives and implications of actions within the organization can create value within their organizations. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the five ethical content issues of Hosmer’s (1987) model related to the twenty-first century human resource management (HRM) themes.

As a result of a syntheses of leadership and HRM philosophies over several decades, six propositions associated with the content issues are suggested.

HRPs are well-positioned to encourage ethical and moral decision-making within their organizations when they are able to contribute to creation of a culture that honors duties to stakeholders and supports organizational success.

The existence of synthesized analysis regarding organizational leaders, human resource managers, ethics and culture to build organizational success is limited. Thus, this paper highlights a need for organizations and for HRPs to dedicate policies and implement practices which can support ethical sustenance in today’s organizations.