Comparatively few studies have analyzed the social behavior of multinational corporations (MNCs) at a cross-national level. To address this gap in the literature, we propose a “transnational” model of corporate social responsibility (CSR) that permits identification of universal domains, yet incorporates the flexibility and adaptability demanded by international research. The model is tri-dimensional in that it juxtaposes: 1) Bartlett and Ghoshal’s (1998, 2000) typology of MNC strategies (multinational, global, “international,” and transnational); 2) the three conceptual domains of CSR (human rights, labor, and the environment) proposed by the UN Global Compact (Compact 2003); and 3) Zenisek’s (1979) description of three CSR perspectives (ideological, societal, and operational). The end result is a multidimensional typology that permits the organization and development of empirical CSR research in an international setting.

Progressives have advocated reforms of rules governing corporations to achieve greater distributive justice, but Maitland (2001) has argued that corporate rules are distributively neutral and that changing the rules will have no long run impact on distributive justice. These different conclusions stem from the use of two different methods of economic analysis, partial equilibrium and general equilibrium models. A change in the rules governing corporations in a “large” sector of the economy is appropriately analyzed using a general equilibrium analysis, supporting the conclusion that changes in the rules may affect distributive justice in the long run. However, a partial equilibrium analysis of a change in the rules of corporations affecting a “small” part of the economy such as a single firm or even all firms in a small state supports the claim that such changes cannot affect distributive justice.

Recent corporate scandals raise an old question anew: is capitalism fundamentally infected by immorality? A now almost forgotten answer to this question was advanced at the dawn of capitalism, an answer that students of business ethics would find profit in considering. In the early eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville authored The Fable of the Bees, which became notorious in its day for arguing that capitalism created wealth while necessarily relying on vicious impulses. The fundamental dilemma is that morality requires self-denial while capitalism runs on self-interest. As such, Mandeville claims that business and ethics are essentially separate.

While this would appear to align him with skeptics of business ethics, Mandeville does suggest a role for moral theorists in dealing with the challenges of commercial societies. The Mandevillean business ethicist proceeds by separating the public and private spheres. In the former, where government policy toward business is at issue, the Mandevillean ethicist applies a market-friendly utilitarianism. In the latter, where individual conduct is at issue, the Mandevillean gently articulates a market-critical ethic predicated on self-restraint.

HIV/AIDS threatens international health on a scale never before seen in human history. Previous plagues and great epidemics, devastating though they were to imperial China, urbanizing Europe, and the colonizing Americas (McNeill 1998), were regionally contained. More than forty million people worldwide are HIV-positive: about half of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, where it apparently originated and where whole tribes and, indeed, most of the adult population of Botswana may very well die of the disease. (Joint UN/WHO 2004). India has another five million people who are HIV-positive, the largest number outside Africa. AIDS is spreading rapidly in China and devastating Thailand, a regional center for prostitution that spreads it further throughout the Asia-Pacific region. No part of the world is spared. The economic, social, and political impacts of this pandemic have only begun to be felt and to be considered.

Modern technological and organizational capacities—jet aircraft and globetrotting business and tourist travelers—turned what would have been, in previous eras, an African regional problem into an international crisis and made AIDS exceedingly difficult to contain. Yet, the human technological and organizational capacity to confront the AIDS pandemic also makes this health crisis different from epidemics in earlier times. Medical science applied by pharmacological research has created drug therapies that can control the disease, that can not only stave off death but make productive life possible for many years. The challenge of AIDS could be met, many in the health community say, if it were not that the life-sustaining drugs are owned by private enterprises (Oxfam 2002). The doctors at Médicins Sans Frontières contend, “Patents are not god-given rights. They are tools invented to benefit society as a whole, not to line the pockets of a handful of multinational pharmaceutical companies” (MSF 2003: 2). “[T]he patent monopoly means that a higher price than necessary has to be paid for patented inventions. This is acceptable if this higher price is merely an inconvenience…. However, if the patented invention is essential (say, if it could prevent your untimely death from disease), then the price is more of a dilemma” (MSF 2003: 5). These and other critics declare that drug makers put profits ahead of people and accuse the governments that grant them patent-intellectual property rights, especially the U.S. government, of contributing to this moral bankruptcy.

