According to Bertrand Russell, philosophy should “teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation.” Recent natural and human-made disasters have confronted business leaders to act decisively without certainty in circumstances with profound implications for ethical well-being. This article introduces a Special Topic Forum on Extreme Operating Environments, defined as times of great uncertainty and/or crisis which challenge human capabilities, organizational operations, and social institutions.

The business landscape today is characterized by looming global challenges like natural disasters, war, and industrial accidents throughout the world. However, there is limited research on describing how businesses operate and cope in extreme environments and whether principles of ethical decision-making can be used as guidelines in such situations. To address this gap we describe and analyze organizational and business responses to three different extreme environments, namely the fall 2012 Gaza conflict, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the so-called triple disasters (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown) in Japan on March 11, 2011. We discuss moral issues surrounding helping one another with specific reference to criteria called the Kew Garden Principles (KGPs) and strategic corporate social responsibility (Strategic CSR). We conclude the paper with managerial and leadership implications for ethical decision-making in extreme situations.

Search engine marketing (SEM) industry provides modern on-line marketing services. This industry initially obtained a doubtful reputation in the sphere of e-commerce due to utilization of ethically questionable methods in the promotion or marketing their customers` web sites. This study considers the relationship building process and the trustfulness between the marketers and their business customers. Research aims are to explore how these virtual companies operate in unsteady-trust environment as the Internet market. The interviewed marketing-companies representatives have provided their perspectives on successful relationship maintenance including the impact of trust on the business performance. The results of the qualitative research illustrated that trust is a vital necessity for the stable business development. Investigation highlights that the trustful relationships depends on inter-personal communication and following the ethical principles of business management. Although digital business allows performing the activities on-line, interpersonal interaction remains the key element in the trustful relationship building.

The conceptualization of CSR has been steadily establishing and evolving, and even after decades of research there is still no consensus regarding CSR definition and scope. In a world of multiple definitions and approaches, every company needs to find its own way and “translate” vague idea of CSR into company-specific and context-related CSR program. Three large Danish companies with the substantial experience in CSR were chosen in order to investigate their set of CSR activities and initiatives—“organizational CSR portfolio.” Their CSR related reports were qualitatively evaluated according to the categories which were suggested for each pillar of CSR concept—environmental, social and economic. The paper performs longitudinal study of organizational CSR portfolios which contributes to a better understanding of priorities in CSR field for different types of organizations and reveals changes in corporate CSR policies of leading companies over the last five years.

The basic idea of the conceptual paper is to discuss the notion of value creation in the business and society field and to present the public value concept as a way of extending the understanding of business’s value creation for society. First, the paper draws on the value balance accountability (VBA) model by Schwartz and Carroll, in which value creation is identified as a central element in the business and society field. Second, based on this, we critically evaluate the VBA model’s value notion, which appears to be relatively vague and narrow. Third, in order to tackle these gaps, we present Meynhardt’s public value approach, which provides an extended notion of value creation. We further propose a combined public value-balance-accountability-framework. Public value fills the framework’s value dimension with actual content and provides a microfoundation. It helps to overcome the separation fallacy. The combined framework contributes to both theory and practice in the business and society field.

Environmental, social and ethical issues have become increasingly important for businesses due to changed customer expectations, more regulation and stakeholder pressure, amongst others. This led to the development of concepts such as sustainability management, corporate social responsibility (CSR), stakeholder management and business ethics. Though mostly developed in isolation, scholars have increasingly worked on their integration. This editorial sheds light on (missing) overlaps between these concepts. We find that sustainability management and CSR have become more integrated and are increasingly grounded in an “embedded view“ in which business and society is part of (and constrained by) the natural environment. In contrast, business ethics has not been integrated to the same extent, expect for the subfield of environmental ethics. After this general overview, we introduce the individual contributions to the special issue which are advancing the conceptual and empirical foundation of sustainability management, CSR, and business ethics.

The business case for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a powerful driver for mainstreaming socially responsible behavior in corporate practice. This is because managers’ proclivity to assume responsibility is positively correlated with their expectations that CSR pays off. However, there is the danger that managers might be tempted to focus primarily on those CSR activities that allow to link the associated costs and benefits ex ante reliably which, in turn, is a precondition for a perceived business case. Unfortunately, the perceived business case for CSR activities that prevent irresponsible behavior (“avoiding bad”) is rather weak. In contrast, CSR in terms of the voluntary engagement for society (“doing good”) is quite promising for the perceived business case. In consequence, a business case–driven approach to CSR might foster “cherry picking” behavior, in the sense that managers might tend to reduce CSR to “doing good” and put less efforts on CSR in terms of “avoiding bad” which, in turn, increases the risk of irresponsible business practices.

