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The purpose of this paper is to develop a narrative framework for doing empirical research into business ethics and shows, through two examples, how the framework can be applied in practice in this context. The focus is on interview-based research.

A theoretical research based on literature review was conducted.

In the developed narrative framework, two main kinds of analysis are distinguished: an analysis of the narrative and a narrative analysis. An analysis of the narrative is a matter of classifying and producing taxonomies out of the data. The purpose of a narrative analysis is to construct a story or stories based on the data. Narrative analysis differs from the analysis of narratives in that the story does not exist prior to the analysis, but is created during the analysis.

The proposed narrative framework helps those doing empirical research into business ethics avoid simplistic “black and white” interpretations of their material, and helps them to show that ethical realities in the business world are often complex, various and multiple.

The paper offers a methodological framework for those doing qualitative research into business ethics which will increase the quality and rigor of their studies.

A value of the narrative approach is that the stories offer researchers an entry point to understanding the complexity of ethics and how people make sense of this complexity. The paper shows in detail how the methods presented can be used in practice in empirical research.

This paper analyses what is seen as a crisis of authority in financial reporting. It considers the view that an element of authority may be restored to accounting through communicative reason. The paper argues that the justice‐oriented rationality of traditional, Habermasian, communicative ethics is incapable of providing a solid foundation for the re‐authorisation of financial reporting. The paper argues that a more adequate foundation might be found in an enlarged communicative ethics that allows space to the other of justice‐oriented reason. The inspiration for the enlargement is found in Ricoeur's analysis of narrative, his exploration of its role in the figuration of identity, and in his biblical hermeneutics which reveals the necessity of an active dialectic of love and justice.

The purpose of this paper is to see to what extent Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy could be used to unveil how corporate discourse about financial crimes (in codes of ethics) is closely linked to the process of understanding.

Corporate ethical discourse of 20 business corporations will be analyzed, as it is conveyed within their codes of ethics. The companies came from five countries (USA, Canada, France, Switzerland and Brazil). In the explanatory study, the following industries were represented (two companies by industry): aircrafts/trains, military, airlines, recreational vehicles, soft drinks, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, beauty products, telecommunications and banks.

Historically-based prejudices in three basic narrative strategies (silence, chosen items and detailed discussion) about financial crimes are related to the mindset, to the basic outlook on corporate self-interest or to an absolutizing attitude.

The historically-based prejudices that have been identified in this explanatory study should be analyzed in longitudinal studies.

The historically-based prejudices that have been identified in this explanatory study should be analyzed in longitudinal studies. Historically-based prejudices could be strengthened by the way corporate codes of ethics deal with financial crimes. They could, thus, have a deep impact on the organizational culture in the long-run.

The paper analyzes the way corporate codes of ethics use given narrative strategies to address financial crimes issues. It also unveils historically-based prejudices that follow from the choice of one or the other narrative strategy.

The arena of services marketing provides numerous opportunities for ethical violations. As competition intensifies, service providers strive harder to please the customer which can increase the temptation to make ethical compromises. Presents the narrative paradigm as a normative model for ethical decision making in the services marketing environment. The narrative paradigm is learned through socialization and can be applied to the performances of service providers. By viewing services rendered from the narrative perspective, service marketers may be able to discern hidden moral issues, or potential controversial activities. Introduces the concept of services as a performance and the current status of ethics in marketing with implications for the service industry. Introduces the narrative paradigm and gives examples of how it can be applied to the service marketing environment.

This paper examines the ethical tensions in social entrepreneurship (SE) research by focusing on the ethical consequences of obtaining ethics approval in a university in the developed world while executing fieldwork for data collection in a developing country. It aims to offer insight into ethical research practice to protect vulnerable research participants from being further silenced and marginalised by the dominant social order that developed world universities embody.

The ethical tensions are described through narratives drawn from a Filipino Ph.D. candidate's experience. The candidate obtained ethics approval from the university in New Zealand and collected interview data from social enterprise beneficiaries in the Philippines. A critical reflexive lens carves a space for a deepened understanding of these ethical tensions.

