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To succeed in today’s dynamic and unpredictable business world, businesses are increasingly required to gain the trust of and inform the society in which they operate about the social and environmental consequences of their actions. Corporations’ claims regarding the responsibility and ethicality of their actions, however, have been shown to be contradictory to some degree. We define corporations’ deceitful implementation of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies as pseudo-CSR. We argue that it is the moral characteristics of individuals, i.e. employees, managers and other decision-makers who ignore the CSR policies, which produce pseudo-CSR.

This is a conceptual paper.

The authors conceptualize the gap between true CSR and pseudo-CSR on a cognitive individual level as “moral laxity,” resulting from organization-induced lack of effort concerning individual moral development through ethical discourse, ethical sensemaking and subjectification processes. The absence of these processes prohibits individuals in organizations from constructing ethical identities to inhibit pseudo-CSR activities.

This paper contributes to the literature on CSR by augmenting corporate-level responsibility with the hitherto mostly neglected, yet significant, role of the individual in bridging this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to get a deeper understanding how not-for-profit organizations (NPOs) discursively legitimize their corporate engagement through cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) in general, and particularly how they construct legitimacy for partnering with firms involved in the commodification of water. The paper seeks to shed light on the values embedded in these discursive accounts and the kind of societal effects and power relations they generate, and the authors are particularly interested in understanding the role of modernity in shaping their responsibilities (or lack of them) via various technologies and practices

Drawing on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995), the authors analyze the discursive accounts of three water-related CSPs involving the three biggest bottled water producers in the world (Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Danone) and three major non-profits (The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the World Wildlife Foundation and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

The NPO’s legitimate their corporate engagement in the water CSPs through the use of two global discourses: global governance discourse and the global climate crisis discourse. Relief from responsibility is achieved through three processes: replacement of moral with technical responsibility, denial of proximity and the usage of intermediaries to whom responsibility is outsourced.

This paper explores the processes of legitimizing accounts for CSPs, particularly focusing on NPO discourse and their use of CSR elements and the consequences of such discursive constructs, and this has received little to no attention in previous research.

This paper seeks to address the question: what happened to postmodern?

Three trends are reviewed: postmodern fragmentation, late modern appropriations of postmodern moves; and emergent awareness of the dark‐side of postmodern.

On the way to postmodern theory the revolution to reform modern capitalism fragmented into rhetoric‐strands, while practice became ineffective.

The paper concludes with possibilities for participatory research in ways that enact more postmodern forms of capitalist praxis.

It is suggested that qualitative studies of postmodern praxis can be conducted; such as postmodern organizations that enact the dark‐side of biotechnology; consumer organizations, such as Blackspot and No Sweat that contract to non‐sweatshop factories; and autoethnographic examples of how building a Harley‐Davidson chopper is post‐production and post‐consumption.

The paper shows that in the fragmentation of moderns and postmoderns, there is a relentless appropriation of postmodern moves by late modernism. This is one contributing factor to the “dark side of postmodern.” Other contributing factors are naive brands of postmodern (e.g. chaos theory, complexity, new age spirituality) which, sometimes only see the positive potentialities, and blind one to the dark side. What is original is the call for a combination of critical theory and postmodern theory (critical postmodern) that looks at the relation between various ideas of modern and postmodern and how they can be studied in their dialogicality.

Collects thoughts that emerged during the recent virtual conference, Business and Leadership Ethics. For the consumer, legislation often seems insufficient to control the activities of business and business suffers as a result. A company’s ethical stance is frequently as important as more traditional considerations like product, service and even pricing. Considers three themes as a basis for the ethical orientation of organizations. Postmodernism is important – after all, this new collective consciousness is largely responsible for the changing view of business that necessitates this study. Despite links with older business styles, competition can be used to shift the ethical base, provided that the ethics of competition (as in sport) are also considered. Total quality management can easily be adapted – the TQM fundamental of “excellence” can become “ethical excellence”. Concludes that as business and society become partners a true moral leadership will be needed to make the relationship work.

Postmodernist contestations of modernist economic and organizational rationalities have made immense contributions to organizational analysis. A current direction in critical theory now, working through the postmodernist critique, seeks new conceptions of organizations and sources for the revitalization of organizational life. In particular, feminist criticism drawing on, and contributing to, postmodern forms of inquiry and interpretation, offers new visions of critical organizational analysis. This article addresses feminist postmodern critiques, and particularly discusses two feminist contributions developed out of serious critical engagement with postmodernist thought: eco‐feminism and conceptions of “relational autonomy”, of agentic, social subjectivity.

This paper analyzes the concept of racism in the context of business ethics and globalization. It first introduces three ethical traditions to understand moral issues in business: deontological, utilitarian and virtue ethics. Then it discusses about the challenges and demands that globalization has set to multicultural and multinational business operations. Third, it clarifies how racism works when it is understood as an ideology‐based phenomenon. It argues that there is a great value of knowing how racism works for the development of an anti‐racist and nondiscriminating organization. Although any of the three traditions on ethical thinking does not give direct answer to the question of how to develop and manage an anti‐racist business organization, but connected with the understanding of racism they can be useful tools for the leader of a multicultural organization.

In the internet era, the boundaries between public and private lives of government employees are often blurred, resulting in enhanced concerns about administrative accountability and effectiveness. By adopting a multi-step qualitative methodology involving internet survey and analysis of illustrative examples, this research explores and examines how social media policies could assist in keeping the public and private lives of civil servants distinct. We find that very few public sector agencies have adopted social media policies in an attempt to regulate employee behavior. We conclude that social media sites, both private and official, could be an effective administrative tool if harnessed properly. We offer certain recommendations and strategies based on our findings that could assist in accomplishing the principles of ethical administration.

In the internet era, the boundaries between public and private lives of government employees are often blurred, resulting in enhanced concerns about administrative accountability and effectiveness. By adopting a multi-step qualitative methodology involving internet survey and analysis of illustrative examples, this research explores and examines how social media policies could assist in keeping the public and private lives of civil servants distinct. We find that very few public sector agencies have adopted social media policies in an attempt to regulate employee behavior. We conclude that social media sites, both private and official, could be an effective administrative tool if harnessed properly. We offer certain recommendations and strategies based on our findings that could assist in accomplishing the principles of ethical administration.

The purpose of this article is twofold; first, to demonstrate a linkage between the tenets of justice theory and OD core values, assumptions and ethical beliefs and, second, to show the role of this linkage as it applies to postmodern organizations in terms of the evolution of OD technology. Distributive, procedural and interactional justice is discussed and juxtaposed with the humanistic and organizational effectiveness orientations that compise the core values of OD. Finally, ways are suggested that the linkage between justice theory and OD core values can be used for the development of OD science and its application to the postmodern organizational paradigm of equality, empowerment and horizontal relationships.

Surely the absence of a sociology of morality has to be one of the major weaknesses of academic sociology, and a mysterious one at that. For Durkheim, one of sociology's founding fathers, morality was to have a central place as an object of inquiry; moreover, he was passionately interested in it on the existential level, as was Weber.