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This first chapter explores the basic foundation of corporate ethics: the human person in all its dignity and mystery, its corporeality and emotionality, and its cognitive and volitive capacities of moral development. Four fundamental characteristics of the human person, namely individuality, sociality, immanence, and transcendence, will be examined for their potential to understand, live, experience, and witness corporate ethics and morals. We explore the profound meaning and mystery of human personhood invoking several philosophies of the good and human dignity as exposed by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in the West, by the doctrine of Dharma in the East as expounded by Gautama Buddha, Mahabharata, and Bhagavad Gita, and by Prophets Confucius and Tao, in the East. Several contemporary cases of great human personhood are analyzed: for example, Peace Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela from South Africa (1993) and Peace Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo from China (2017) – cases of human abuse that turned into triumphs of human dignity.

More than at any other period in human history, humankind is currently at the crossroads of war or peace, growth or decline, progress or regress, life or death, and hell or heaven. We cannot leave these opposite polarities and possibilities to politicians and bureaucrats, to chance and expediency. These are expressions of turbulent markets. We must design and invent, plan and predict, and monitor and control our future and that of our posterity. In this regard, the concept of human personhood cum human dignity and responsibility is a fundamental part of this new self-understanding and undertaking. Ethics and morality are critical components on this creative journey to destiny. Corporate ethics, in particular, requires the development of a clear understanding of the existential situation of turbulent markets – that is, the relationship between executive autonomy and freedom, between human creativity and innovation, and between human culture and corporate social responsibility. Other critical concepts such as accountability and moral responsibility, the ethics of rights and duties, the executive virtue of moral and ethical reasoning, the building of trusting and caring relationships, and the like will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

This is exploratory research on the Bruneian sense of motherhood. The pre-socially established religious definition of motherhood is unformulated where; the analysis is located in the inner context of experience. The Western feminist idea defined motherhood as such reality as the “otherness” whereby its common sense justifies sexuality and feminism. The religious significance gives meaning to its spiritual connection, embodying a foundational knowledge of Bruneian proper personhood – being a good, spiritual and respected person. This relates to the importance of the body as an entity of both culture and symbol that has drawn attention to its sociological significance.

The argument here is how religious experience influences the meaning of motherhood in Brunei Darussalam, which underwent a transformation scheme to empower women. Participants were interviewed, and the transcribed interviews were analysed using the reflexive methodology to find out the natural phenomena of motherhood.

The findings indicate that the Bruneian sense of motherhood is regulated through natural norms of femininity, an unformulated knowledge of spirituality, religion and the influence of cultural and religious rituals, such as prayers, consuming pure food, concoction and reciting holy verses from the Quran.

This study reveals to codify and extend the sense of religious obedience through generations. Religion rationalises the spiritual experience and provides the basis of obedience towards a proper development of personhood Bruneian. The idea of motherhood itself recreates a role to empower women, which will initiate opportunities for further studies in Brunei context.

The study aimed to understand the significance of how employee personhood and the act of speaking up is shaped by factors such as employees' professional status, length of employment within their hospital sites, age, gender and their ongoing exposure to unprofessional behaviours.

Responses to a survey by 4,851 staff across seven sites within a hospital network in Australia were analysed to interrogate whether speaking up by hospital employees is influenced by employees' symbolic capital and situated subjecthood (SS). The authors utilised a Bourdieusian lens to interrogate the relationship between the symbolic capital afforded to employees as a function of their professional, personal and psycho-social resources and their self-reported capacity to speak up.

The findings indicate that employee speaking up behaviours appear to be influenced profoundly by whether they feel empowered or disempowered by ongoing and pre-existing personal and interpersonal factors such as their functional roles, work-based peer and supervisory support and ongoing exposure to discriminatory behaviours.

The findings from this interdisciplinary study provide empirical insights around why culture change interventions within healthcare organisations may be successful in certain contexts for certain staff groups and fail within others.

This paper aims to explore John Mbiti’s concept of African time in line with the studies on the crisis of the post-independence African state. Then, how this concept offers new analytical spaces for understanding the modern nation-states inconveniences in African contexts.

The paper analyses the Mbitian African concept of time in light of the works on post-independence African state and communalism.