This paper is about how multiple contexts influence employees’ and managers’ enactments of a standardized corporate code of ethics. An earlier local Swedish case study of how a code is enacted is extended to include enactments during business trips to Ottawa (Canada), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and New Delhi (India). The paper shows that although the code is possible to enact as remote and insignificant (‘not relevant to me’) in the local study, when travelling to different contexts it is enacted as intrusive (affecting core operations) and fluid (highlighting seeming contradictions). The paper highlights the consequences of these enactments in terms of management control and individual responsibility) and suggests ways for better understanding how a code is expected to perform, meant to work and keep on working.

Most corporate stakeholders agree that Corporate Responsibility (CR) ought to be part of modern business management and practice. Academic work has been seminal to a fruitful and collaborative relationship between business and society. A closer examination of the contemporary academic narratives on CR, however, reveals a plethora of positions orbiting this complex construct, rendering it and its applications opaque, amorphous, and contested. The bewildering array of conceptualizations and applications leads not only to unintended consequences but also to concrete negative outcomes for most stakeholders. In this study, we map the conceptual landscape of CR in academia by systematically analyzing 120 audio and video recordings of university sponsored or endorsed CR-focused workshops, business meetings, interviews, lectures, conference presentations, roundtable events, and debates deposited at the media repository iTunesU and held between 2010 and 2014. The recordings were analyzed using Content Configuration Analysis, a qualitative analysis method related to content and thematic analyses. Our results show how business ethics in academia are often debated in opposition to or independent from business and economic concerns. We highlight seven major shortcomings within this conceptual space, relating to conceptual disunion, Eurocentrism, lack of specificity with regard to domains, stakeholder bias, areas of application, and normativity. Recommendations to overcome some of these shortcomings are presented to develop policy-relevant and change-oriented approaches to CR, which would make academic work on business ethics more applicable to globalized business and business practices, as well as to further develop collaborative partnerships between academia, business, and society.

Executive compensation is wrought with problems of moral judgment. To the extent that compensation rewards or penalizes behavior for which an executive is not justifiably responsible, it is also a problem of luck. Although executive compensation is both a problem of morality and luck, moral luck—which seems to occur when our moral judgments about a moral agent's conduct or character are influenced by factors beyond the agent's control—has not been a factor in the compensation debate. There remains controversy as to whether moral luck is a real or imagined problem, but if it exists, it should be factored into the compensation equation; if it does not, we cannot deny that moral performance presents a measurement problem. Thus, we are forced to accept that moral luck, real or imagined, has important implications for the ways and means by which executives are compensated.

Several European and North American states encourage or even require, via good Samaritan and duty to rescue laws, that persons assist others in distress. This paper offers a utilitarian and contractualist defense of this view as applied to corporations. It is argued that just as we should sometimes frown on bad Samaritans who fail to aid persons in distress, we should also frown on bad corporate Samaritans who neglect to use their considerable multinational power to undertake disaster relief or to confront widespread social ills such as those currently befalling public health (obesity) and the environment (climate change). As such, the corporate duty to assist approach provides a novel justification for sustainable business practices in such cases. The paper concludes by arguing that traditional stakeholder approaches have not articulated this duty of assistance obligation, though a new utilitarian stakeholder theory by Thomas Jones and Will Felps may be coextensive.

This paper provides an analysis of conscience-based refusals in healthcare from a Sartrean view, with an emphasis on the tension between individual responsibility and professional role morality. Conscience-based refusals in healthcare involve healthcare workers refusing to perform actions based on core moral beliefs. Initially this appears in line with Sartrean authenticity, which requires acknowledgment that one is not identical with professional role. However, by appealing to Sartre’s later social thought, I show that professional role morality is authentic when one considers common group practices, which Sartre refers to as pledged group praxis. I demonstrate that for healthcare providers, authenticity mandates putting the goals and generally accepted praxis of healthcare front and center in the workplace decision process. I conclude by strengthening Andrew West’s existentialist decision-making model with Sartre’s later social thought. With the updated model, I show that for healthcare workers most often the authentic decision is to perform generally accepted healthcare procedures in spite of individual moral qualms. This is because working in healthcare necessitates viewing one’s professional tasks in their broader social context—as unified, communal group praxis.

