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As Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) proliferate, calls have emerged for ethical reflection. Ethics guidelines have played a central role in this respect. While quantitative research on the ethics guidelines of AI/Big Data has been undertaken, there has been a dearth of systematic qualitative analyses of these documents.

Aiming to address this research gap, this paper analyses 70 international ethics guidelines documents from academia, NGOs and the corporate realm, published between 2017 and 2020.

The article presents four key findings: existing ethics guidelines (1) promote a broad spectrum of values; (2) focus principally on AI, followed by (Big) Data and algorithms; (3) do not adequately define the term “ethics” and related terms; and (4) have most frequent recourse to the values of “transparency,” “privacy,” and “security.” Based on these findings, the article argues that the guidelines corpus exhibits discernible utilitarian tendencies; guidelines would benefit from greater reflexivity with respect to their ethical framework; and virtue ethical approaches have a valuable contribution to make to the process of guidelines development.

The paper provides qualitative insights into the ethical discourse surrounding AI guidelines, as well as a concise overview of different types of operative translations of theoretical ethical concepts vis-à-vis the sphere of AI. These may prove beneficial for (applied) ethicists, developers and regulators who understand these guidelines as policy.

This paper aims to propose a model of ethics education for corporate organizations framed as an holistic approach to the problem of how to teach ethics.

As a conceptual/viewpoint piece, this paper recognizes that for ethics education to be successful, individuals and corporations must have an appreciation of their role in the society at large. In addition, there needs to be preparedness on the part of the corporation to engage in an ethical manner with the marketplace with which it interacts.

Ethics education should not exist in a vacuum, that is just within the organization, but it should reflect the values of the organization as they impact upon and are impacted upon by society in general.

This model is predicated on a belief that organizations must craft their ethics education program with as much care and enthusiasm as they craft their strategic plan. The employees are the organization's representatives and they need to be made as clear as one can make them as to the ethical philosophy of the company and what is expected of them. Adults have a capacity for greater reasoning and reflection on their life experiences than children and thus the concept of “andragogy” provides a more satisfactory method to fashion education programs for adults than some more traditional methods that focus on training and not education.

When considering the ethics education of its employees, corporations need to place that education in context as it relates to the organization and the wider society as a whole. It is suggested that an ethics education program needs to provide a framework for understanding the concepts of ethics and moral development. Using this framework as the basis for the education offered, the education program is then expanded into an examination of a range of ethical issues presented in a variety of ways.

This paper proposes an integrated way to approach ethics education that ensures that the antecedents of the program are considered in the context of the ethics of individuals, the society and in turn the organization, hence the holistic approach.

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.

There is reason to believe that an ethically minded approach to hiring and the development of an ethical context should be associated with incremental decreases in employees’ perceptions of ethical conflict. It is also likely that the selection of ethical employees, and the reduced ethical conflict that follows, are positively related to employees’ positive work attitudes. The purpose of this paper is to test these relationships.

Using a self-report questionnaire, information was collected from 187 employees working for a medium-sized financial services organization with offices located primarily in the Midwestern USA.

Results of structural equation modeling indicated that employees’ perceptions of ethics-related selection were negatively related to perceived ethical conflict, and that reduced ethical conflict and enhanced ethics-related selection were associated with an increased positive work attitude, which was comprised of job satisfaction, an intention to stay, and organizational commitment.

The results cannot prove causal association between the constructs, and the use of one focal firm limits generalizability.

Organizational leaders and HR professionals should develop ethics-based hiring practices to reduce ethical conflict and strengthen a company's ethical context.

This investigation is relevant because strong relationships among ethics-related hiring, ethical conflict, and positive work attitudes would suggest that companies must use ethical selection criteria and maintain an ethical culture/climate that meets or exceeds employees’ expectations about ethics. Furthermore, this study adds to the relatively few published works exploring the relationship between ethical conflict and work attitudes.

Ethics in organizations has become a critical issue, one which requires an accurate assessment of ethical vision and of the alignment among various elements of the organization. Moreover, the sensitive nature of the concept requires a measurement methodology which counteracts the bias potential of self‐report assessment. This article proposes a way to address these requirements.

It reviews the importance of addressing the ethics issue and delineates a methodology based on the logic of decision making rather than on taxonomies, codes, and self‐report. The basic understandings of axiology and axiometrics are described, as well as an axiological ethics model. Preliminary organizational analysis yields data addressing the issues of the relative importance afforded to key components of ethics by management and employees, and perceptions of the degree to which an ethical climate exists.

