In this paper we develop a categorization scheme for stakeholder research based on differences in studies’ primary level of analysis (managerial agency, organizational, or societal) and use this scheme to review and critique genres of stakeholder-based accounting research. We draw three primary conclusions: 1) stakeholder research in accounting should more clearly incorporate the business ethics stakeholder literature, 2) ethical issues are much less likely to be considered in stakeholder-based accounting research when a managerial agency level of analysis is adopted, and 3) the accounting discipline can learn from debates within the business ethics literature concerning shareholder dominance and stakeholder legitimacy. These conclusions, taken together, demonstrate the need for accounting researchers to become more focused on ethical considerations in the design of accounting information systems, performance measurement criteria, and financial reporting models.

This paper argues that attempts to apply Alasdair MacIntyre’s positive moral theory to business ethics are problematic, due to the cognitive closure of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice. I begin by outlining the notion of a practice, before turning to Moore’s attempt to provide a MacIntyrean account of corporate governance. I argue that Moore’s attempt is mismatched with MacIntyre’s account of moral education. Because the notion of practices resists general application I go on to argue that a negative application, which focuses on regulation, is more plausible. Large-scale regulation, usually thought antithetical to MacIntyre’s advocacy of small-scale politics, has the potential to facilitate practice-based work and reveals that MacIntyre’s own work can be used against his pessimism about the modern order. Furthermore, the conception of regulation I defend can show us how management is more amenable to ethical understanding than MacIntyre’s work is often taken to imply.

The paper has two parts. The first considers the debate about whether social entities should be regarded as objects distinct from their members and concludes that we should let the answer to this question be determined by the theories that social science finds to have the most explanatory power. The second part argues that even if the theory with the most explanatory power regards social entities such as organizations as persons in their own right, we should not accord them citizenship in the moral realm. Rather we should accept moral individualism, the thesis that only individual humans can have rights and duties. The moral status of corporations and other organizations is often thought to depend on their ontological status. In particular, it is thought to depend on whether they can be said to exist as distinct entities, and especially as persons distinct from the individuals who are their members. In this article I argue that the two questions are actually independent of each other. No matter what the ontological status of organizations, they should not be accorded citizenship in the moral realm in their own right.

Despite some exceptions, the business ethics literature on the moral responsibility of corporations does not emphasize a subject critical to that inquiry: the general nature of corporations. This article attempts to lessen the imbalance by describing three conceptions of the corporation that have been prominent in twentieth century legal theorizing, and by sketching their implications for the moral responsibility of corporations. These three conceptions, at least two of which have counterparts in the philosophical and organizational theory literature, are the concession, aggregate, and real entity theories. The article concludes that the real entity theory is the most plausible of the lot. At least under prevailing tests of moral responsibility, it then contends, corporations-as-real-entities are morally responsible for most of their members’ actions.

This paper describes the professional ethical context behind the failure of Arthur Andersen’s audit of Enron. It is argued that the evolution of extreme industrial concentration in the accounting profession, and the subsequent unrestrained diversification of the “Big Five” accounting firms were the sources of multiple conflicts of interest that were unresolved by the time of the Enron debacle. In the post-Enron era, the problems of commercial conflicts of interest and of highly concentrated power in the profession remain important issues.

Accountancy is believed by its practitioners to be a profession, not a commercial venture. (Magill, Previts, and Robinson 1998: 4)

Programs aimed at increasing women’s entrepreneurship are a rapidly proliferating class of CSR initiatives across the globe with participation by many of the world’s largest corporations. The gendered nature of this phenomenon suggests that feminist approaches to CSR may offer a particularly salient mode of their analysis. In this article, I argue that insights from feminist economics regarding the historically prevalent—but narrow and gendered—definition of work, which artificially separates production from reproduction, provide fruitful tools for theory building when conceptualizing gender through the lens of CSR. I demonstrate that the gendered separation of production and reproduction is typically taken as given in entrepreneurship, and that mainstream CSR research has not sufficiently challenged this perspective. I present a conceptual framework of what is to be gained by examining the CSR, entrepreneurship, and feminist economics literatures in combination, and demonstrate how researchers might use this framework for future research.

As we enter the new millennium, there is an overriding question facing global corporate free enterprise, and that is whether the corporations that now or will control and affect so much of the planet’s humanity and resources can demonstrate not only their profitability but their integrity. The old quasi-theological arguments still persist, whether multinational corporations and capitalism in general best serve humanity; whether corporations and capitalism are good or evil or whether they are, at best, amoral; whether corporations can have a conscience; and whether responsibility can be expected of them.

