Search results

Purpose – The purpose of this essay is to look at the workplace of hostess clubs as moral projects and examine the constitution of morals in the marketplace “from below,” meaning from the perspective of workers. It focuses specifically on the experiences of Filipina hostesses, who constitute the majority of foreign hostesses in Japan. Specifically, it looks at their moral construction of commercial sex in the clubs where they work, which are usually Philippine clubs, meaning clubs that solely employ Filipino women.

Methodology/Approach – Ethnographic research in Philippine hostess clubs in Tokyo, Japan.

Findings – The analysis illustrates the emergence of three moral groupings among Filipina hostesses. They include moral prudes (those who view paid sex as immoral), moral rationalists (those who morally accept paid sex), and lastly moral in-betweeners (those who morally reject the direct purchase of sex but accept its indirect purchase). The case of hostess clubs shows us market activities – in this case, customer–hostess interactions – do not inevitably result in a hegemonic churning of a particular moral order, as the constitution of morals in the marketplace is not only a top-down process but depends on the actions from below, specifically the personal moral order of hostesses, the club culture (sex regimes), peer pressure, and employment status concerns.

Value – This essay provides concrete empirical evidence on an understudied group of migrant workers, and it advances our knowledge on the experiences of sex workers and their negotiation of moral views on commercial sex.

Business schools offer a unique window into the making of corporate morals since they bring together future executives at formative moments in their professional lives. This paper relies on an analysis of faculty’s teaching tasks at the Harvard Business School to better understand the making of corporate morals. More specifically, it builds on a coding of teaching notes used by faculty members to highlight the importance of silence in promoting a form of moral relativism. This moral relativism constitutes, I argue, a powerful ideology – one that primes business leaders not to vilify any moral stand. In such a context, almost anything can be labeled “moral” and few behaviors can be deemed “immoral.”

This chapter presents two examples of misinterpretation of the philosophical term and historical concept of human dignity in contemporary legal theory and practice. Current legal theories (R. Alexy) still introduce Pico’s concept of dignity regarding the human personality and personal (volitional and rational) abilities. The term ‘dignity’ is marginal for Pico and shows the spiritual way to the status of the original Adam. Pico’s concept of dignity is located in the area of spirit (hyperphysics), not metaphysics (soul) or physics (materials). Günter Dürig in his commentary to Grundgesetz also used the Kantian concept of human dignity. Dürig exaggerated this value and used it also for the area of physics (to protect the human being as a personality). For Kant, the term ‘dignity’ was also marginal, and he used it in the area of metaphysics (soul – especially the moral and rational parts), regarding transcendence for homo noumenon, not for homo phaenomenon. In general, it seems to be problematic to use the ideal of the dignity for the law, which regulates the social relations between concrete phenomenal personalities. There are parallels to Pico. The Kantian starting point was different from Pico, because Kant stays in the area of metaphysics (especially the moral and rational parts). Both consider freedom as a condition of dignity. The concept of autonomy of will is significant for both, but each thinks of it in different ways. For both, human being can become master of oneself, but in a different context.

Discussions about the dignity of human beings often focus on violations of a person’s dignity that are performed by other persons. However, human beings can also violate their own dignity or at least they can expose it to a violation by others thoughtlessly or intentionally. In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant states that ‘[o]ne who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him’. Kant presupposes that persons can infringe or even forfeit their own dignity – for instance through servile behaviour – and that violating one’s own dignity is a violation of a duty towards oneself. Starting from the tension between dignity in terms of honour and worth in current debates and in Kant’s own thinking, as well as between understanding dignity as absolute or relational, I develop a comprehensive account of dignity as a duty to oneself. The author argues for a twofold obligation towards oneself to respect one’s own dignity: (i) a duty (as the necessity of an action done out of respect for the moral law) to respect one’s authority as an autonomous person in the Kantian sense; and (ii) beyond the Kantian framework – an obligation arising from the practical necessity that follows from one’s self-understanding as a self-determined, self-expressive individual personality in a socio-cultural context. Finally, the author outlines the consequences of the idea of ‘making oneself a worm’ for the concept of dignity in the realm of rights by discussing why, even though persons can behave like worms, others ought not to step on them.

One way of looking at the association between ethics and stakeholder theory – of examining the idea that stakeholder theory has a strong moral foundation – is to consider how the stakeholder approach might in fact be directly driven by and guided by the moral obligations of business. An alternative perspective we offer is that stakeholder theory only indirectly derives from the moral obligations of business, with business purpose serving as a mediating factor. We work through the fairly straightforward logic behind that alternative perspective in this chapter. We argue that it is a better way to think about the association between ethics and stakeholder theory, particularly because it allows for a theoretical and practical distinction between corporate social responsibility and stakeholder theory. Stakeholder theory can thereby continue developing as a theory of strategic management, even as it brings morals to the fore in ways that other approaches to strategic management do not.

Moral struggles in and around markets abound in contemporary societies where markets have become the dominant form of economic coordination. Reviewing research on morality and markets across disciplinary boundaries, this introductory essay suggests that a moral turn can currently be observed in scholarship, and draws a direct connection to recent developments in the sociology of morality. The authors introduce the chapters in the present volume “The Contested Moralities of Markets.” In doing so, the authors distinguish three types of moral struggles in and around markets: struggles around morally contested markets where the exchange of certain goods on markets is contested; struggles within organizations that are related to an organization’s embeddedness in complex institutional environments with competing logics and orders of worth; and moral struggles in markets where moral justifications are mobilized by a variety of field members who act as moral entrepreneurs in their striving for moralizing the economy. Finally, the authors highlight three properties of moral struggles in contemporary markets: They (1) arise over different objects, (2) constitute political struggles, and (3) are related to two broader social processes: market moralization and market expansion. The introduction concludes by discussing some of the theoretical approaches that allow particular insights into struggles over morality in markets. Collectively, the contributions in this volume advance our current understanding of the contested moralities of markets by highlighting the sources, processes, and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets, both through tracing the creation, reproduction, and change of underlying moral orders and through reflecting the status and power differentials, alliances, and political strategies as well as the general cultural, social, and political contexts in which the struggles unfold.