By using the Mbitian concept of time politically after explaining African communalism and African concepts of personhood and destiny, the paper reached a conclusion. This conclusion claims that due to the highly existential nature of the African concept of destiny and the past-oriented feature of the African concept of time, Africans cannot be restrained by any supernatural claim or any futuristic promises that are irrelevant to their context and cut from the communal values of ancestral past. Africans do not think supernaturally or bet for the future. However, those futuristic and supernatural claims that cannot restrain the African subjectivity – ironically – characterize the modern nation state with its “progress orientation” and “social-contract” metaphysics. Unfortunately, this radical difference in perceptions between the past-oriented African temporality and the future-oriented modern state temporality rendered the post-independence. African state dysfunctional and unable to operate as a medium for authority. This, consequently, opened the door for informal conflict and strife.

The paper is novel with regard to offering a new theory on the conceptual problems of the nation state in African contexts.

Nation states’ neoliberal policies do not regard asylum seekers and undocumented migrants as deserving of a good life. Social work in welfare states is highly connected to the policies of nation states. There is a need to address theories in social work that have a transnational focus at the local level. Axel Honneth’s recognition theory enables an approach to forced migration from the direction of personal relations and personhood itself. The core idea is that if people cannot gain recognition, this causes harm to their self-realisation. The purpose of this paper is discuss how the recognition theory overcomes a national focus in social work.

This paper is theoretical. The relations of recognition are discussed in the context of transnational social work in welfare states with forced migrants.

The theory of recognition in social work practice with people who do not have a residence permit is best articulated by an understanding of rights concerning all the attributes of the person, i.e. as a needy being, autonomous and particular in a community.

Forced migrants’ backgrounds provide a specific backdrop for misrecognition, which may harm self-relations. The relations of recognition contribute to social work by providing the sensitivity required to evaluate the complexity of views and attitudes that affect the way we encounter service users. The relations of recognition (care, respect and esteem) give normative criteria for communication in order to take another person as a person, which, in turn, contributes to healthy self-relations of forced migrants.

To identify the Transcendental Essence of Humanity, the purpose of this paper is to describe in brief what kind of research became possible when the theory of, e.g. autopoiesis, Husserl’s Transcendental Consciousness and the theory of Rhodes and Thame came together to form a “transcendental” interview methodology.

Critical conceptual implications are drawn to form a new research method to explore a de-subjectified inner domain and to search for a possible common essence of humanity.

A Transcendental Emotional Reference was found practically alien to contemporary perspectives. Still, the reference governs the emotional structure of human experience. This different perspective answers basic questions of morality, organization theory and leadership.

The findings of the new research open a new and transparent perspective answering Grey’s question: “What is it to be human?” (Grey, p. 47, 2014.) A perspective shedding new light on the humanities. A research limitation is the number of respondents. Still, being transcendental the findings are theoretically valid for all.

The paper is based on a unique research enabling 32+ (ongoing research) respondents to explore their own and universally shared Transcendental domain.

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.

All entrepreneurs face challenges during their venture start-up process, but immigrant entrepreneurs face additional and distinctive challenges due to their contextual newness. This paper focuses on understanding the intertwined journeys of nascent entrepreneurship and cross-cultural adaptation of immigrants in a small Western European country where immigrant entrepreneurship is still a relatively new phenomenon.

The induction-driven, 18-month longitudinal empirical inquiry focused on six early-stage nascent entrepreneurs. Qualitative methods included participant observation during an enterprise program, qualitative interviews and ongoing informal communication.

The data uncovered the interplay between the nascent immigrant entrepreneurship and cross-cultural adaptation. This led to the development of a novel conceptual framework which highlights how the cross-cultural adaptation domain links with the process of recognition, evaluation and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities by immigrant entrepreneurs. While varying temporarily and contextually, cross-cultural adaptation was found to create both enabling and constraining tensions within the nascent entrepreneurial experiences of immigrants.

It is recognized that undertaking just six cases may present a significant limitation of the research, but a close examination of even one individual's lived experience can yield valuable insights. It is hoped that future work will test the highlighted research propositions and other findings in different empirical contexts, and so add to the emerging conceptual framework on nascent immigrant entrepreneurship within the context of cross-cultural adaptation.

No previous qualitative studies have been undertaken seeking to understand how cross-cultural adaptation interacts with the early stages of nascent immigrant entrepreneurial activity. By integrating new venture creation and cross-cultural adaptation theories, this research contributes to the conceptualisation of early stages of nascent entrepreneurial activities of immigrants in a new host environment. The implications of the research are also relevant to enterprise support bodies, policymakers and practitioners who support immigrant entrepreneurship.