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Attempts by mainstream economics to account for cooperative behavior expand the utility‐maximizing framework without questioning the individualistic set‐up on which it is grounded. This paper aims to develop a theory of cooperation that departs from the individualistic framework. “Communal principles” must be introduced in the analysis to account for cooperation and the relational, as opposed to atomistic, nature of individuals must be acknowledged.

The empirical study, based on data from the European Working Conditions and European Social Surveys, aims at illustrating the social benefits of cooperation. A categorical components analysis was carried out to build indicators for the notions of relational and moral goods and civic participation. Regression models were subsequently estimated to study the association between relational/moral goods at work and civic participation.

The empirical results show that high levels of relational and moral goods at work are associated with high levels of civic participation. However, substantial differences are observed between countries. Nordic countries exhibit high levels of both indicators while some Eastern and Southern European countries perform much more poorly. The study illustrates interaction between certain features of working life and civic behavior.

The theoretical contribution of the paper lies in the proposal of a new account of the sources of cooperative behavior at work. It argues that cooperation within work organizations is supported by three common goods – a common goal, relational goods and moral goods. The “goodness” of these goods does not derive simply from their generating utility but from their being commonly shared.

Robert Hauptman first raised awareness about the ethical issues of reference service in 1976. Hauptman, a library school student at the time, did a study on the culpability, or lack thereof, in reference service provided by librarians. In his study, Hauptman posed as a library patron seeking potentially dangerous information. The behavior examined was how librarians respond to the request for material on how to build a bomb that would be powerful enough to blow up a house. Hauptman tried to present himself as a person of questionable character. He used six public and seven academic libraries in this study. Hauptman first made sure that he was speaking to the reference librarian. He then requested information for the construction of a small explosive, requesting specifically the chemical properties of cordite. He then asked for information on the potency of such an explosive, whether or not it could blow up a suburban house (Hauptman, Wilson Library Bulletin, 1976, p. 626).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of religion, morality and mindset in influencing perceptions of luxury products.

The study uses three experimental studies to investigate this relationship.

Study 1 shows that religiosity influences negative moral emotions (but not positive moral emotions), which then negatively influence luxury consumption and morality evaluations. Study 2 replicates the effects of Study 1 and shows that priming a moral (marketplace) mindset decreases negative moral emotions and increases luxury consumption evaluations for highly (less) religious consumers. Study 3 explains the effects found in Studies 1 and 2 as driven by moral licensing, such that priming a moral (marketplace) mindset decreases (increases) the negative moral emotions experienced by those primed (not primed) with religiosity. Study 3 also improves the external validity of findings by including a social media sample of regular luxury purchases. Implications for theory and marketing practice are discussed.

The present research is limited by samples conducted in Western culture with a predominantly Western, Christian religious audience. Future research should examine how moral vs marketplace mindsets differentially influence the consumption of luxury products for Eastern religious consumers (e.g. Hindus, Buddhists and Confucianists). Additionally, this research was conducted using Allport and Ross’ (1967) religiosity measure. Some could argue that the measure is not the most representative for atheists or agnostics or is outdated, so further research would benefit from replicating and extending the findings in this paper with other, newer religiosity measures better adapted to measure all belief systems.

Marketers of luxury products should realize the potential of a new target audience – religious consumers. While religiosity is positively correlated with negative moral emotions toward luxury products in Study 1, Studies 2 and 3 reveal that priming a moral mindset can reduce negative affect and increase evaluations of luxury products. Thus, marketers could seek out ways to emphasize morality in messaging. For example, a marketer may incorporate words such as virtues, ethics and/or noble, when describing attributes of their brand in advertising, thereby resulting in a moral licensing effect. Research suggests advertising content has the potential to influence consumers’ perceived moral obligation, inclusive of the moral or immoral nature of the consumption of luxury brands.

While the link between religion and luxury goods is evident in popular culture, previous research has yet to empirically explore this relationship. This study fills this gap by investigating the role of religiosity on the perceived morality and ultimately the purchase of luxury branded goods.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Moral struggles in and around markets abound in contemporary societies where markets have become the dominant form of economic coordination. Reviewing research on morality and markets across disciplinary boundaries, this introductory essay suggests that a moral turn can currently be observed in scholarship, and draws a direct connection to recent developments in the sociology of morality. The authors introduce the chapters in the present volume “The Contested Moralities of Markets.” In doing so, the authors distinguish three types of moral struggles in and around markets: struggles around morally contested markets where the exchange of certain goods on markets is contested; struggles within organizations that are related to an organization’s embeddedness in complex institutional environments with competing logics and orders of worth; and moral struggles in markets where moral justifications are mobilized by a variety of field members who act as moral entrepreneurs in their striving for moralizing the economy. Finally, the authors highlight three properties of moral struggles in contemporary markets: They (1) arise over different objects, (2) constitute political struggles, and (3) are related to two broader social processes: market moralization and market expansion. The introduction concludes by discussing some of the theoretical approaches that allow particular insights into struggles over morality in markets. Collectively, the contributions in this volume advance our current understanding of the contested moralities of markets by highlighting the sources, processes, and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets, both through tracing the creation, reproduction, and change of underlying moral orders and through reflecting the status and power differentials, alliances, and political strategies as well as the general cultural, social, and political contexts in which the struggles unfold.

