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Purpose: This chapter applies and integrates theories of status and stigma to better understand the mechanisms that drive the combined effects of the status of race and the stigma of criminal record in the context of the labor market. Using these social psychological theories of status and stigma, I propose and test two potential mechanisms – moral expectations and performance expectations – that might explain the compound or “double disadvantage” observed among Black job seekers with a criminal record. Within this synthetic application, I also seek to bridge and extend the literatures on status and stigma processes.

Methodology/Approach: To examine the relationship between race and criminal record and the potential mediating role of moral and performance expectations, I use a laboratory experiment consisting of a hiring scenario where participants evaluate mock, but ostensibly real job applicants who vary on the characteristics of interest. Participant evaluations consist of rankings along a series moral and performance-related scales as well as a set of workplace outcomes.

Findings: Findings suggest that race and criminal record aggregate to intensify disadvantage, with Black applicants who have a criminal record faring worse than other applicants on each workplace outcome. Results also support moral expectations, but not performance expectations, as a key mechanism driving this status-stigma intensification process.

Implications: This study has important implications for studies of race, crime, and employment as well as for theories of status and stigma. Future research should attend more closely to the role of perceived morality both in substantive work on race and criminal record and in bridging work on status and stigma processes. Pinpointing moral expectations as a mechanism of bias related to race and criminal record also opens new avenues for targeted intervention efforts.

Despite the practice of credit card services by Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) is debatable, Islamic banks (IBs) have been offering this product. Both Muslim and non-Muslim customers have subscribed to the products. Thus, it is critical to analyse the strategy of IBs’ moral messages in reminding their Muslim and non-Muslim customers to repay their credit card debts. This paper aims to investigate this issue in Indonesia using data mining via machine learning.

This study examines the IBs’ customers across the 32 provinces of Indonesia regarding their moral status in credit card debt repayment. This work considers 6,979 observations of the variables that affect the moral status of the IBs’ customers in repaying their debt. The five types of data mining via machine learning (i.e. Boruta, logistic regression, Bayesian regression, random forest, XGBoost and spatial cluster) are used. Boruta, random forest and XGBoost are used to select the important features to investigate the moral aspects. Bayesian regression is used to get the odds and opportunity for the transition of each variable and spatially formed based on the information from the logistical intercepts. The best method is selected based on the highest accuracy value to deliver the information on the relationship between moral status categories in the selected 32 provinces in Indonesia.

A different variable on moral status in each province is found. The XGBoost finds an accuracy value of 93.42%, which the three provincial groups have the same information based on the importance of the variables. The strategy of IBs’ moral messages by sending the verse of al-Qur’an and al-Hadith (traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad PBUH) and simple messages reminders do not impact the customers’ repaying their debts. Both Muslim and non-Muslim groups are primarily found in the non-moral group.

This study does not consider socio-economic demographics and culture. This limitation calls future works to consider such factors when conducting a similar topic.

The industry professionals can take benefit from this study to understand the Indonesian customers’ moral status in repaying credit card debt. In addition, future works may advance the recent findings by considering socio-cultural factors to investigate the moral status approach to Islamic credit warnings that is not covered by this study.

This work finds that religious text of credit card repayment reminders sent to Muslims in several provinces of Indonesia does not affect their decision to repay their debts. To some extent, this finding draws a social issue that the local IBs need to consider when implementing the strategy of credit card repayment reminders.

This study credits a novelty in the discourse of data science for Islamic finance practices. Specifically, this study pioneers an example of using data mining to investigate Islamic-moral incentives in credit card debt repayment.

In this chapter, I analyze the notion of corporate responsibility from the person-centric perspective. I offer a four-dimensional exposition in terms of which I examine the corporate moral personhood view. These four dimensions are explained and critiqued to arrive at a definition of moral responsibility and status appropriate to corporations. I suggest that a corporation cannot be construed as a person in the sense in which individuals are persons. Since a corporation cannot be an independently existing entity, it cannot have an independent moral personality of its own as individual persons have. Therefore, I argue that a reasonable construal of corporate moral personhood has to exploit a different point of view altogether. With this difference of standpoint, I develop what is called the institutional personhood view. I argue that corporations do acquire a sort of collective institutional moral personality.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the historical development of identity theory from 1988 to the present, and then outline some thoughts about future directions for the theory.