This paper offers critical insights into ethical SE research involving participants from vulnerable communities. These insights suggest that closer consideration needs to be given to contextual sensitivity, particularly on the part of researchers and research ethics committees, in crafting ethical data collection protocols. Findings also show how it is important for the indigenous researcher to filter ethical protocols through their local knowledge.

The paper uses critical reflexivity to examine ethical tensions in SE research involving vulnerable beneficiaries. It offers insights into ethical research procedures and practices that engender mindfulness of the contextual and relational aspects of doing SE research in the developing world.

To determine the human and environmental values that need to be protected at every ethical decision‐making point, given that resources are finite and that the needs of future generations have no upper limit.

A search was made of the Humanities and Area Studies Databases and Articles, the Philosophers' Index, RenDa Fuyin Baokan Ziliao (People's University reprints series), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index on ISI Web of Knowledge, the Arts and Humanities Data Service, the British Philosophy Database, Dissertation Abstracts International, the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (REP Online), ZETOC (Electronic Table of Contents) through MIMAS, and Academic Search Elite. Relevant arts and humanities journals were hand‐searched, and reference lists examined for further relevant reports.

Although decision making in environmental policy relies on logic, empirical fact and intuition, it does not make sense to have a “universal master plan” covering living persons, the unborn, and the non‐human world when designing an environmental policy. Environmental policy options are meaningful in specific contexts; since each context has its own underpinnings and specific preferences on the basis of its own peculiar socio‐cultural and economic circumstances, the necessity of narrative ethics in decision making becomes evident.

As this review demonstrates, the initial concern in environmental matters may centre on the preservation of human health, clean health, clean air and water, endangered species, jobs and the needs of future generations. Decisions may then be reached through cost benefit analysis, which tends to be whether or not the chosen course of action produces greater balance, the greatest happiness to the greatest number. But there are difficulties in determining what constitutes “cost” or “benefit”.

It became evident from this study that, to stand the test of time, context‐sensitive environmental paradigms should be capable of enriching themselves with ideas from other approaches to decision making such that, although problems may have a global dimension, the solutions to them must be context‐sensitive.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the background and an evaluation of a new health and social care leadership programme. Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes a three‐stage programme design methodology. First, participants were asked to narrate their stories of implementing change at a series of in‐depth interviews. Second, the dialogue was continued with these managers and others based around their stories of change to establish that their meanings of change and their support needs had been understood. Finally, their expressed needs and practical suggestions were analysed with the help of MacIntyre's virtue ethics schema. MacIntyre's schema was used for two reasons. First, because it is based on the notion of a narrative underpinning to social reality and to informing our moral standards, and second because strong resonance between the managers' narratives and the schema's underlying thesis of ethical conflict in modern institutions was found. Findings – The finding was that the programme exceeded expectations by influencing the participants' courage to lead change despite the complexity of their working environment. At the start of the programme many of the participants had reported feelings of powerlessness in face of central and local imperatives for reforms to their services. During the course of the six‐month programme their narratives changed from “mission impossible” to “mission possible”. Research limitations/implications – The main limitation is that this was a pilot study. However, the encouraging findings do support the view offered by Moore and Beadle that MacIntyre's thesis offers rich concepts for the furtherance of managerial and organisation studies and imply that a wider education programme based on this methodology and theorising would be worthwhile. Practical implications – The enthusiasm with which this pilot programme was received implies that public sector leadership education needs to pay more attention to narrative constructions of change, ethical conflict and engaging managers in concert with their constructed needs in the face of those conflicts. Originality/value – The study contributes a design methodology for health services leadership education informed by a narrative research methodology and a virtue ethics theoretical framework.

This paper articulates a counter-concept to the notion of speciesism with the aim to encourage thinking beyond critique, towards imagining what non-speciesist worlds can actually look like.

By using the concept of “multi-species-isms” (or “multispecies”, as a simpler adjective), and linking it to feminist and relational ethics of “care”, the paper seeks to unite perspectives from both Critical Animal Studies as well as feminist, posthumanist theories. Already existing traces of multi-species-isms that exemplify different forms of multispecies care are visualised through annotated illustrations that accompany the text. These traces offer a cue for negotiating multispecies worlds without attempting to define their content in all too definite forms.