For many, the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill has become a symbol of unethical corporate behavior. Had Exxon’s managers not callously pursued their own interests at the expense of the environment and other parties, the accident would not have happened. In this paper, we (1) present a short case study of the Valdez incident; (2) argue that many analyses of the case either ignore or fail to give sufficient weight to the uncertainties managers often face when they make decisions; and (3) propose a framework for moral management grounded in principles of communicative ethics, moral dialogue, and in the non-traditional ideas of many current management and behavioral decision theorists. From this view, the moral manager is not expected to know the “correct” answer to every ethical issue, but rather to participate responsibly in an open dialogue with other interested parties.

What is a corporation? Ed Hartman momentarily hesitates, commenting that “the last thing we need is another metaphor for organizations.” The truth is that we can all too easily imagine—and will no doubt get—much worse than another metaphor or model for organizational structures, functions and behavior, but the critical question is, of course, how apt a metaphor is “the corporation as commons”? If excitement about a subject can be measured by the number of current metaphors,—witness the current overuse and abuse of the “information superhighway” image—then the nature of the corporation would still seem to be a vibrant topic. But whether a metaphor depicts business organizations as teams playing games, as free-for-alls, as military hierarchies or as “dog-eat-dog” jungles makes all the difference, not only in our understanding of organizations but in the way that the people in those organizations understand themselves and, consequently, behave and treat one another.

Hartman suggests that corporations and other large organizations are a lot like, in fact are (at least metaphorically) identical to, “a commons.” This is, admittedly, not a very pretty or exciting metaphor. It is rather rural for such an urbane subject, and the metaphor of sheep farming may suggest some unintended and unfortunate images in the corporate world. But, nevertheless, the metaphor of “the commons” has the virtue of being an old, rather established philosophical and political metaphor. Indeed, it is so well established that it is no longer considered to be a metaphor. Literally, the commons is publicly owned land on which any villager’s sheep may graze. It is obviously a finite resource, and its maintenance is in the interests of all.

We provide a brief history of the business and human rights discourse and scholarship, and an overview of the articles included in the special issue.

This article considers the economic case for so-called sweatshop wages and working conditions. My goal is not to defend or reject the economic case for sweatshops. Instead, proceeding from a broadly pluralist understanding of value, I make and defend a number of claims concerning the ethical relevance of economic analysis for values that different agents utilize to evaluate sweatshops. My arguments give special attention to a series of recent articles by Benjamin Powell and Matt Zwolinski, which represent the latest and best defense of the economic case for sweatshops. In the process, I challenge Zwolinski’s “non-worseness claim” (NWC), and the idea that opposition to sweatshop wages and working conditions fails to respect that the autonomy of would-be sweatshop workers. Ultimately, I conclude that even if the economic case for sweatshops rests on a solid empirical foundation, agents possess good reason to advocate for better wages and working conditions for sweatshop workers, and to prefer less exploitative or coercive relationships. Sweatshop labor undermines a compelling vision of free markets, according to both Kantian and republican conceptions of freedom, and the relationships formed by those who participate in such markets.

This commentary develops my position on the ethics of price gouging in response to Jeremy Snyder's article, “What's the Matter with Price Gouging.” First, it explains how the “nonworseness claim” supports the moral permissibility of price gouging, even if it does not show that price gougers are morally virtuous agents. Second, it argues that questions about price gouging and distributive justice must be answered in light of the relevant possible institutional alternatives, and that Snyder's proposed alternatives to price gouging fare worse on the dimension of justice than a system in which goods are allocated by a system of market prices.

Private firms are uniquely positioned to provide significant relief to the misery that pervades the developing world. Global misery has persisted due to a variety of failures in the provision of relief by nation-states and non-governmental organizations, including corruption and the absence of strong background institutions in the countries in need of aid. In many situations, private firms have a comparative advantage over these entities in the provision of aid. Examples such as Merck and the cure for river blindness show how firms can use their specific competencies and knowledge to relieve misery through Direct Corporate Humanitarian Investment (DCHI). DCHI is legitimized by marketplace morality and is consistent with the role of business within society, including legal dimensions. Shareholders may formally approve a corporation’s DCHI strategy and all stakeholders may act in support of their moral desires with respect to the firm and its DCHI strategy.

Virtually every empirical inquiry of issues relevant to applied business ethics involves the asking of questions that are sensitive, embarrassing, threatening, stigmatizing, or incriminating. Accordingly, questions of this sort are likely to result in unsatisfactory outcomes: 1) many individuals will not respond; and/or, 2) many individuals will not respond candidly. An obvious objective, then, is to use a method to collect information which increases participation, provides absolute anonymity, and does not jeopardize subjects’ privacy. The randomized response technique (RRT) is a method designed to realize this promise. We provide here an overview of RRT approaches and applications which may be effectively used in empirical examinations of potentially sensitive issues in business ethics.