According to a widely credited model in the business ethics literature, ethical decisions are a function of two kinds of factors, personal (individual) and situational, and these factors interact with each other. According to a contrary view of decision making that is widely held in some areas of business research, individuals’ decisions about ethical issues (and subsequent actions) are purely a function of their self-interest.

The laboratory experiment reported in this paper provides a test of the person-situation interactionist model, using the general theoretical and experimental framework used in the experimental economics literature. One individual and two situational factors relating to moral intensity were examined which may influence decisions to misrepresent information in the course of business activities.

The individual and one situational variable were significantly related to participants’ actions. The interactions among individual and situation variables were not individually significant, although the model including interactions had a much higher level of statistical significance. Gender was significant, both directly and in interaction with moral development, suggesting that it may be worthy of further examination.

The pharmaceutical industry has in recent years come under attack from an ethical point of view concerning its patents and the non-accessibility of life-saving drugs for many of the poor both in less developed countries and in the United States. The industry has replied with economic and legal justifications for its actions. The result has been a communication gap between the industry on the one hand and poor nations and American critics on the other. This paper attempts to present and evaluate the arguments on all sides and suggests a possible way out of the current impasse. It attempts to determine the ethical responsibility of the drug industry in making drugs available to the needy, while at the same time developing the parallel responsibilities of individuals, governments, and NGOs. It concludes with the suggestion that the industry develop an international code for its self-regulation.

This paper revisits the Pinto case not merely for the purpose of demythologizing the case, but as an opportunity to examine the broader issue of the logic of blame, the ascription of legal and moral responsibility. Three issues are addressed in the contexts of fault and liability in tort, criminal liability and product liability: 1) To what extent can judgments of moral wrongdoing or blame be inferred from legal judgments? 2) What are the strengths and weaknesses of attempting to model moral arguments upon legal ones? and, 3) What is the nature and role of judgments of risk evaluation in legal and moral judgments?

Is it unethical to advertise lotteries? Many citizens think that states should not be actively promoting and encouraging the public to spend hard-earned dollars on a bet that they are virtually guaranteed to lose. Perhaps more importantly, business ethicists are concerned that lottery advertising may be targeting the most vulnerable markets: households with the lowest income and education levels. If this were true, then it would increase the already disproportionately large burden of lottery taxes on the poor. Fortunately, our research finds no evidence to support the contention that advertising is responsible for high rates of lottery participation and expenditures by lower income groups or that low-income groups are more affected by advertising than high-income groups. On the contrary, awareness of lottery advertising seems to be associated with a higher probability to play Lotto only for the middle income group. This means that lottery advertising may actually reduce the regressivity of lottery taxes.

The paper begins by exploring whether a “tendency to avarice” exists in most capitalist business organisations. It concludes that it does and that this is problematic. The problem centres on the potential threat to the integrity of human character and the disablement of community.

What, then, can be done about it? Building on previous work (Moore, 2002) in which MacIntyre’s notions of practice and institution were explored (MacIntyre, 1985), the paper offers a philosophically based argument in favour of the rediscovery of craftsmanship by those who work in business organisations, and the exercise of craftsmanship in community.

The practical implications for individuals of this way of conceptualising business, and the virtues which must then come to the fore, are discussed.

In the early 1990s, managers at Exxon decided to seek lower cost disposal in Louisiana for oil-field wastes declared hazardous in Alabama. This decision resulted in injuries to the residents of Grand Bois, Louisiana; the disposal company; Exxon; and the oil industry in the state. Given the need for business and society to manage business operations for mutual benefit, it is essential to understand why businesses injure the public so that similar incidents do not happen again. The authors use three analytical perspectives to suggest how corporations may make unethical decisions without purposefully setting out to do so: their managers may fail to understand changing social expectations for corporate behavior; they may adopt organizational structures, policies, and procedures that block ethical action in the name of efficiency; and they may follow unwritten rules of behavior for career success that exclude ethics. These perspectives suggest that individual Exxon managers may not have been making greed-based decisions, weighing corporate gains against harms to others. The situation more likely involved a failure, for the reasons discussed, to raise ethics questions in making business decisions. This explanation does not make much difference to those injured nor does it absolve those who made the decisions. It does make a difference to society and to companies seeking to understand factors that have to be overcome in any large corporation that wishes to prevent such events from occurring.