Leadership cannot exist without followership. The phenomenon of direction and guidance, coaching and mentoring, has at least three components: the leader, leadership, and followers. With each component, the composition of purpose and goals, ethics and morals, rights and duties, and skills and talents is critically important. While the leader is the central and the most important part of the leadership phenomenon, followers are important and necessary factors in the leadership equation. Leaders and followers are engaged in a common enterprise: they are dependent upon each other; their fortunes rise and fall together. Relational qualities define the leadership–followership phenomenon. A major component of such a relationship is how the leaders create and communicate new meaning to followers, perceive themselves relative to followers, and how the followers, in turn, perceive their leader. This mutual perception has serious ethical and moral implications – how leader uses or abuses power, and how followers are augmented or diminished. This chapter features the essentials of ethical and moral, corporate executive leadership in two parts: (1) the Theory of Ethical and Moral Leadership and (2) the Art of Ethical and Moral Leadership. Several contemporary cases such as inspirational leadership of JRD Tata, Crisis of Leadership at Infosys, and Headhunting for CEOs will illustrate our discussions on the ethics and morals of corporate executive leadership.

Ethics is fundamentally a science of social and collective responsibility. Ethics concerns human behavior as responsible or accountable. Because of the nature of social interaction, certain members of the society will bear greater authority, and hence, greater individual and social responsibility than others. In our world, personal responsibility and social responsibility are hardly separable. Personal responsibility becomes responsibility for the world because the person and the world are inseparable. In this chapter, we use the term responsibility from a legal, ethical, moral, and spiritual (LEMS) standpoint as some promise, commitment, obligation, sanctioned by self, morals, law, or society, to do good, and if harm results, to repair harm done on another. Hence, responsibility from a moral perspective is trustworthiness and dependability of the agent in some enterprise. Its inverse is exoneration – the extent to which one is excused from commitment and repairing the harm done to others by one’s actions. We apply the theories and constructs of executive responsibility to two contemporary cases: (1) India’s Super Rich in 2014 and (2) the Fall and Rise of Starbucks. After exploring the basic notion of responsibility, we present a discussion on the nature and obligation of corporate responsibility into three parts: Part I: Classical Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility; Part II: Contemporary Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility, and Part III: A synthesis of classical and contemporary views of responsibility and their applications to corporate executive responsibility.

Purpose — (Dis)honesty as a quality of our actions can be assessed at different levels. Often these levels have not been differentiated. Semantically we cannot talk about a dishonest society or dishonest organizations — dishonesty can only be attributed to individual actions. We can approach a dishonest act through its essence (deontology), consequences (utilitarianism), and also through the person committing the act (virtue ethics), but most often organizational spheres are too complex objects of study to face ethical dilemmas without the influences that their context can bring. Therefore, the purpose of the chapter is to look at dishonesty as an unethical act through the lenses of behavioral ethics, since behavioral ethics is able to grasp the framing effects of ethical situations while combining the main elements of the previously mentioned traditional ethical theories.Design/methodology/approach — In the current chapter it will be differentiated between traditional ethical theories and acknowledged that depending on the level of analysis (individual, organization, or the society level) with their distinctly different ontological backgrounds, we will have different groundings for making any kind of axiological statements about the dishonesty of an action.Findings — In order to give ethical statements about (dis)honesty in organizations, we cannot neglect the influences brought by context. Organizations with endless social interactions both locally and globally usually have no universal basis for making axiological statements.Originality/value — The originality of this chapter is twofold: firstly to cover the importance of making sense of what ethical approaches we take as a grounding when we make ethical judgments in organizational context, and secondly to analyze whether and how the question of dishonesty differs when we switch between the most traditional ethical approaches. The chapter proposes a new framework how ethical decision-making should be assessed depending on the level of social interactions and how dishonesty is associated with gaining social approval.

Mental health is a universal issue nowadays, and poor mental health is detrimental to any individual's optimal health and well-being. Instead of keeping up with mental health, most civilization encounters the opposite continuum of mental health, a.k.a. mental illness. Unfortunately, mental health issues are more intense during the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on public organizations and public servants more severe while rendering their social services to the Malaysian citizens despite the danger of the pandemic to them and their family’s well-being. Hence to cure the disease, manifold ways and means are presented. Most public servants are Malay Muslims and hence recommended treatments are originated from Islam teachings, thus proposing the Islamic Mental Health model to improve their mental health during this intense situation is proper. The model emphasizes on fulfilling the deeds of habluminallah and habluminannas. Habluminannas complements habluminallah as the formation of a complete mental health model from Islamic perspective. Habluminallah focuses on the person's relationship to his Creator, while habluminannas focuses on the person's relationship with others. These two types of morals, that is morals to Allah (habluminallah) which is indicated by the command that Muslims must establish a good relationship with Allah by not associating Allah with others and Muslims also must show morals toward fellow human beings (habluminannas) shown by the command to do good to both parents, close relatives, orphans, poor people, near neighbors and distant neighbors, peers, people on the way, and servants. Habluminallah and habluminannas are two sides of a coin that cannot be separated. The two are the foundation of comprehensive mental health in Islam. So Islam encourages its people to practice both worshiping of the Creator as well as encourages social relations, such as paying attention to the fates of the weak. Even if referred to the pillars of Islam, there is a combination of habluminallah and habluminannas, a combination of vertical and horizontal relations.