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This research looks at the main effect of individuals’ moral philosophies, idealism and relativism, and its impact on the four dimensions of the consumer ethics beliefs – active benefit, passive benefit, no harm and doing good. The moderating impact of two dominant personalities – Machiavellianism and narcissism – was also analyzed. Based on Hunt–Vitell theory of ethics, this study aims to propose that there is a positive and significant impact of more relativistic and less idealistic moral philosophies on the decreased consumer ethical perceptions and that the narcissistic/Machiavellian personality traits drive that effect.

A total of 497 survey respondents were recruited via an online platform. All respondents were asked to answer questions, which were divided into four major parts. The first part consisted of scales related to both moral philosophies, the second part had both dark personality scales, the third part questioned about their consumer ethical beliefs and the final part was related to consumer demographics.

Relativists had higher scores in three consumer unethical belief dimensions. Idealists were not supportive of the active and passive illegal activities, as did their positive relation with doing good aspect of the ethical beliefs. Machiavellians strengthen the positive relativism relationship. The idealistic relation of narcissists, compared to relativistic relation, is stronger on unethical decision-making for consumers.

This study contributes to the current knowledge of individual’s moral philosophies and their impact on consumer ethical beliefs. It further demonstrates how the dark personalities of narcissism and Machiavellianism drive the relationship.

To build public trust in the accounting profession, previous research studies have stressed the need for ethics education. This present research aims to investigate the effects of teaching ethics using the ethics education toolkit (EET) developed by the International Accounting Education Standards Board on accounting students’ moral judgment.

An experimental design was used to determine the effects of teaching ethics using the EET on moral judgment. Data were obtained using the multidimensional ethics scale questionnaire and analysed with multiple linear regression. Factor analysis was performed to obtain the four moral philosophies defined in the literature.

The results confirm that use of the EET improves the moral judgment of accounting students. The influence of utilitarianism and relativism on moral judgment was reduced, while the students’ ability to recognise violating an unwritten contract as an unethical act was improved. Contrary to expectations, the influence of justice on moral judgment decreased.

The study may benefit academics by showing positive outcomes of EET use. The EET is a well-developed teaching tool, also suitable for educators insufficiently qualified to develop their own ethics courses or facing time constraints.

The EET was developed to support implementation of ethics education in programmes for professional accountants. By investigating the applicability and effects of the tool in higher education, this study aims to develop moral judgment in accounting students before they enter the accounting profession.

This paper aims to identify predictors that affect business student perceptions on ethical decision-making. This paper also investigates how those predictors impact the decision-making related to ethical matters among Vietnamese business students.

A survey was conducted to collect data for testing the hypotheses. Questionnaires were administered to 500 Vietnamese business students from four public and private universities. The independent t-test was applied to the usable sample to analyze and derive relationships.

The empirical results showed that idealism and relativism significantly predict the perception of ethical decision-making. Idealism and relativism were found to influence high ethical decision-making significantly.

The study contributes to the literature on ethical decision-making in a transitional economy. New findings and insights from the research serve as a foundation for future research with ethics and decision-making topics. The results offer some insights to business schools in improving their ethical teaching courses and to businesses in their recruitment.

This chapter explores the role of ethics in shaping, underpinning and sustaining authentic leadership. Viewing ethics as a system of moral principles that govern individual behaviour and conduct, Mould discusses the basis of ethics for authentic leadership, recognising that it has multiple overlapping and conflicting sources. Recognising the multiple ‘moral’ pressures and dilemmas that leaders face, Mould asks how they can construct and live by coherent ethics in a globally minded, interconnected, culturally diverse and often incoherent world. He suggests tools that may assist in searching for ethics that support authentic leadership. The author concludes that examining the interplay between ethics and leadership practices challenges theories of authentic leadership.

This chapter introduces the aims, objectives and potential outreach of the handbook. The handbook is both a quest for insights from leadership theory and practice in the contemporary world and a manifesto for leadership training through a value-based approach to authenticity. Contributors in this handbook do not belong to the orthodox authentic leadership community. They offer varied, provocative views and personal case studies of leadership. Some endorse aspects of the concept of authentic leadership while developing new understanding of authenticity, others suggest that it is flawed; others offer fresh, challenging, leadership insights. The chapter concludes with a brief introduction to all chapters in the handbook.

