Search results

In the months leading up to, and during, the 2021 legislative session – the most dangerous for trans athletes in the history of the United States – 1,224 news articles, public statements and opinion pieces were published through online sources about trans people having access to sport. Conducting a textual analysis of those mediated articles, we conclude that trans athletes are being used by conservative political forces to instigate a social, moral panic. We identified three primary framings being used to instil a moral panic in articles published between 1 December 2020, and 1 June 2021, inflaming the debate over trans athletes. First, trans athletes have been positioned as spectres haunting the future of sport. Second, narratives of fear frame trans women as psychologically malevolent. Finally, conservative politicians are creating a moral panic to paint themselves as protectors of cisgender girls in sport. We conclude by describing the ways fears about trans athletes are being politicized by larger conservative forces that may have especially harmful ramifications for both trans athletes and cisgender women athletes.

A good theory of leadership unites personal integrity, moral commitments, legal authority, and accountability and effectiveness. This chapter presents leaving a legacy as an approach to organize managers’ and leaders’ ethical reflection. It unites personal meaning with organizational mission and connects a person's significance with organizational results. It embeds leaders in an historical setting, linking their inheritance and their obligations to the future. Thinking of a legacy guides leaders to a less controlling style, supporting people and institutions capable of adaptation and growth. While legacy does not capture all aspects of managerial leadership, it maps broad and rich understanding of leadership and responsibility linked to trusteeship.

The chapter first draws concepts underlying legitimacy theory (Suchman, 1995) to provide a basis to understand alternative approaches to the development of ethical cultures in global organization. The chapter then illustrates the institutionalization of Codes of Ethics through a “management” approach drawing from Simon’s Levers of Control as a framework to contextualize experiences of a large global conglomerate. The chapter adopts the case approach, applying the case of the Tata Group to highlight the integration of external institutions into the institutionalization process. The management of business ethics (MBE) can provide a basis to institutionalize ethics in global firms to create an internal culture consistent with ethical goals of the corporations that may also be different from the external environment. The MBE includes the application of managerial techniques and information technology to institutionalize ethics in organizational culture. Management Accountants can have a significant role in supporting this endeavor, given their expertise in measurement and control. The code is only one aspect through which firms develop their identity. Information on the case was unevenly distributed. For example, there was voluminous information on the code and its implementation. Therefore, some subjectivity was necessary in selecting relevant items. The chapter, to my knowledge, provides unique insights into the theoretical and practical aspects of institutionalizing ethics in corporate cultures using Codes of Ethics.

We have recently seen a growing concern for business ethics and the central role key individuals play in the formative years of a business. Research has shwon that the embedding of personal values are one of the more critical and lasting contributions that a founder can make in an organisation. Research also indicates that in the modern business context, there are few accepted guidelines for moral evaluations in practical business settings. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to explore some of the moral and social elements inherent in entrepreneurship, using the basic tenets expoused by Aristotle. By revisiting the theory of virtue, we find a powerful framework for establishing organisational purpose, habitual excellence, the optimal balance for sustaining these ventures, and the people on whom they depend. For creative business practices, such as entrepreneurship and marketing, a virtue perspective offers a particularly appropriate lens.

As a “fictitious commodity” (Polanyi), that cannot be separated from the human being who is its owner, labor has a special moral significance. However, this moral quality is not a given but must be asserted in struggles over the value of labor. With the example of disabled workers in Switzerland, this chapter examines the moralization of labor as a means to revalue a category of workers who range far down the labor queue. Moralization mediates the tension between the normative societal goal of inclusion for disabled people and the freedom of employers to select the most “productive” workers. Drawing on the theoretical approach of the Economics of Convention the chapter analyzes the valuation frames proposed by economic and welfare state actors in political debates over the establishment of the Swiss disability insurance and the role of employers regarding occupational integration. A core concept used in negotiations of the value of disabled labor in the public arena and within individual businesses is the “social responsibility” of employers. Historically, employers’ associations successfully promoted the liberal principle of voluntary responsibility to prevent state interference in the labor market. In contrast, disability insurance argues predominantly within the market and the industrial convention to “sell” its clientele in the context of employer campaigns and case-related interactions with employers. Only recently, both sides started to reframe the employment of disabled people as a win–win affair, which would reconcile economic self-interest and the common good.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how performance management practices are implicated in the exercise of power with particular reference to the ability of individual managers to balance between more or less institutionalized conceptions of performance while pursuing organizational change.

