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Attempts to examine the following question: is Body Shop International a socially responsible organization? This exploration includes a description of the concept of corporate social responsibility and an investigation of some specific actions by Body Shop International to ascertain whether or not these actions are in fact socially responsible in nature.

We attempt to go beyond media representations as we explore the following question: Is Ben & Jerry′s Inc. a socially responsible organization? This exploration includes a description of the concept of corporate social responsibility, and an investigation of some specific actions by Ben & Jerry’s to ascertain whether or not these actions are indeed socially responsible in nature.

The purpose of this paper is to address the current debate between business ethics and economics by examining the underlying ideologies of each side.

It is our intention in this article to examine the stories business ethicists and economists utilize to explain how the world works. A two dimensional model is employed to accomplish this goal by plotting the two sides' different theories of human nature on one axis and the two sides' different theories of society on the other axis.

This article provides a framework for assisting practitioners and scholars/teachers in better understanding the origins and causes for the debates that take place on complex issues regarding the economic domain.

A limitation of this article is that while it offers better understanding of positions, it does not offer guidance to the reader in crafting future strategies. Space does not warrant doing so in this article; however, it is an important issue.

The framework in this article can be utilized to help managers and students understand the debate between business ethicists and economists, help them to examine and form their own positions, and be better prepared to take part in debates that promote societal progress.

While scholars have described the current debates well, little coverage has been placed on how the debate arose. By knowing how past and current positions were developed, it is our hope that more informed frameworks addressing developing social issues can be developed in the future.

Entrepreneurship education has had a remarkable evolution over time and the number of entrepreneurship textbooks has multiplied given the increased interest in entrepreneurship programs in higher education. Yet, studies that review the coverage of textbooks focusing on entrepreneurship are scarce. This study provides an inventory of entrepreneurship textbooks and the topics they cover as well as specific emerging topics they do not cover by analyzing the content of 57 textbooks. Our results suggest that most textbooks provide significant coverage of such topics as the nature of entrepreneurship, business plans, financing, marketing, and cases. Among emerging concepts, social media has been relatively well covered with increasing coverage in more recent textbooks, while business canvas, as an example of alternatives to conventional business plans, is rarely covered. Most textbooks have provided little coverage of such topics as sales, family business, women and minorities, as well as ethics and sustainability. This study not only reveals areas that are covered by existing textbooks but also themes that future textbooks and research could cover to address the challenges of future entrepreneurship education.

Entrepreneurial pursuits are all situational and relative. Business opportunities come and go based on many fluid factors. Those factors are also multidimensional, as market pressures and demands, skills of entrepreneurs, resources of entrepreneurs, and environmental factors make each opportunity and execution strategy unique. Since every entrepreneurial venture is essentially a one-of-a-kind enterprise, each startup is a chance for the entrepreneur to express their unique vision, values, and goals. Philosophers would recognize this exercise as existential in nature. This paper explains how reading existential literature provides inspirational heroes for entrepreneurs seeking to build companies that stand out from their peers. The paper provides an overview and history of existentialism and then applies it to entrepreneurship. The paper is conceptual and provides a brief overview of existentialism and explains how it relates to entrepreneurship. It provides a collection of existential writings that relate to entrepreneurship. Guidance for reading and applying the literature is given. Existentialism is a subject that has not been covered in the entrepreneurship literature. Thus, the paper introduces this popular philosophical perspective to the entrepreneurship literature. The authors hope to create interesting discussions between philosophy and entrepreneurship scholars.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber chronicled how seventeenth‐century religious tenets expounded by John Calvin inadvertently laid the ideological groundwork for the flourishing of eighteenth‐century capitalism. In this early work on the rise of capitalism, Weber examined the changes in attitudes of business and accepted ethical business behavior and the transition of justification from religious tenets and guidance to more secular, yet rational explanations. The purpose of this paper is to contend this transition from religious to secular moral cover for business ethics was aided by the harmony‐of‐interests doctrine, which provided moral, but secular, cover for the pursuit of self‐interest and personal wealth with an implicit, secular rationalization of promoting the public good.

Although Weber used Benjamin Franklin as an exemplar of the earlier Calvinist Protestantism and spirit of capitalism, advocates a case study of Robert Keayne, a seventeenth‐century Boston Puritan Merchant, as being more appropriate for Weber's thesis. The paper uses passages from Keanye's will to illustrate the seventeenth‐century Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism, Franklin's writings to illustrate the eighteenth‐century Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism, and various historical prose to demonstrate the legitimation of the harmony‐of‐interests doctrine which allowed for the secular moral cover for the pursuit of capitalism in the following centuries.

The original (seventeenth‐century) spirit of capitalism identified by Weber is reflected in the rational way in which Keayne conducted his business affairs and in the extent to which his business behavior mirrored Calvinist tenets.

This earlier spirit of capitalism is important in setting the stage for the emergence of the eighteenth‐century spirit of capitalism embodied in Franklin as seen through his writings of acceptable and moral behavior without the use of explicit religious explanations.

In today’s society, health and fitness are given much publicity. Advertisements, magazine articles and television shows, trumpeting the benefits of exercise, encourage people to undertake a fitness regimen. Indeed, for the busy executive, an exercise program can lead to a less stressful and more productive life. However, due to busy schedules and the challenge of maintaining interest once the novelty of an activity has faded, many managers quit these programs soon after starting them and return to their sedentary lifestyles. We believe that most people stop exercising because they are not mentally prepared for the difficult realities of maintaining a regular workout program. While most health articles provide the initial spark for beginning athletes, very few offer guidance for the person in the middle and latter stages of an exercise program. This article, which we have based on our personal experience as athletes (the authors have run 15 marathons between them) and on an extensive review of psychological, organizational, and sports‐related research, provides executives with five mental strategies for developing a mindset for maintaining physical fitness during these challenging stages.

It is quite common for industries to quickly go from a state of stability to one of decline in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace. In this article, we examine research on organizational and industry decline, a topic often overlooked by researchers and practitioners. In particular, survival guidelines are provided for organizations within declining industries. Also, it is demonstrated how an organization can use such guidelines by examining a single‐sex boarding school that is currently facing such a dilemma. It is hoped that our observations and prescriptions for the boarding school may be helpful to other organizations that may be facing similar decline in their environments.

Traditional employment practices since the Second World War had usually ensured job security for a company’s workforce. However, the increasingly competitive environment and the restructuring of companies in the 1980s and 1990s have made this practice impossible to continue; therefore, layoffs have become a fact of life for employees in an increasing number of industries. The purpose of this study was to examine attitudes in two employment environments, one in which temporary workers were used to shield permanent employees from layoffs and another in which layoff decisions were made without regard to permanent or temporary status. Specifically, examination was made of the relationships among perceived organizational support (POS), organizational commitment, and intention to quit, and the relative levels of these variables across two environments and the two classes of workers. It was found that, as expected, the relationships among the commitment variables and intention to quit were similar within both environments. Also, as expected, levels of commitment in the “shield” environment were higher than in the “layoff” environment; and POS was higher among temporary employees in the “shield” environment than among permanent workers in the “layoff” environment. A particularly interesting finding was that, in the “layoff” environment, POS among temporary workers was higher than among permanent workers.