The chapter discusses major advances in identity theory over the past 25 years such as the incorporation of the perceptual control system into the theory, the introduction of “resources” in which symbolic and sign meanings are important, new views of the social structure, the relevance of the situation in influencing the identity process, the idea of different bases of identities, broadening our understanding of multiple identities, studying identity change, and bringing in emotions into the theory.

Throughout the review, empirical work is identified and briefly discussed that supports the major advances of the theory.

The chapter suggests a number of ways that identity theory may be developed in the future such as examining negative or stigmatized identities. Additionally, there is a discussion as to ways in which the theory may be tied to other theoretical traditions such as affect control theory, exchange theory, and social identity theory.

Identity theory has had a number of applications to various areas in society, including understanding crime, education, race/ethnicity, gender, the family, and the environment.

This is the most recent overview of identity theory over the past 25 years. It becomes clear to the reader that the theory offers a way of understanding the person as a cognitive, emotional, and behavioral agent who influences the structure of society but who is also influenced by the social structure.

This chapter offers a critical evaluation of the disability scholarship of Michael Oliver, a leading developer of the British social model of disability, and Peter Singer, a philosopher whose utilitarian ethics excludes some persons with intellectual disabilities from full moral status. Through a critique of the simplified accounts of disability employed by these two very different scholars, this chapter explores the ontology and the moral significance of disability. The importance of the ontology of disability in relation to inclusion is also discussed.

Moral reasoning research in Western cultures is grounded primarily in Kohlbergian cognitive moral theory. Enumerable investigations about the psychological determinants and cultural dimensions of moral reasoning have provided significant insights about Western decision making and contributed to Western organizational behavioral theory. However, inquiry about these same constructs and how they may interact with moral reasoning in non-Western Southeast Asian trading partner countries has not provided comparable insights. The purpose of this paper is to remedy that by comparing predominant cultural dimensions to levels of moral reasoning in student and graduate populations in Thailand and the USA.

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) measurement of moral reasoning (Rest et al., 1999) and the Values Survey Module (VSM) 2013 (Hofstede and Minkov, 2013) were translated for the first time into Thai, pilot tested, and used to gather cultural and moral reasoning data in Thailand. The same English version instruments were used to gather comparable data among similarly matched US samples. Comparisons are presented in this paper, and differences in approaches to moral decision making are discussed.

Findings indicate that there are both significant psychological and cultural differences between the two nations that affect moral reasoning. Predominant status quo moral reasoning predominates in Thailand, while a polarity between self-interest moral reasoning and higher level abstract idealistic moral reasoning predominates in the USA. Potential cultural influences on these moral reasoning tendencies are discussed.

While findings can be generalized to the sample populations of Thai and US undergraduate students and graduate students who are in the workplace, the considerable time required to complete the two survey instruments precluded inclusion of higher level, veteran managers and public policy administrators in the study. Alternative survey methods need to be developed for investigating these subjects in order to make the combined findings more robust and widely generalizable.

Careful attention to cultural and linguistic variables provided for thorough and effective first-time translations of the DIT and the VSM 2013 from English into the Thai language. These two instruments are now available to other researchers who wish to investigate cultural dimensions and moral reasoning through other research designs. The Thai-version DIT can be obtained from the copyright holder, Center for the Study of Ethical Development (http://ethicaldevelopment.ua.edu/). The Thai-version of the VSM can be obtained through the Geert Hofstede website (www.geerthofstede.nl/).

These findings can help researchers in Western and non-Western countries to better understand the foundations upon which moral reasoning in the two countries is grounded, and can provide insights about how individuals in quite different cultures perceive ethical dilemmas in the workplace and public arena and attempt to solve them. The findings also serve as another entry point for business managers and public policy administrators to not only better understand organizational behavior as regards ethical decision making, but general decision making as well.

This is the first research study comparing cultural dimensions identified by Geert Hofstede and Michael Minkov as measured by the VSM 2013 to moral reasoning as measured by the DIT.