In recent years society has come to expect more from the “socially-responsible” company and the global HIV/AIDS pandemic in particular has resulted in some critics saying that the “Big Pharma” companies have not been living up to their social responsibilities. Corporate social responsibility can be understood as the socio-economic product of the organizational division of labor in complex modern society. Global poverty and poor health conditions are in the main the responsibilities of the world’s national governments and international governmental organizations, which possess society’s mandate and appropriate organizational capabilities. Private enterprises have neither the societal mandate nor the organizational capabilities to feed the poor or provide health care to the sick in their home countries or in the developing world. Nevertheless, private enterprises do have responsibilities to society that can be categorized as what they must do, what they ought do, and what they can do.

Some critics raise moral objections against corporate social responsibility on account of its supposedly undemocratic nature. They argue that it is hard to reconcile democracy with the private discretion that always accompanies the discharge of responsibilities that are not judicially enforceable. There are two ways of constructing this argument: the “perfect-market argument” and the ‘social-power argument.” This paper demonstrates that the perfect-market argument is untenable and that the social-power argument is sometimes valid. It also asserts that the proponents of the perfect-market argument are mistaken in their assumption that perfect markets are conducive to democracy. There are strong reasons to hold that perfect markets are undesirable from a democratic point of view. A proper conceptualization and differentiation of the relation between “the private and the public” can make this clear. The proponents of the social-power argument sometimes maintain that the democratic deficit can be compensated for by consulting the stakeholders affected. Against this, I will argue that the social power argument has nothing to offer affected parties. Still, it will be shown that modern theory on corporate social responsibility is not well accommodated to the democratic deficit as revealed by the social power argument.

Although the idea of intellectual property (IP) rights—proprietary rights to what one invents, writes, paints, composes or creates—is firmly embedded in Western thinking, these rights are now being challenged across the globe in a number of areas. This paper will focus on one of these challenges: government-sanctioned copying of patented drugs without permission or license of the patent owner in the name of national security, in health emergencies, or life-threatening epidemics. After discussing standard rights-based and utilitarian arguments defending intellectual property we will present another model. IP is almost always a result of a long history of scientific or technological development and numbers of networks of creativity, not the act of a single person or a group of people at one moment in time. Thus thinking about and evaluating IP requires thinking about IP as shared rights. A network approach to IP challenges a traditional model of IP. It follows that the owner of those rights has some obligations to share that information or its outcomes. If that conclusion is applied to the distribution of antiretroviral drugs, what pharmaceutical companies are ethically required to do to increase access to these medicines in the developing world will have to be reanalyzed from a more systemic perspective.

Organizational justice is a behavioral science concept that refers to the perception of fairness of the past treatment of the employees within an organization held by the employees of that organization. These subjective perceptions of fairness have been empirically shown to be related to 1) attitudinal changes in job satisfaction, organizational commitment and managerial trust beliefs; 2) behavioral changes in task performance activities and ancillary extra-task efforts to assist group members and improve group methods; 3) numerical changes in the quantity, quality and efficiency of divisional outputs; and—though this is far more tentative—4) eventual changes in the competitive advantage and financial performance of the full organization. The authors propose that these constructs can be applied to all stakeholders, rather than just to the current employees of the firm, and that objective determinations of fairness by the managers can be related to subjective perceptions of fairness by the stakeholders that will result in the sequential series of attitudinal, behavioral and numerical changes that will lead to performance improvements. In short, the authors propose a normative stakeholder theory of the firm, based upon ethical principles, that will have testable descriptive hypotheses derived from the behavioral constructs.