This study aims to investigate the association between executives with foreign backgrounds and the audit fees paid by the Chinese-listed firms over the period from 2010 to 2020.

To examine the association between executives’ foreign experience and audit fees, this study constructs the following empirical model: Lnfee_i,t = β₀ + β₁Foreign background_i,t + ∑β_j Control_i,t + YearFE + IndFE + ε_i,t (1).

This study finds that auditors charge higher fees for firms hiring more executives with foreign backgrounds. The results are robust to a battery of robustness checks, including fixed effects, alternative measures of independent variable, controlling for other characteristics of executives and auditors and entropy balancing method.

This study sheds light on how executives’ foreign backgrounds affect audit fees, enriching the literature on executive heterogeneity and audit fees and providing important implications for audit practitioners.

This study aims to examine the potential of Information Ethics (IE) to serve as a coherent ethical foundation for the library and information science profession (LIS profession).

This study consists of two parts: the first part present IE’s central theses and the main critiques it has received; the second part offers the authors' own evaluation of the theory from the LIS perspective in two steps: (1) assessing its internal consistency by testing its major theses against each other; (2) assessing its utility for resolving frequently debated LIS ethical dilemmas by comparing its solutions with solutions from other ethical theories.

This study finds that IE, consisting of an informational ontology, a fundamental ethical assertion and a series of moral laws, forms a coherent ethical framework and holds promising potential to serve as a theoretical foundation for LIS ethical issues; its inclusion of nonhuman objects as moral patients and its levels of abstraction mechanism proved to be particularly relevant for the LIS profession. This study also shows that, to become more solid an ethical theory, IE needs to resolve some of its internal contradictions and ambiguities, particularly its conceptual conflations between internal correctness, rightness and goodness; between destruction, entropy and evil; and the discrepancy between its deontological ethical assertion and its utilitarian moral laws.

This study alerts LIS professionals to the possibility of having a coherent ethical foundation and the potential of IE in this regard.

This study provides a systemic explication, evaluation and field test of IE from the LIS perspective.

This paper aims to examine the role of social auditing in legitimising the relationship between the buyer and supplier firms rather than strengthening corporate accountability in the global supply chain.

Applying case study methodology and drawing on Suchman’s theory on societal legitimacy, it is argued that social audits are artefacts of legitimacy, and global firms dominate the buyer–supplier relationship across the supply chain. The analysis is based on data collected from different secondary sources, including Walmart’s corporate sustainability reports.

Using Walmart’s relationship with Tazreen Fashions Limited around the Tazreen factory fire incident as a case study, it explains that the practices which attempt to symbolically demonstrate accountability from social audits need to shift to a more continuous and sincere demonstration of accountability through the social audit process. For this to occur, the cognitive and pragmatic approaches that international buyers have previously used in auditing their supply firms’ social responsibility are no longer sufficient to achieve societal legitimacy. Instead, a moral turn needs to underpin the intentions and actions of these buyers to maintain legitimacy and demonstrate accountability across the supply industry in developing economies.

The findings of the study answer the questions raised in the extant literature about the expectation from social auditing and whether social auditing serves to ensure corporate accountability. The paper contributes to the policymaking discussion of how social auditing can be configured to include a legal provision to ensure that social auditing is not a parroting tool for corporations.

Drawing upon a contractarian lens of corporate social responsibility (CSR), this study aims to explore community construals of happiness and evaluates conceptual boundaries of CSR for happiness.

Using a mixed-methods design, natural language processing and thematic analysis techniques were used to analyse large volumes of textual survey data collected from over 1,000 research participants through an online survey.

Results indicated that lay construals of happiness were primarily defined in terms of socioeconomic conditions and psychoemotional experiences. In explicating the boundary conditions, community perceptions regarding the extent of businesses’ social responsibilities for happiness were evidenced in five themes: that businesses have a responsibility not to harm happiness, a responsibility to enable conditions for happiness to occur, a responsibility to exercise awareness of happiness implications in decision-making, a responsibility for happiness that is limited by strategic purpose and resource capability and a responsibility for happiness that is limited by stakeholder proximity.

This study contributes to the theoretical and empirical foundation of CSR for happiness while simultaneously developing and applying a novel approach for processing and analysing large volumes of qualitative survey-based data.