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Intensive Care for Everyone’s Least Favorite Oxymoron: Narrative in Business Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Laura L. Nash
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Abstract:

It had to happen. After two full decades of intense energy, business ethicists and business practitioners may actually have succeeded in suppressing the feeblest joke of the profession: “Business Ethics. Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Har har har.

In the early days of business ethics, the oxymoron had actual embodiments. “Business” was represented by hard-nosed, thick-skinned managers with no inclination to adopt academia’s language and critiques. “Ethics” was embodied by ivory-towered theoreticians with an undisguised contempt for profit makers. What a joke to think of these two groups as conceptually productive partners.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , January 2000 , pp. 277 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2000

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References

1 This essay expands on Laura Nash’s Presidential Address to the Society for Business Ethics at its annual meeting, held Boston, Massachusetts, August 9, 1997.

2 R. Edward Freeman, Presidential Address, Society for Business Ethics Annual Meeting, Dallas, Texas, August 1995.

3 R. Edward Freeman, “The Problem of Two Realms,” speech quoted by Al Gini, “Moral Leadership and Business Ethics,” in Ethics: The Heart of Leadership, ed. Joanne B. Ciulla (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), p. 33.

4 Thomas W. Dunfee, “The Marketplace of Morality: First Steps Toward a Theory of Moral Choice,” Presidential Address, Society for Business Ethics Annual Meeting, Quebec City, Quebec, August 1996, reprinted in Business Ethics Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1998): 127–146.

5 Laura L. Nash, Good Intentions Aside: A Manager’s Guide to Resolving Ethical Problems (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1991).

6 Lynn Sharp Paine, “Managing for Corporate Integrity,” Harvard Business Review, March 1994.

7 Patricia Werhane, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

8 Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).

9 Selznick, p. 143.

10 Selznick, p. 148.

11 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932).

12 William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 381.

13 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 3 (New York: Collier Books, 1961).

14 Martin E. Marty, The One and the Many: American’s Struggle for the Common Good (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 150ff.

15 Michael Oakshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933, 1990).

16 Joseph L. Badaracco, Defining Moments. When Managers Must Choose between Right and Right (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997), p. 44.

17 For a discussion of key contextual inconsistencies, see Laura L. Nash, “Business Ethics: the Second Generation,” in The Relevance of a Decade: Essays to Mark the first Ten Years of the Harvard Business School Press, ed. Paula Barker Duffy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1994), pp. 115–148.

18 Harvey Cox, “The Market As God,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1999.

19 Robert N. Bellah, et al. The Good Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).

20 Thomas Donaldson, The Ethics of International Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 101–108.

21 Donaldson, p. 108.

22 Robert C. Solomon, Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 215.

23 Solomon, p. 214.

24 Laura L. Nash, “Ethics Without the Sermon,” Harvard Business Review, November– December 1981.

25 E.g., Sissela Bok, in her classic book on lying, utilizes historical narrative, poetry, drama, theology, and psychological narrative as well as classic ethical theory. (Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life [New York: Vintage Books, 1979])

26 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).

27 Cedric H. Whitman, The Heroic Paradox (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 25.