This paper investigates the broad ideological conflict between world views on corporate culture. Two views are identified: one encompassing standard liberal economic philosophy; the other taking broader notions of corporate culture from ethics theory. The conflict that surrounded the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle is used as an illustration of the current conflict between these views. The writings of Alasdair MacIntyre are employed as a means of elucidating and reconciling these two world views.

Confucius’s teachings fall under four headings: “culture, moral conduct, doing one’s best, and being trustworthy in what one says” (7/25). Trust or, more precisely, being trustworthy, plays a central role in the Confucian ethic. This paper begins by examining the Confucian concept of trustworthiness. The second part of the paper discusses how the ideal of trustworthiness makes itself felt in business practices within China. The paper concludes by raising and addressing several objections to the Confucian emphasis on trustworthiness.

Why does it matter that every negative thought you have had about car salespeople, they have likely had about you? The answer to this question opens up the distinctive challenges, and opportunities, facing business ethics. Those challenges and opportunities emerge from the significant bearing organizational reality has upon individuals’ conduct. As we consider how to assign responsibility for misconduct; how to provide guidance to organizational actors about what they ought to do; and how to develop responsive ethical theory, we need to take psychological and social forces into account. Organizations shape human behavior in ways that pose unavoidable questions about responsibility, practical guidance, and the enterprise of business ethics itself. Adopting the agents’ perspective suggests that business ethics can take a leading role in addressing these vexing questions that confront ethical inquiry and social science more broadly.

The randomized response technique (RRT) is used to study the deceptive behavior of purchasing agents. We test the proposition that purchasing agents’ perceptions of organizational expectations influence their behavior. Results indicate that perceived pressure to perform and ethical ambiguity on the part of the firm are correlated with purchasing agents’ unethical behavior, in the form of acknowledged deception of suppliers.

Work on stakeholder theory has proceeded on a variety of fronts; as Donaldson and Preston (1995) have noted, such work can be parsed into descriptive, instrumental, and normative research streams. In a normative vein, Phillips (1997) has made an argument for a principle of fairness as a means of identifying and adjudicating among stakeholders. In this essay, I propose that a reconstructed principle of fairness can be combined with the idea of consent as outlined in integrative social contract theory (ISCT) to bring about a more normative stakeholder theory that also has ramifications for corporate governance.

Total Quality Management (TQM) has been the object of extensive discussion within the popular literature and is increasingly of interest among management scholars. Recent scholarship has focused on the theoretical foundations of TQM, particularly what makes it work, why so many firms have had problems implementing it, and under what circumstances it may create a sustainable advantage for individual firms. This paper extends the work in theory development regarding TQM and offers an empirically testable theoretical model of its function. The central claim of the paper is that embedded within TQM there are a set of moral values (“value dynamics”) that must be developed and maintained if it is to work, and that seeing them as moral values has significant theoretical and practical implications. That is, how TQM is understood and “enacted” (Weick 1979) by managers plays a significant role in determining its success. The discussion is linked to the ethics literature, normative implications of the model are explored, and directions for future research are outlined.

In his Society for Business Ethics presidential address, “Does business ethics rest on a mistake?” John Boatright argues that we should move away from what he calls the Moral Manager Model of Business Ethics toward a Moral Market Model, in which the focus is not on the individual responsibilities of managers but on the regulation of economic markets to achieve ethical ends. Boatright’s message is a very important one. Market mechanisms and market values increasingly dominate our society, and it is important that business ethicists recognize this and ask how they can contribute to such a society. But this should not mean throwing out or even downplaying the Moral Manager Model. I shall argue here that economic markets are inherently hostile both to regulation and to moral values, and that their beneficence depends critically on the political context of traditional moral values and individual responsibility that the Moral Manager Model supports. Indeed, as we go through a period of commercial and cultural globalization, marked by a combination of rapid economic development and moral uncertainty, the need for moral managers has never been greater.

Boatright begins by identifying three problems with the Moral Manager Model of business ethics. First, to the extent that it describes the desired aims of business ethics, he contends that business ethics is fighting a losing battle. The most admired corporate executives today are not “moral managers” at all but hard-headed and ruthless economic actors. Secondly, its application is effectively restricted to the senior managers of large companies: it does not speak to the situation of the majority of managers and working people. Thirdly, he suggests, most people nowadays are primarily economic actors. In business and in our home lives we act and think as market participants, striving to get the best deal.