Rather than focusing on critiquing oppressive structures, the paper contributes narratives of multispecies worlds that inspire further imagination towards the positive ingredients of such worlds and show more concretely how multispecies care is practised in everyday life.

These insights frame a starting point for a repertoire that shows the numerous ways in which multispecies relationships between humans and other animals are already given form.

By articulating the actual ingredients of multi-species-isms, rather than focusing on what they are not, the paper seeks to advance a move towards adding multispecies possibilities that can be especially helpful for those researchers, designers and activists concerned with imagining alternative futures.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the relaxion on what can be done to develop ethical cultures that may be less permeable and more resilient to changes in leadership from an ethical point of view. The influence of leaders on organisational ethics is recognised, and there are even those who consider that it is not possible to maintain an ethical culture when leaders are not engaged. But, if this theory is true, all business ethics programmes that can be created, and the cultures that can gradually be developed in organisations, will always have their existence and robustness suspended at each leadership change. How to maintain an ethical culture beyond leadership?

As a strategy, we used the case study with a narrative methodology, in which a chief executive officer (CEO) and a chief compliance officer (CCO) narrate in the first person a case of perceived collapse of the ethical culture of a multinational company.

The findings point to the difficulty in maintaining ethical leadership. Key aspects to protect an organization from leadership changes are as follows: the management of the succession process, the quality of the training on ethics and the mechanisms developed by the organization to foment speak up and take notice of the situations. Moral blindness and the banality of evil that also can be observed in organizations appear as facilitating elements for collapse.

Ethical leadership is generally presented as a necessary condition for an ethical culture. However, leaders often have unethical or ethically neutral leadership. This case helps to understand the difficulties experienced by leaders in adopting ethical leadership and proposes a set of instruments and procedures that, when included in an ethical programme, can protect the company's ethical culture against unethical leaders. Some characteristics of our case study make it particularly relevant: action occurs in a multinational, a context where, by size and complexity, achieving uniformity in culture becomes particularly relevant, and actions happen in the context of a CEO succession process, something that may occur in any company and which is often a trigger for ethical misconducts. Additionally, our case is narrated by a CEO and a CCO, which makes it rare, as it is especially difficult to have access to these executives.

In the last few years, signs of material excess by organizational and political leaders have often evoked public outcry. The paper aims to argue that there is insight to be gleaned from drawing together strands from the leadership literature with the literatures on moral economy and conspicuous consumption. The premise is that views of leader conspicuous consumption are shaped by their moral economy, the interplay between moral attitudes and economic activities. The paper seeks to juxtapose tales of Cleopatra and Antony's display of wealth with current media accounts to contribute to the leadership literature on ethics, specifically its intersection with power and narrative representation.

The paper adopts an analytic approach, with an international orientation and an interdisciplinary perspective. It acknowledges the role of narrative representation in shaping leadership and the psychological ambivalence with which societies approach their leaders' practices, focus here on desire-disdain and discipline-decadence. Cleopatra and Antony's conspicuous consumption generated a legacy of condemnation for millennia. Drawing from the retellings of their story, four moralizing representations – by Plutarch, Shakespeare, Sarah Fielding and Hollywood – are analyzed and juxtaposed with current media accounts. Altogether, the paper combines the interest in leadership across history with moralizing perspectives on the display of wealth by leaders.

The intersection of the literatures on leadership, moral economy and conspicuous consumption draws together several dynamics of relevance to leadership. First, evaluations of the display of wealth on the part of a leader are contextual: they change across time and place. Second, interpretations of conspicuous consumption involve aesthetic judgment and so sit at the nexus of morality and taste. Third, following tragedies, tales of leader conspicuous consumption offer critics another knife to dig into the fallen tragic hero. Fourth, views of conspicuous consumption are gendered. Last, conspicuous consumption by leaders attracts condemnation through support for social responsibility and sustainability.

The paper establishes a novel articulation between the literatures on leadership, moral economy and conspicuous consumption.