Search results

Both the Austrian and Bloomington Schools emphasize the dispersal of information to the level of individual agents. An underappreciated difference is the Bloomington emphasis on the moral psychology of agents and its relation to covenant. Covenant refers to a habit, a sense of obligation to consider the interests of the other in decision making, and a commitment to do so that is not easily or unilaterally broken. This chapter seeks to elaborate the lineage of covenant in constituting political order and its implications for the moral psychology of agents and artisanship. This exploration raises issues of metaphysical foundations as they relate to values and to the Hobbesian–Aristotelian divide in starting points. An application to the environmental crisis, with particular reference to vested interests promoting disinformation, obfuscation, and doubt about anthropogenic climate change, suggests value in emphasizing covenant.

In this chapter, we explore the importance of morality in groups. We draw from decades of research from multiple perspectives, including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and organizational science, to illustrate the range of ways that morality influences social attitudes and group behavior. After synthesizing the literature, we identify promising directions for business ethics scholars to pursue. We specifically call for greater research on morality at the meso, or group, level of analysis and encourage studies examining the complex relationship between moral emotions and the social environment. We ultimately hope that this work will provide new insights for managing moral behavior in groups and society.

The field of behavioral business ethics has come a long way since its inception nearly five decades ago. Pioneered in part in response to a number of high-profile corporate scandals, the early field of business ethics was thought by many to be a fad that would recede along with the salience of the scandals of the day. Yet, this could not have been further from the truth. The need for behavioral business ethics research remains ever-present, as evidenced by the sustained number of scandals and unethical behavior within and by organizations. Moreover, research in this area has burgeoned. In the 1980s, only 54 articles had been published on this topic (Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008); today, a similar search yields over 3,000 “hits.” In light of the area’s growth, we suggest the need to take a look back at the seminal work that sparked social scientific work in the field. In particular, this chapter has two main objectives. First, we provide a review of select foundational work. In so doing, we identify some of the key trends that characterized early knowledge development in the field. Second, we draw on this historical context to consider how past trends relate to current work and speak to future research opportunities.

In this book we consider the foundation of ethics to be the moral law. Contrarily, in mainstream terminology ethics is defined as values manifesting human behavior in congruence with certain civil conduct that are commonly agreed upon by society at large (Spencer, 1978). In reference to the social preference basis of ethics and morality we can adopt formalization by using two different approaches. One approach is to consider linear aggregation of preferences. The other is to treat morality and ethics within complex aggregation types.¹

This chapter seeks to advance the neglected debate on the ethical issues between formal organization and practice arising from innovation in an organization. To that end, the chapter discusses the sources of possible moral dilemmas for practitioners who belong to a practice with a shared identity, values, and standards of excellence, and who need to conform to new rules of formal organization. While formal organization ideally strives for generalized fairness principles for all organizational members when introducing an innovation, the contextualized nature of practices may lead to particular needs and goals of the practice which can only be recognized as such by practitioners and not by formal management, and to which procedural justice cannot respond. The chapter proposes how practitioners may interpret moral dilemmas, aligned with their practice-based identity and ethical values, and what options for action they may seek. The discussion is illustrated with examples of innovation in the field of information systems design.

How is moral legitimacy established in pluralist contexts where multiple moral frameworks co-exist and compete? Situations of moral multiplexity complicate not only whether an organization or practice is legitimate but also which criteria should be used to establish moral legitimacy. We argue that moral legitimacy can be thought of as the property of a dynamic dialogical process in which relations between moral schemes are constantly (re-)negotiated through dynamic exchange with audiences. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ framework, we propose a process model of how three types of truces may be negotiated: transcendence, compromise, antagonism. While each can create moral legitimacy in pluralistic contexts, legitimacy is not a binary variable but varying in degrees of scope and certainty.

Prior studies investigating the relationship between moral reasoning (as measured by the defining issues test, DIT) and political orientation have rendered mixed results. We seek to find an explanation for these mixed results. Using responses from a sample of 284 practicing certified public accountants (CPAs), we find evidence that value preferences underlie both moral reasoning and political orientation. Specifically, we find a statistically significant inverse relationship between moral reasoning and conservatism in univariate tests. However, this relationship is no longer significant when eight individual value preferences and gender are taken into account. These results suggest that variations in moral reasoning scores of CPAs are accounted for by their value preferences, which also underlie their relative conservatism.

In an age where morality requires economic justification, it is a compelling task to explicate the deeper affecting implications of moral judgment than its mere financial costs. In this chapter, we explore the emotional, behavioral, and cognitive ramifications of moral leadership at both the individual and macro organizational levels; specifically, by summoning literature on leadership, affect, and organizational justice to build a conceptual model of affect and interactional justice in moral leadership. The aim of the model is to extend current theoretical frameworks and highlight the important ramifications that moral decision-making has on employee and organizational welfare including that of the decision maker. The chapter concludes with a call for research comparing moral and immoral leadership in terms of different influence and strategy processes adopted by leaders and their followers’ attributions, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors.

Religious institutions can affect organizational practices when employees bring their religious commitments and practices into the workplace. But those religious commitments function in the midst of other organizational factors that influence the working out of employees’ religious commitments. This process can generate varying outcomes in organizational contexts, ranging from a heightened effect of religious commitment on employee behavior to a negligible or nonexistent influence of religion on employee behavior. Relying on social identity theory and schematic social cognition as unifying frameworks for the study of religious behavior, we develop a theoretically informed approach to understanding how and why the religious beliefs, commitments and practices employees bring to work have varying behavioral impacts.

This chapter aims to reflect upon the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and human rights. We argue that although CSR is a good attempt to propose better practices for managerial decisions, a human rights perspective enriches this vision. Therefore, the authors will define the meaning of a human rights perspective for business activities and, specifically, for CSR. The authors apply the idea of res extra commercium to human rights and CSR. As a first step, both factors need to be identified as moral absolutes. Essentially, businesses should start by identifying areas of human activity that are off limits.