The data collected indicate that the organization studied had uneven alignment. Management misjudged the level of congruence between management's vision and employees' vision, and there were often wide gaps in both groups between vision and perceived reality. Moreover, some issues that were primary among employees received little attention by management.

The article proposes that this new axiometric methodology transcends the limits of both conventional self‐report and observation measures of sensitive issues, and provides an ideal resource for understanding an organization's targets for ethical training and transformation.

There is an ongoing concern about workplace ethics. Many voices say that our educational system ought to do something about it, but they do not agree about how to do this. By the time students reach post‐secondary education, they will have already developed a general moral sense. The concern is whether their moral sense is sufficient for ethical situations in the workplace. If not, post‐secondary education is expected to close the gap. In order to do this, educators need information about what is missing. Educators can set clear, work‐related objectives and use classroom activities to reach those objectives based on an identification of these gaps.

The study of business ethics has seldom shed light on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) despite their theoretical and practical significance. Drawing from strain perspective, the purpose of this paper is to address this insufficiency and investigate SME owners’ ethical attitudes toward money-related deviances.

Based on a large sample of 741 Chinese SMEs, an OLS regression analysis was employed to test associated hypotheses. The robustness of results was additionally checked.

The results suggest that for stratification variables, education level is positively related to ethical attitudes, whereas household income level is surprisingly negatively associated with ethical attitudes; for materialism facets, success and happiness exert a negative impact on ethical attitudes as hypothesized, but centrality has no associated impact.

This study has examined both structural and motivational sources of personal strains on the ethical attitude of SME owners, while the characteristics of these strains could be explored in the future studies.

This study advances and complements the dominant behavior approach that emphasizes cognitive and other psychological processes in explaining individual ethical attitudes. It is also seemingly the first study to examine the influence of three materialism facets on entrepreneurial ethical attitudes.

The purpose of this paper is to propose guidelines for business enterprises engaging with indigenous communities to protect their intellectual property rights, particularly indigenous art works produced for the souvenir industry.

Literature on indigenous art and souvenirs demonstrating exploitation of indigenous communities’ intellectual property was facilitated by a lack of knowledge of how to otherwise behave. The proposed guidelines for commercial entities wishing to engage ethically with indigenous communities draws on international exemplars.

A twelve‐point framework for ethical commerce in indigenous souvenirs between indigenous communities and businesses is proposed to ensure populations lacking economic and social power are not disenfranchised by limited experience in a market society.

The proposed guidelines contribute to achieving reconciliation between mainstream and indigenous people in various countries throughout the world.

This paper assists development of guidelines enabling ethical decision‐making in the souvenir industry applying a critical approach to the principles of corporate responsibility.

The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated framework for ethical decision making in uncertain conditions, such as those of entrepreneurship. The model aims to build an exceptional ethical heuristic employable by entrepreneurs.

The theoretical framework is anchored to Aquinas’ theory of practical reason (PR) virtue, specifically its minor virtue gnome, and the Kantian faculty of genius or to better say its modus operandi. Thanks to the composition of these prima facie distant ontologies it is possible to build a “ready-to-use” heuristic.

The paper through a philosophical discussion offers a ready-to-use heuristic that may help entrepreneurs and businesspersons when “navigating” uncertain and troubled situations. In such situations, first it is important to recognize the “exceptionality” of the situation, disregarding where necessary the ordinary criteria of judgment (an act directed by gnome). Second, a creative reconstruction of available knowledge able to reshape the “rules of the game” is needed (an act directed by PR but with connotations drawn from genius).

The paper provides only a theoretical conceptualization of the heuristic model. However, the result is a ready-to-use heuristic rule for entrepreneurs, who work in uncertain and unclear conditions. Empirical validation of the framework can represent an opportunity for future research to test the operative impact of such an exceptional ethical heuristic.

Little attention has been dedicated to ethical decision making in the entrepreneurial setting built on a virtue ethics approach. This paper’s proposed model may represent an innovative alternative to strictly rational models for ethical decision making.

This paper aims to explore President Obama's leadership style during passage of this major and controversial piece of legislation. Specifically it addresses the historical development of healthcare reform in the USA, and provides an ethical analysis of President Obama's leadership in pursuing the health reform initiative.

Based on a review of the literature, speeches, and application of leadership and ethical theory, an analysis was done of President Obama's leadership and ethical approach to healthcare reform.

This analysis revealed that Obama's behavior was consistent with the full‐range leadership model articulated by Bass and Avolio. Moreover, his personal and strategic ethical approach to promulgating healthcare reform incorporated both deontological and teleological ethical principles.

This paper provides a current look at President Obama's leadership style and demonstrates how incorporating different ethical theories can result in the same outcome.