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A significant catalyst in global economic success has been the information revolution. The Internet, in particular, has facilitated a vast increase in the quantity of available information and multimedia, in general, has allowed corporate players to dramatically increase their market share by exploiting new channels of persuasion, inducing the consumption of yet more goods and services. Globalisation has enabled the discovery of new cultural influences, often transformed by marketers into yet another sales device. Marketers have routinely employed a number of psychological techniques with the cynical intention of subverting human emotions into a marketing tool. Beginning with Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who has been credited with pioneering these methods in the 1920's, a technologically‐aided ‘spinning’ of the ‘truth’ continues to be employed in the private and public sphere today. It has been alleged that governments have favoured such techniques in order to reinforce support for the global economy; whilst at the same time their own susceptibility to manipulation and coercion by the global forces of corporatism has resulted in action taken against the wider public interest. It is suggested in this article that societies need to re‐empower themselves against the global information manipulators who comprise a powerful elite. In order to realise a reflective, rational and truly reciprocal society, corporate practices must be subject to stringent statutory control and, finally, demonstrate a commitment to ethical, conscionable behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the usefulness to business education of aesthetics, literature and the ancient ideal of the rule of law in an increasingly complex global environment. Recent financial scandals have exposed a range of vulnerabilities in the management decision‐making process and, increasingly, big business is searching for ethical answers. It is suggested that there is a need to develop the necessary critical, analytical and empathic qualities of, in particular, the business student in order that future global corporate leaders might also be moral managers.

The abstract yet foundational concept of the rule of law is reworked in order to widen its application to business activities and ensure greater accountability. It is argued that the intellectual sensibilities need to be stimulated beyond the traditional business studies format, looking to various examples from the liberal arts. The paper proposes greater attention to, for example, the classics, as the lessons we can learn from fiction are highly pertinent to modern leadership and corporate conduct in general.

There is a relatively new literary genre of business books which is inspired by classic and popular works of literature, for example Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons in Leadership; however, such books are yet to appear regularly on business school recommended reading lists.

There are compelling reasons for a radical change in management style, one being that the single‐minded pursuit of profit has recently produced an unprecedented global economic crisis. The paper proposes that, by placing a greater emphasis on developing the intellectual and empathic sensibilities, future managers may be able to adopt a more conscionable approach to environmental and wider societal concerns.

Against the backdrop of an alarmingly amoral and inept set of global management practices, the paper urges a radical return to a classical or liberal arts education for the business student. A re‐imaging of the traditional rule of law also provides the basis for deciding the right course of action; tailored to meet the specific needs of the modern business community.

The modern social and political order is characterised by a range of disparate moralities which lead to a plethora of interpretations and competing perspectives as to what ought to be the appropriate ethical template for corporate social responsibility. The possibility of uniting these disparate threads into a unified whole is explored by addressing the complex philosophies of Immanuel Kant and his alleged successor, Hans Kelsen; paying particular attention to their contrasting views of the proper foundations of public consensus towards establishing an idealised moral community of corporate actors.

The research is library-based and suggests that philosophy (in this instance, Kant’s moral philosophy and Kelsen’s general theory of law and state, for example) is able to offer an alternative rational and morally grounded ethics of law and governance; pertinent to the effective governance of corporate behaviour and moral management practices.

Central concepts, characteristic of both the Kantian and Kelsenian philosophical methodologies, have the capacity to act as a positive influence on the development of effective CSR mechanisms for assuring greater accountability. In addition, it is suggested that by prescribing ethically appropriate corporate behaviour as a first consideration, such philosophical frameworks are capable of providing a powerful disincentive against corporate crime.

The paper is interdisciplinary and (in an era of mistrust, global financial impropriety and other corporate misdemeanours) explores the utility of a philosophical approach towards articulating the conditions for imposing a moral duty incumbent upon all corporate actors in addressing the practical and conceptual needs of their shareholders and wider society.

To address the impact of information technology on culture and society, in particular the potential for control and manipulation afforded to state, government and unregulated corporations, by the medium of sophisticated communication networks. The paper sets out to expose the corporate world's manipulation of IT and the multi‐media as it exercises a powerful coercive force, constituting a legitimating principle for economic and cultural domination. It is suggested that the relentless progression of science as profit and the individual as profit‐generating automaton constitutes the subversion of a world rightly ordered by human principles. The paper calls for the ethical regulation of cyberspace, necessitating a philosophical approach and one which prizes human endeavour.

Examples from the technosocial world taken from across a range of uses, providers and users are explored according to their impact on everyday life. The ontological and phenomenological nature of the technological medium is also explicated with reference to various academic sources including Castells and Bauman. A sociological / philosophical / ethical approach is adopted by reference to the writings of inter alia Baudrillard and Kant.

The traditional territories of communication in which social exchange takes place have been dislocated and we have formed new attachments to the pervasive replacement technoculture and technologies. Many examples evidence the extent to which human values and achievements are increasingly organised around various enslaving technological mediums. Cyberspace is in need of a regulatory framework, one which has an ethical basis.

Presents an alternative perspective on a significant topic.

There are too many examples of CSR as a mere PR exercise however with public confidence in the existence of a ‘corporate conscience’ at an all‐time low, supported by the box‐office success of movies such as, ‘The Insider’, ‘Erin Brockovich’, ‘The Corporation’ and ‘Supersize Me’, it is recognised that trust needs to be restored. Although high‐profile media‐fuelled initiatives which identify and present awards to companies for ethical performance are regular events these days; customers, employees, shareholders and the general public expect not only quality goods and services but also increasingly demand a genuine commitment to ethical standards and practices, sustainable management of resources and community interaction. This paper explores the potential for furthering the ideals of CSR within the provisions of the recent EU constitutional treaty. The newly adopted Constitution aims to provide Europe with a common identity and set of goals which encompass both business and social interests, yet it has to date received a cool response from the business community. The impact of the Treaty and current CSR initiatives within the EU are discussed as to what extent their provisions might inform the current CSR debate in Europe.

As fully‐socialised beings, all human experience is characterised by communication and primarily facilitated by language. Every society seeks legitimation for its ideologies and practices and it legitimates itself chiefly through language. When employed as an instrument of governance, it can bring about social cohesion, also has the power to cause disintegration when consensus is absent, and can have serious consequences when its constituent parts are dismembered. This paper addresses the context in which value‐attribution and labelling takes place and examines the idea of CSR in terms of its lexicology or theoretical lexicography. In particular, the demands and imperatives incumbent on the word responsibility are explored according to its use as part of language, discourse and most significantly as a referent within the expression, corporate social responsibility. In the first part, it is suggested that this approach may provide clues as to the alleged failure, in spite of recent national and international endeavours, to provide any useful universal framework for ethically‐sound corporate behaviour. The second part constitutes a tentative inquiry into whether an alternative to the word responsibility might produce a better result. To this end, a specific definition of the word love is posited as a substitute or at the very least, acknowledged as a worthy driving force for responsible corporate citizenship.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems.

The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts.

The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code.

In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail.

To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.