Refers to Chester Barnard’s classic work in management theory, The Functions of the Executive, which includes one of the first systematic discussions of management ethics, and is an attempt to create a new justification for executive control and organization freedom. The literature reviewing Barnard’s effort has focused on the various arguments he uses to justify these ends. Contends that the key fact in understanding Barnard’s work on management ethics is that he broke with any historical continuity of (traditional) moral belief. Barnard attempts to replace traditional moral beliefs with a rational process of moral conflict resolution controlled by the executive. He develops a complex system of dichotomies, assumptions, and concepts in order to incorporate the individual into the organization and demonstrate the moral superiority of the individual executive. This conceptual system, however, is shown to be based on a contradictory reversal of the definitions in the individual‐organization dichotomy. This reversal supports Barnard’s objectification of organization which enables him to reduce morality to a functional role within the organization. In other words, morality is reduced to politics. The argument is based on the dubious ambition that only organizations, not society, can provide an integrated moral whole. Barnard’s justification fails in that rational individualism cannot provide a stable or legitimate moral system.

Economics and sociology are two different theoretical disciplines dealing with one and the same subject. The aim of the paper is to integrate the two paradigms into one framework of interpretation and analysis.

Economics is presented as a science that approaches human behaviour being subject to the omni‐present phenomenon of scarcity, assuming rationality and social independence of human actors. Sociology is presented as a science that interprets human behaviour as group behaviour. Groups are motivated to rank one another in terms of status. Integration must take place by relating the two analyses based on these paradigms.

The basic economic framework is about the relationship between preferences and scarce resources, determining the structure of allocation of goods. The basic sociological framework is about the relationship between the distribution of socially valued goods and the culture that gives goods their social meaning. A socio‐economic framework is about the relation between allocation, distribution, culture and preferences.

When applying the socio‐economic framework to real‐life phenomena both the economic and the social motives play a role in the explanation, which is not the case in applied economics and applied sociology.

Information ethics, as is well known, has emerged as an independent area of ethical and philosophical inquiry. There are a number of academic journals that are devoted entirely to the numerous ethical issues that arise in connection with the new information communication technologies; these issues include a host of intellectual property, information privacy, and security issues of concern to librarians and other information professionals. In addition, there are a number of major international conferences devoted to information ethics every year. It would hardly be overstating the matter to say that information ethics is as “hot” an area of theoretical inquiry as medical ethics. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview on these and related issues.

The paper presents a review of relevant information ethics literature together with the author's assessment of the arguments.

There are issues that are more abstract and basic than the substantive issues with which most information ethics theorizing is concerned. These issues are thought to be “foundational” in the sense that we cannot fully succeed in giving an analysis of the concrete problems of information ethics (e.g. are legal intellectual property rights justifiably protected?) until these issues are adequately addressed.

The paper offers a needed survey of foundational issues in information ethics.

Circular economy advocates innovations that upcycle wastes in the food supply chain to generate high added-value materials. These innovations are not only disruptive and green but also they are often initiated by startups, leading to the emergence of novel open-loop supply chains connecting actors in food and non-food sectors. While earlier research has highlighted the need to seek legitimacy for disruptive innovations to survive and grow, little is known about how these innovations occur and evolve across sectors. This paper aims to elaborate on this mechanism by exploring the function of the circular economy as a boundary object to facilitate legitimacy-seeking strategies.

An exploratory multiple-case research design is adopted and features food waste innovation projects with multi-tier supply chains consisting of a food producer, a startup and a buying firm. The study is investigated from the legitimacy and boundary object lenses.

The findings proposed a framework for the role of a boundary object in enabling legitimacy-seeking strategies for novel food waste innovations. First, the interpretative flexibility of the circular economy affords actors symbolic resources to conduct manipulation strategy to achieve cognitive legitimacy. Second, small-scale work arrangements enable creation strategy for the new supply chain to harness moral legitimacy. Finally, pragmatic legitimacy is granted via diffusion strategy enabled by scalable work arrangements.

This paper provides novel insights into the emergence of food waste innovation from a multi-tier supply chain perspective. It also highlights the key role of the boundary object in the legitimacy-seeking process.