In 2003, CEOs of the 365 largest U.S. corporations were paid on average $8 million, 301 times as much as factory workers. This paper asks whether CEOs get paid too much. Appealing to widely recognized moral values, I distinguish three views of justice in wages: the agreement view, the desert view, and the utility view. I argue that, no matter which view is correct, CEOs get paid too much. I conclude by offering two ways CEO pay might be reduced.

Spirituality is an undeniable human need and is thus the subject of increasing interest among management scholars and practitioners. In this article, we propose using archetypal psychology as a framework for understanding the human need for spirituality more clearly because it provides important insights into spirituality and organizational life. Because most spiritual needs reside in the deepest aspects of the self, an archetypal approach helps us recognize not only that we have spiritual needs but also why we have them. We present three common archetypes and their implications in a management context. That is followed by an application of the archetypal approach to some of the more spiritually corrosive aspects of organizational life and a discussion of the implications of archetypes as a source of motivation.

Organisational politics can raise the problem of “dirty hands,” illustrated in this paper by an example drawn from a textbook on organisation theory. The initial question is whether the main character has different ethical and political obligations, but this leads on to the question to what extent we can distinguish various different categories of obligation. The example may be of special interest because of the importance of close personal relationship in organisational politics, which brings the dirty hands problem together with the question to what extent friendships generate distinctive obligations. However, it is doubtful whether the allocation of obligations to different categories can be sustained in a useful way. It may be that we can put aside loyalty to an organisation, as a consideration which does not generate any distinctive obligation, but balancing other factors against one another may require the sort of judgment that has sometimes been called “political wisdom,” and sometimes “moral imagination.”

This paper investigates whether, in theoretical terms, corporations can be citizens. The argument is based on the observation that the debate on “corporate citizenship” (CC) has only paid limited attention to the actual notion of citizenship. Where it has been discussed, authors have either largely left the concept of CC unquestioned, or applied rather unidimensional and decontextualized notions of citizenship to the corporate sphere. The paper opens with a critical discussion of a major contribution to the CC literature, the work of Logsdon and Wood (Wood and Logsdon 2001; Logsdon and Wood 2002). It continues with a consideration of the nature and role of metaphors for business and of the contestable nature of the political concept of citizenship. It evaluates corporations as citizens through a four-dimensional framework of democratic citizenship offered by Stokes (2002). The analysis suggests that corporations do not easily fit the “liberal minimalist” model of citizenship. It finds, however some possibilities for fit with the three more participatory models. The paper concludes by cautioning against basing corporate citizenship on legal and administrative status or identity, and mapping out specific criteria by which we might determine whether corporations could be considered as citizens by virtue of their participation in processes of governance.

Disputes regarding the ethics of work by children have intensified in recent years, with little resolution. The impasses stem from failure to recognize the diverse forms of child work and a lack of empirical research regarding its causes and consequences. We report on data gathered in Brazil’s export-oriented shoe industry, which is notorious for the employment of children. Central findings are: 1) the causes of child work have less to do with backwardness and more to do with how shoe workers are integrated into the global order; 2) local employers and children regard this work as benign, but the U.S. government sees it as hazardous to children and unfair to U.S. producers; 3) efforts to remove children from the shoe industry have been frustrated by local resistance and raise ethical questions; and 4) in certain circumstances, efforts to eliminate hazards from the workplace are morally superior to campaigns to remove child workers from employment.

This paper contends that rationality is more properly evaluated as a property of an organization’s relationships with its stakeholders than of the organization itself. We predicate our approach on the observation that stakeholders can hold goals quite distinct from those of owners and top managers, and these too can be rationally pursued. We build upon stakeholder theory and Weber’s classic distinction between wertrationalitat and zweckrationalitat, adding to them the “new institutionalist” concept of the organization field (1983, 1991). Stakeholders employ a variety of direct and indirect mechanisms to rationalize relations with the firm. We discuss four: internal subunits, legislated stakeholder participation, legislated access to information, and direct stakeholder activism. These developments are blurring the distinction between the environment and the organization by importing the values and goals of external stakeholders into the internal organization. They are also precipitating a more structured set of relationships among the actors who comprise the field. To the extent that the zweckrationalitat values of managers and owners as well as the wertrationalitat concerns of stakeholders are met, the firm is more rational.