The paper builds on a longitudinal field study in a Chinese local government department conducted over a period of six years.

Recent reforms in the Chinese government sector have resulted in an incomplete shift between moral‐ and merit‐based conceptions of performance. The focal manager in this analysis initially balanced successfully between these conceptions of performance whilst pursuing a degree of organizational change, but was ultimately transferred as the power relationships forged through her manoeuvring were radically reversed. Whilst this balancing act was facilitated by the simultaneous embeddedness of the manager in both conceptions of performance, she experienced growing difficulties in maintaining such a position as a means of nurturing critical power relationships.

The empirical analysis underscores the importance of examining institutional embeddedness as a multi‐layered phenomenon constituted by institutionalized expectations as well as internalized values and beliefs of individual actors. The varying degree of alignment of these constituent elements of embeddedness has important implications for the ability of managers to balance between diverse conceptions of performance and effect change and the configuration of power relationships.

In contrast to much previous research on performance measurement and management the paper analyzes power as a dynamic and relational concept. The study also sheds new light on the notion of institutional embeddedness by underlining its multi‐layered nature and how this gives rise to potential value conflicts among individual actors.

This paper aims to contribute to the discussion of the role of education in developing a new mindset for sustainability leadership by analyzing a project of a Brazilian business school that implemented a sustainability training module regarding the UN 2030 Agenda. Considering the purpose of signatory school of the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education, this analysis reflects on the student capacities to become sustainable future value generators for business and society in general.

This study is characterized as a quantitative research whose strategy is the investigation between variables to understand the learning evolution of the study participants in each of the topics addressed in the training module. The research has a positivist approach that explores data using statistical methods to detect possible behavior patterns in the analyzed data volume, based on secondary data sourced from the questionnaire that validated student knowledge at the beginning and end of the class.

The data show a considerable impact of education in developing a new mindset for sustainability leadership as there is a big variation students’ average knowledge of the themes that made up the sustainability mindset suggesting that the students’ exposure to the content in the school environment helps increase their knowledge.

This paper fulfills the need to understand the effectiveness of the creation of specific modules of sustainability for students from different areas of activity.

Fair trade has made paying producers in poorer countries a “just” price one of its central aims, with the issue constantly in its public communiqués, from the print media to social networking sites. As most research has looked at fair trade in the South, where small producers and craft makers live, discussions of the fair price have centered on whether the wholesale prices paid to them are alleviating poverty. However, circumscribing the issue of the fair price only to its impact in the South impedes our understanding of how fair trade operates in the North, on which the system relies for its existence. Looking at fair trade from a Northern perspective, this paper sees the fair price as a partial illustration of the social processes that characterize reflexive modernity, particularly the ethical dilemmas that surround the composition of prices. But rather than focusing exclusively on activist discourse, the paper uses practice theory to build a more nuanced picture of the diverse beliefs and behaviors that the fair price is entangled with. Drawing on ethnography with people who consume and sell fair trade in the Italian city of Palermo, the paper shows how understanding what a fair price is appears to be an enigma that conceals different aspects of the fair trade network. Specifically, it reveals that the fair price is not a single but a double entity, comprising the wholesale price paid to producers, where “political” emphasis usually lies, and the fair retail price, an entity discussed far less often.

A number of studies show that women are underrepresented in positions of power and authority in the labour markets of Western societies. Comparative studies within this field are few, and based on data from the 1980s, showing larger gender differences in workplace authority in the Scandinavian countries than in English-speaking countries (especially the U.S.). In this paper we use data from the International Social Survey Programme 1997 to describe and compare the gender gap in managerial positions within the labour markets in the U.S. and Norway. We include a perspective on differences in managerial and national cultures in order to interpret our findings. The American society has been characterized as individualistic and contract-based with a strong market orientation and work ethics. Compared with this, the Norwegian culture is less individualistic and less market oriented, and more inclined to emphasize a norm about a balanced life between work, family and leisure. These cultural differences may help us understand why the gender policy in these countries historically have had divergent foci: The Americans have implemented a powerful policy of equal opportunities within the labour market, regarding family issues as private matters. The Norwegians have a long-term political goal of gender equality in all areas of the society, comprising work-family linkages with a strong emphasis on arrangements allowing family members (in particular women) to combine work and family life. However, it seems fair to say that Norway has been less successful in implementing a powerful policy of equal opportunities within the labour market, in particular within the private sector. The paper discusses some possible implications of the differences between the U.S. and Norway, with regard to women’s access to managerial power positions.