Suppose we want to know whether the ethics of persons with one characteristic differ from the ethics of persons having another characteristic. Self-selection bias occurs if people have control over that characteristic. When there is self-selection bias, we cannot be sure observed differences in ethics are correlated with the characteristic or are the result of individual self-selection. Self-selection bias is germane to many important business ethics questions. In this paper I explain what self-selection bias is, how it relates to business ethics research, and how to correct for it. I also illustrate the correction process in an empirical analysis of the effect of organizational rank on worker ethics. Using data from the European Values Survey, I find that being a supervisor is positively correlated with worker ethics. However, I also find a negative self-selection effect. Workers with relatively lower ethics are selected into supervisory roles.

International business ethics, as the term implies, cannot be national in character, anymore than international law can be national in character. Yet the analogy to law is as misleading as it is enlightening. For although we can speak of American, German or Japanese law, it is odd to speak of American, German or Japanese ethics. The reason is that ethics is usually thought to be universal. Hence there is simply ethics, not national ethics. Despite this, there is a sense that can be given to American business ethics or German business ethics. American business ethics does not refer to American as opposed to German ethics, but rather to the approach taken by those who do business ethics in the United States. What characterizes the American approach is not that it uses a special ethics or a national ethics, but that it is concerned with certain problems that are embedded in the American socio-economic-political system and faced by American business. German or Japanese business ethics differs from American business ethics in the cases and topics it deals with, in the different set of background institutions it takes for granted or investigates, and in the different culture, history, and social setting in which business operates.

The same is true of what is often called international business ethics insofar as we can distinguish American, German, Japanese approaches to it. International business ethics might refer simply to the comparison of business practices and their ethical evaluation in different countries; it might investigate whether there are in fact ethical norms commonly recognized in all countries that should govern international business and economic transactions, and if there are variations in ethical norms, whether multinational firms are bound by the ethical norms of their mother country, by the ethical norms of their host countries, by either, by both, or by neither. International business ethics might involve broad issues about the economic inequality of nations, the justice of the present international economic order, the ethical status and justifiability of such organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and of their structures and practices, as well as the ethical dimensions of international debt, and the claimed economic dependence of some countries on others, or such global issues as the role of industry in the depletion of the ozone level.

In this article we set the context for this special issue focusing on individual and organizational reintegration in the aftermath of transgressions that violate ethical and legal boundaries. Following a brief introduction to the topic we provide an overview of each of the four articles selected for this special issue. We then present a number of potentially fruitful empirical, theoretical, and normative directions management and ethics scholars might pursue in order to further advance this evolving literature.

I explore the role of hypernorms in the Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) of Thomas Donaldson and Thomas W. Dunfee, who suggested that hypernorms are a necessary condition for the rejection of cultural relativism and justification of moral norms within and across social communities. Hypernorms are, thus, a significant part of a conception of international business ethics. I highlight philosophical problems that emerge in attempts to identify and justify hypernorms. These problems have not been sufficiently addressed in the ISCT; therefore, I will discuss the discourse–ethical contributions of contemporary German philosophers toward resolving the justification problem with regards to universal norms. Discourse ethics builds on the linguistic and the pragmatic turns in philosophy and develops procedural rules for the assessment of norms. I explore variants of discourse ethics with regards to their concept of justification and discuss the implications of discourse ethical procedures for the justification of norms and actions.

Effects of globalization have amplified the magnitude and frequency of corporate abuses, particularly in developing economies where weak or absent rules undermine social norms and principles. Improving multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) ethical conduct is a factor of both the ability of firms to change behaviors in the direction of the moral good, and their willingness to do so. Constraints and enablers of a firm’s ability to act ethically emanate from the external environment, including the industry environment of which the firm is a resident, and the host country environment in which it operates. A firm’s willingness to engage in ethical conduct is determined by the effective bundling of internal resources and the commitment of those resources to social ends. The interaction of external and internal conditions carves out categories of expected firm behaviors and suggests interventions that would push these behaviors in a more positive ethical direction. With reference to integrative social contracts theory (ISCT), these categories of firms are examined, and a conceptual model for analysis is developed to explain the drivers of corporate choices in the adoption and implementation of codes of conduct, and the relative power of relevant communities to the process.

Market-based social governance schemes that establish standards of conduct for producers and traders in international supply chains aim to reduce the negative socio-environmental effects of globalization. While studies have examined how characteristics of social governance schemes promote socially responsible producer behavior, it has not yet been examined how these same characteristics affect consumer behavior. This is a crucial omission, because without consumer demand for socially produced products, the reach of the social benefits is likely to be limited. We develop a comprehensive model that links two characteristics of market-based social governance schemes—(1) stringency and enforcement of requirements, and (2) promotion—to two conditions required for governance schemes to generate significant social benefits: (1) socially responsible behavior of participating firms; and (2) consumer demand for socially produced products which, in turn, expands products produced according to social governance schemes, and thus, the quantity of social benefits. We discuss market-based social governance schemes in the context of fair trade coffee.