This focal chapter deals with the understanding of important ethical theories used in executive moral reasoning such as teleology, deontology, distributive justice and corrective justice, virtue ethics versus ethics of trust, from the perspectives of intrinsic versus instrumental good, moral worth versus moral obligation, and moral conscience versus moral justification. Ethical and moral reasoning will power executives to identify, explore, and resolve corporate moral dilemma, especially in the wake of emerging gray market areas where good and evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, and truth and falsehood cannot be easily distinguished. We focus on developing corporate skills of awareness of ethical values and moral imperatives in current otherwise highly commoditized and turbulent human, market, and corporate situations. The challenges of morality are multifaceted and diverse. Professionals usually have self-discipline and self-regulation abilities, ego strength, and social skills. Morality in the professions is not concerned with the issues of rudimentary socialization; rather, the issues involve deciding between conflicting values, where each value represents something good in itself. There are problems in both knowing what is right, good, true, and just on the one hand, and on the other hand, in doing what is right and avoiding wrong, doing good and avoiding evil, and being fair and just while avoiding being unfair and unjust. Several contemporary cases will illustrate the challenging dimensions of ethical and moral reasoning, moral judgment and moral justification embedded in executive decision processes, and corporate growth and profitability ventures.

This paper aims to explain a conceptual background for an emerging agrarian discourse in corporate social responsibility (CSR) research. Socially responsible provision of public goods is examined by encompassing a shift in paradigms and approaches from the industrial phase of development with economic/profit dimension, emphasized by the theory of public goods, to the post-industrial phase of development with moral dimension, empowered by knowledge-based economy, sustainability and further development of the theory of CSR.

The paper sets the conceptual foundations for the holistic study of the two confronting conceptions of public goods and CSR by discussing their interconnectivity and distinctions of relevant approaches in the intersecting classical economics and sustainability fields.

Research results show that provision of public goods is still mainly debated from the classical economic paradigms. Nevertheless, author give promising evidence for the possibility to implement holistic studies on confronting economic and moral dimensions in the field of socially responsible provisions of public goods with use of appropriate theories and approaches from both paradigms depending on the context.

This paper presents exceptionally theoretical insights and sophisticated explanations of the background of emerging agrarian discourse in CSR. It gives implications for further research in the field of socially responsible provision of public goods both from theoretical and empirical point of view.

The study proves the enlarged scope of the theory of CSR by conceptualizing the newly emerging discourse in the field, which has been absent from theoretical to empirical CSR research in agriculture.

The main goal of this paper is to provide us with a more systematic framework for examining the moral background of markets.

The paper makes an attempt to put forward a way of market evaluation relying upon the three major moral theories of utilitarianism, deontology (Kantianism) and virtue ethics. Specifically, by using these three basic pillars, an “evaluation triangle” is constructed in order to examine various crucial moral aspects of markets' functioning.

The paper examines some significant distortions with respect to the three above-mentioned triangle's sides, using also examples from the real world. The paper also discusses the main findings from the previous analysis, stressing also emphasis on some crucial factors with respect to the triangle's functioning, such as the role of culture and time.

Mainstream economic theory, with a very few exceptions, does not acknowledge the interwovenness of economic behavior and morality, adopting the fact/value dichotomy underlying modern science. Accordingly, most economists usually avoid answering questions concerning ethical topics. The market system, however, has a direct effect on our everyday lives, so it is crucial that a systematic method of moral assessment can be proposed. Thus, this paper seeks to promote the dialogue with respect to the interconnection between economic and moral issues.

While certain contested goods do manage to make their way to market, others have moved less far in this direction and others seem permanently unable to do so. Moral contestation promotes, holds back or blocks the emergence of contested markets. This chapter examines the conditions that make the operation of these markets possible, and those that block their appearance. From a comparison between two cases (organs for transplantation and gambling), the authors focus attention on the one hand on those devices that make transactions possible, and on the other, on the “vulnerable populations” that these devices are intended to protect, either from or by the market.

The purpose of this paper is to reach more clarity regarding the notion of compliance, in particular with regard to relation between this notion and the notion of integrity.

The paper is a conceptual investigation, following a broadly understood Wittgensteinian approach.

The main result is: there is no such thing as compliance in the full sense of that word without integrity. Compliance without integrity is a pathological case of compliance.

So far, issues of compliance and integrity have either been treated as being essentially separate or as one coming in addition to the other one. If the paper’s argument is correct, this should no longer be accepted. The whole discussion should, instead, take another route.