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Purpose — This paper explores the field of ethical conflicts of human resource (HR) managers in Slovenian organizations: unfair payments, extreme differences in rewards, not respecting employees’ rights, discrimination; using over excessive disciplinary power, not paying social contributions, and engaging in manipulations, among others. The main attention is paid to the implementation of employees’ rights and the factors that affect the process of the implementation of employees’ rights.Design/methodology/approach — We applied an ABC (antecedents — behavior — consequences) analysis of ethical organizational behavior. The survey encompasses 73 HR managers of Slovenian companies.Findings — HR managers perceive their role in an organization as being caught in a specific position in relation to senior management and employees. The study shows that in organizations where the “soft” and “combined” model of human resource management (HRM) is developed, the implementation of employees’ rights is more strongly realized.Research limitations — The sample size is one of the chapter’s limitations. The other is the use of quantitative statistical approach without applying other methods. In the future it should be accompanied with qualitative techniques by which dishonesty would be more directly linked to the violation of employees’ rights.Practical implications — Professional education can (1) form a solid system of professional values that can help to prioritize expectations and demands in the work place and (2) equip HR managers with competencies to solve ethical issues and to engage in ethical behavior.Social implications/value — The results show that first of all, HR managers are responsible in their role (responsibility of the role in developing the model of HRM which facilitates the implementation of employees’ rights) and only secondly, comes the responsibility of HR managers in an active sense of responsibility (responsibility as a virtue).

A common way to promote cooperative and collectively beneficial behavior in organizations is to sanction self-interested and collectively harmful behavior. Social science researchers recently focus more and more on the negative effects of sanctions. In particular, it is argued that sanctioning noncooperative behavior can undermine people's personal motives to behave cooperatively. In this chapter we argue that, in the decision to behave cooperatively, or in one's own self-interest, perceptions of other people's motives play an important role. In this chapter we discuss research on sanctioning systems in social dilemmas which shows that sanctioning noncooperative behavior undermines trust in others being motivated to cooperate. In a series of studies we show that the undermining of trust may lead to a general increase of noncooperation. Moreover, the newly developed “social trilemma” paradigm demonstrated that it may induce people to show self-interested behaviors they had not considered before. These negative effects of a sanctioning system are moderated by the trust people initially may have in their fellow group members’ cooperative intentions, in the sanctioning authority and by the way people regard authorities in general. Implications of these results for organizations are discussed.

Neoclassic economics is a thing of considerable beauty. It yet finds an increasing tendency on the part of those trained in its discipline to rebel from its neatly fitted abstractions and intriguing diagrams. The rebellion stems from two sources. Veblen's sweeping attacks upon its postulates¹⁶ shock its theoretical foundations. The rapid changes in the industrial and business world discredited it on another front by bringing into increasingly sharp relief the divergence between the institutional assumptions of the orthodox theory and the conditions actually obtaining. The giant corporation, overhead costs, and the necessity for maintenance of volume, industrial concentration, the trade association, a widening spread among income classes, advertising, the growing inability of the consumer to gauge quality, the resort to reorganization instead of the “going out of business” of the long-run analyses – what place could the orthodox theory give to these important characteristics of the existing business economy?

This paper looks at changes in the manner in which the accounting profession speaks about itself. Specifically, it considers Canadian and American research that has examined how the profession's internal and external ethical discourses have emerged, survived, and declined over time. The functions that ethical discourses serve are briefly reviewed, and the changes observed in these discourses are contextualized in light of a number of social, cultural, political, and economic factors.

The cost of compliance is an essential variable to consider when administering a tax system. One recent study estimates that the yearly federal tax compliance burden in the US exceeds $431 billion dollars, and this cost does not include the potential greatest cost of all – changes in taxpayer behavior that reduces economic efficiency (Laffer, Winegarden, & Childs, 2011). One example of such behavior is the renunciation of US citizenship due to the impact of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) reporting requirements. Using this context, our study examines how FATCA compliance costs can affect taxpayer behavior in a manner that reduces economic efficiency. We collected responses from 197 experienced US taxpayers living in the US. Our study finds that when tax compliance costs are high, taxpayers may be more likely to renounce their citizenship to avoid FATCA reporting requirements. We further learn that tax compliance costs may increase the likelihood of citizenship renunciation even in the presence of a minimal US tax burden. Supplemental mediation analysis demonstrates that one's perceived fairness of compliance does not mediate the effect of high compliance costs on a taxpayer's renunciation decision; however, one's perceived fairness of compliance and fear of sanctions, collectively, partially explain the effect of tax burden on the renunciation decision. In addition, we find that ethics, the perceived probability of detection, and average income level affect the decision to renounce citizenship. Our findings suggest broader impacts of tax policy and provide a foundation for future research to further explore domestic and foreign tax compliance behaviors.

“The Need to Disrupt Social Control” discusses three examples: sexual assault, civil rights, and state security, and how all three involve social control forces that promote or permit the oppression of individuals, groups, and societies. Amentahru Wahlrab, Sarah M. Sass, and Robert Edward Sterken Jr. briefly provide examples of how social control can be disrupted including #MeToo (sexual assault), the American Civil Rights Movement (civil rights), and the Arab Spring (authoritarian regimes) to illustrate how social control has been disrupted in these areas. The chapter illustrates how patriarchal norms allow for sexual assault by those with power within contexts, such as Hollywood, academia, business, and politics. Sexual assault survivors and bystanders often do not report instances of assault due to informal social norms permitting such actions and fear of personal and professional harm.

On a different level, the jail in the American south was one of the most feared institutions for African Americans. It was not uncommon for an African American to never return from what would be a night in the “drunk tank” for a white person. Black Americans stayed “in their place” due to the threat of the jail cell. Finally, the chapter details how tyrants use the full weight of state security forces, including the police and the military, to maintain their control. Fear of security forces is routinely encouraged by arrests, torture, and even disappearance (of people) at the hands of the security forces. “The Need to Disrupt Social Control” concludes that in these cases, social control maintains an oppressive order of some kind, thus social control is understood as a potential negative.