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Business and Professional Ethics Journal

Systemic Change towards Sustainable Business

Volume 31, Issue 2, 2012
EABIS Decennial Issue

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Displaying: 1-11 of 11 documents


1. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Prof. Dr. Gilbert Lenssen Message from the President of EABIS—The Academy of Business in Society
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2. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
David Bevan, Geert Demuijnck Editorial Introduction: Special Issue EABIS Decennial
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3. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Simon Zadek Titans or Titanic: Towards a Public Fiduciary
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Sustainability as a narrative has mainstreamed, but practice is stuck in the ‘valley of death,’ with exemplary business action to internalize social and environmental externalities remaining ad hoc and small scale. Civil regulation has had significant impacts, but appears unable to act as a driver of systemic change. Addressing change at the system level requires the evolution of corporate governance away from intensive towards an extensive accountability, embedded within a ‘public fiduciary.’ Such a shift in fiduciary arrangements is needed to institutionalize and leverage the growing involvement of the state in economic and industrial practice through direct enterprise ownership, the increasing importance of sovereign wealth funds and national development banks, and the significance of public-private partnerships. This re-emergence of the role of the state in economic governance will underpin the next generation of corporate responsibility, framed largely by an international political economy led by major emerging economies.
4. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Mark Aakhus, Michael Bzdak Revisiting the Role of “Shared Value” in the Business-Society Relationship
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This article critically examines Porter and Kramer’s shared value concept to identify its boundaries and limits as a framework for understanding the role of philanthropy and CSR relative to the role of business in society. Cases of implementation and alternative perspectives on innovation reveal that, despite its appeal and uptake in corporate and philanthropic circles, shared value merely advances the conventional rhetoric that what is good for business is good for society. The shared value approach narrows what counts as social value and avoids the friction between business and society. The consequence is that the approach is problematic as a framework for addressing sustainability and development, and an insufficient basis for decision-making about philanthropy and CSR.
5. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Nick Lin-Hi, Igor Blumberg Managing the Social Acceptance of Business: Three Core Competencies in Business Ethics
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The public support of corporations is continuously declining. The view that the system of free enterprise and profit-making are at odds with societal interests isbecoming more and more prevalent. Business’s associated loss of social acceptance poses a serious threat to the future viability of the system of free enterprise. Thus, corporate leaders face the task of regaining and sustainably securing the social acceptance of business. This paper presents three interrelated business ethics competencies which corporate leaders require to be able to accomplish this task: (1) the ability to prove that business and profit-making do have a societal function, (2) the knowledge of what defines responsible business, and (3) the ability to organize responsible decisionmaking within their corporations.
6. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Kevin Jackson Cura Personalis and Business Education for Sustainability
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Sustainability has been gaining recognition as an innovative pathway for general learning from early childhood to higher education. This article advances acura personalis, or care for the entire person, approach for integrating sustainability into the domain of business management education. Such an approach centers on fostering higher-order dispositions including creativity, critical moral awareness, existential authenticity, excellence, relatedness, and overall well-being and thus constitutes a broader, deep ecological alternative to received scientistic and quantitatively controlled programs.
7. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Eric Cornuel, Ulrich Hommel Business Schools as a Positive Force for Fostering Societal Change: Meeting the Challenges of the Post-Crisis World
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The purpose of the article is to encourage (and in certain ways to initiate) an intellectual debate on how business schools can meet the intellectual challenge resulting from the financial crisis. We argue that this will involve questioning the traditional paradigms of management research, will require broadening the intellectual foundation of business school activities, and will trigger revision processes to incorporate the derived learning points into degree and non-degree programs. European business schools have to cope with these challenges during a phase of intense financial pressures, which may create the temptation of adopting myopic development strategies. The points made in this article may appear to be explicitly prescriptive, but they should be taken as an attempt to foster an open debate on the issues vital for the future development of the business school sector.
8. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Roger Murphy, Namrata Sharma, Jeremy Moon Empowering Students to Engage with Responsible Business Thinking and Practices
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The aim of this paper is to both consider what is meant by ‘responsible business’ and to explore pedagogical approaches which have been shown to lead toeffective student engagement with this important area of modern business thinking and practice. The goal of experiential learning is to encourage students to reflect upon the complexities of responsible business education in authentic business contexts. The range of pedagogies which enable this sort of reflection is thought to be quite wide, and can include internships, practical projects, case-studies, group-work, and observing and participating in artistic performances or cultural events.
9. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Harry Hummels Coming Out of the Investors’ Cave?: Making Sense of Responsible Investing in Europe in the New Millennium
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Responsible Investing is on the rise. In ten years time, what started as an ideologically motivated practice by often religiously inspired investors has become amainstream activity. Through the Principles for Responsible Investing a large group of institutional investors representing tens of trillions of dollars have become involved in and transformed the practice. A major change refers to a change in definition and the disappearance of ethics, which was replaced by a focus on governance. However, society is not taking unethical investments practices lightly. It increasingly confronts investors with potential (ethical) consequences of the investments and calls for impact measurement: what is the social, ethical and environmental impact of the investments?
10. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Richard Straub, Mollie Painter-Morland From CSR to Sustainable Business—Transformational Leadership in Action: With Academic Response by Mollie Painter-Morland
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This contribution to the Decennial volume brings together the insights of a seasoned business practitioner on the sustainability imperatives that corporations face, and a response from an academic who works in the field of sustainability and business ethics. Dr. Straub draws on Peter Drucker to reassert the importance of fulfilling the economic mission of the enterprise, but argues that it needs repositioning. Business must be responsive to customer and employee needs, and in order to do so, transformational leadership is required. In her response, Prof. Mollie Painter-Morland argues that in order to succeed in building sustainable enterprises, an urgent evaluation of what is meant by “need” is required. She also contends that in mainstreaming the sustainability agenda, systemic leadership is needed in addition to transformational leaders.
11. Business and Professional Ethics Journal: Volume > 31 > Issue: 2
Colin Crouch Sustainability, Neoliberalism, and the Moral Quality of Capitalism
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Paradoxically, the rise of neoliberal economic thinking and its rejection of concepts of both state intervention in the economy and the pursuit of purposes bybusiness that are not directly related to profit maximization, has been accompanied by intensified social criticism of business and concerns about sustainability. The article explores the implications of these paradoxes and relates them to active consumerism and to the issue of market externalities.