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Displaying: 1-8 of 8 documents


1. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 1
Ghislain Deslandes Power, Profits, and Practical Wisdom: Ricœur's Perspectives on the Possibility of Ethics in Institutions
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The analysis of narrative processes and metaphorical language are the topics generally focused on by business ethics researchers interested in the work of Paul Ricœur. Yet his work on political questions also applies to the ethical issues associated with organizations. Ricœur’s ethical enterprise can be expressed as a triad composed of teleological, deontological, and sapiential levels, associating ostensibly opposing positions of Aristotelian and Kantian origin. In this study, I examine politics, economics, and ethics in their dialectic relation as established by Ricœur. Against a vertical, mechanistic, and axiologically neutral vision of management, he opposes the two conceptual pairs of conviction/imagination and ideology/utopia as well as a superior definition of justice associating reciprocal indebtedness and mutual disinterestedness. Through this analysis, it becomes clear that the vertical, hierarchical nature of politics tends to undermine the horizontal interactions necessary to procure just institutions in society. And any business ethic that does not acknowledge political tensions will be mute. What is needed instead is practical wisdom that is developed through interaction, and often through conflict, involving all the different players.
2. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 1
David Lea Professionalism in an Age of Financialization and Managerialism
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Historically the professions have maintained a commitment to what MacIntyre calls the “internal goods of practice” as opposed to the external goods of practice associated with monetary compensation and activities directly related to monetary compensation. This paper argues that the growing financialization of the economy has fostered a climate of managerial control exemplified in the proliferation of auditing and procedures associated with auditing. Accordingly professionals, whose organizational function includes responsibility for the internal goods, are thereby frustrated in so far as they have been forced to become preoccupied with performance indicators and the goals of financial efficiency imposed by hierarchies founded on managerial expertise rather than professional achievement and competence. A reaffirmation of professional commitment to the internal goods may well require a communitarian approach that entails a reorganization of society around the common good rather than the efficiency ethos that has displaced it.
3. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 1
Brian K. Steverson Vulnerable Values Argument for the Professionalization of Business Management
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Market events of the past few years have resurrected long unheeded calls for the professionalization of the occupation of business manager, not in terms of increased technical proficiency, but in terms of a renewed vigor to shape the practice of management and the education of those who will fill its ranks along the lines of the “ideal of service” which characterizes socially established professions like law and medicine. In this paper I argue that the push to professionalize business management can be grounded in an ISCT (Integrative Social Contracts Theory) treatment of the “vulnerable values” argument which itself has served as a source for the professionalization of medicine and law. Additionally, I offer a sketch of an argument that once business managers are considered to be members of a profession, we can begin to develop an account of “business malpractice” which would, when it occurs, represent an ethical violation of the “publicpledge” that members of all professions make to serve the broader good of society.
4. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 1
Carol Cirka, Carla Messikomer Behind the Facade: Aligning Artifacts, Values, and Assumptions in Assisted Living
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The market-based innovation known as assisted living (AL) has changed the landscape of long-term care in the US. Using Edgar Schein’s three-level conceptual framework of organizational culture and data from a two-year qualitative study of five AL facilities located in suburban Philadelphia, we argue that misalignments among publicly stated values, material artifacts, and underlying assumptions can create a climate that fosters ethical tension. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with staff at all levels, we derive five operational assumptions that guide behavior in the facilities included in our study, and we describe how facility artifacts and espoused values give rise to ethical tensions and, at times, ethical violations. The findings highlight the imperative for providers and managers in all industries to look beyond the façade of artifacts and espoused values to underlying assumptions, and to recognize that these three levels must be aligned in order to create and sustain a culture in which ethics is a visible and enduring element and where ethical conduct is encouraged on an everyday basis.
5. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 1
Homer B. Warren, David J. Burns, James Tackett The Likelihood of Deception in Marketing: A Crminological Contextualization
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Deception has been practiced by sellers since the beginning of the marketplace. Research in marketing ethics has established benchmarks and parameters forethical behavior that include honesty, full disclosure, equity, and fairness. Deception in marketing, however, has not received the same level of attention. This paper proposes to treat deception in marketing within the context of criminology. By examining deception in marketing within the context of criminology, additional insight can be gained into identifying its antecendents and the likelihood of its occurrence. To this end, deception in marketing is interpreted under the empathy/harm matrix, Cressey’s fraud triangle, and the transparency/time-lag matrix. These frameworks are then combined into a diagram detailing antecedents affecting the likelihood of marketing agents participating in deceptive marketing actions. A number of propositions are presented.
discussion
6. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 1
Klaus M. Leisinger Poverty, Disease, and Medicines in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: The Roles and Responsibilities of Pharmaceutical Corporations
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Providing access to medicines and health care is one of the most challenging issues facing society today. In this paper the author highlights some of the complexities of the health value chain as well as the problems that the world’s poor have in terms of access to medical care and medicines. He then attempts to delineate the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders in order to define the specific corporate responsibilities of pharmaceutical companies in the context of the entire responsibility system—the strength of which is determined by its weakest link. Finally, he looks forward to a transformational change being wrought for pro-poor health development by forging new coalitions that cut across both the health and traditional development stakeholders.
7. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 1
Sybille Sachs Reply to Leisinger
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The paper of Klaus Leisinger is a comprehensive description and reflection on the role and responsibilities of key stakeholders to complex and urgent issues, and suggests novel approaches such as stakeholder collaborations for Global Health. Most corporations have, until recently, focused on a small set of stakeholders in regard to creating corporate value. Increasingly, however, corporations are facing broad ranging and complex issues. To deal with them, they realize that their present business model might be too narrow. To improve the quality of life of poor patients in low-income countries, a broader set of stakeholders needs to be included in new and innovative ways.
8. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 1
Notes on Contributors
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