Wisdom includes the practical application of knowledge, experience, reason, introspection, and intuition, but does its presence impact the ethical attitudes of individuals within organizations? Using Ardelt’s three-dimensional wisdom scale (2003) and a revised version of the ethical attitude measures developed by Wood, Longenecker, McKinney, and Moore (1988), empirical analysis was conducted using 329 responses from non-instructional staff at three colleges located in the southeast. This study is among the first to empirically test the impact of wisdom in a business setting, and also to empirically test the relation between wisdom and ethical attitudes. Correlation and regression analysis results indicated that greater wisdom was positively related to ethical attitudes and the rejection of questionable business practices that are harmful to others and the environment. Also, age was found to be positively related to an individual’s rejection of ethically questionable activities. These findings suggest that developing and encouraging higher levels of wisdom among employees within an organization will likely result in more ethical business practices.

Business ethics educators have been encouraged to cultivate students’ character, but have received meager instructions for doing so. Additionally, there has been insufficient focus on equipping students with the tools they need to foster their ethical development after completing our courses. In this paper, it is argued that the Jewish spiritual practice of Mussar, whose premise is that individuals can become better versions of themselves by repairing their character traits, can inform business ethics instruction. After presenting the tenets and historical background of Mussar, we provide specific information that will enable business ethics instructors to adapt its tools and techniques in order to put their students on a personalized path of lifelong character improvement.

In recent times there have been increasing efforts at reinterpreting core CSR theories such as stakeholder theory with new perspectives as well as applying them to different contexts away from its Western masculinist connotations. This work seeks to add to these efforts by exploring the impacts that the African philosophical worldview of Afro-communitarianism has on small business stakeholder relationships. Specifically it discusses the kinds of relationships that owner/managers of small businesses, in adherence to Afro-communitarianism, maintain with their families, employees, local communities and competitors- all key stakeholders. The contention is that such ethics demand more extensive ethical responsibilities from owner/managers of small businesses than owner/managers motivated by traditional stakeholder theory with its Western masculinist undertones. It is hoped that this effort will add significant perspectives to stakeholder theory as well as having implications for both small and large business practice.

Despite attention to the concerns of labor migration by public policy makers and scholars, the effects of international recruitment policies in developed nations on the economies of the developing world have been largely unaddressed by management literature. This work addresses that lacuna by combining hitherto separate streams of management scholarship with the fledgling fields of nation and employer branding to consider their synthesis in an international context. This combination introduces the possibility for evaluating the effects of recruitment practices on developing economies and creates space for future research regarding ethical international recruitment policies. We explore and discuss these issues from the perspective of potential employees in developing economies and offer suggestions to guide future research in this area.

Organizational theory argues that institutional social responsibility, which represents managers’ moral values, ethics, and norms (i.e. community, environment), and technical (strategic) social responsibility, which represents firms’ relationship with key stakeholders (i.e., employees, suppliers, consumers), influence corporate ethical behavior. We examine and compare the impacts of strengths and concerns of institutional and technical (strategic) social responsibilities on the likelihood of corporate fraud. Using a sample of 152 high-profile corporate fraud cases in the U.S. during the 2000-2010 period, we find that firms’ corporate social responsibility activities reduce the likelihood of corporate fraud. More importantly, our study finds that both institutional strengths and technical strengths reduce the likelihood of corporate fraud. Institutional concerns also increase the likelihood of corporate fraud and institutional responsibility plays a more significant role than technical responsibility. Our study supports the legitimacy theory of social responsibility and highlights the importance of moral management to reduce the likelihood of corporate fraud.

Benefit corporation legislation has rapidly disseminated in the United States. Its advocates claim it is a necessary corporate form to address the unique needs of for-profit social enterprises, despite many scholarly and legal practitioners who doubt the need for or wisdom of adopting this organizational form. Others suggest that the legislation is flawed and deficiencies should be addressed. After reviewing the present status of benefit corporation legislation, this article contributes to the discourse arguing that (1) benefit corporations are unnecessary under the law; (2) benefit corporation legislation does not enhance corporate law; (3) benefit corporation laws create unnecessary new legal risks for both traditional and benefit corporations, and their respective directors; and (4) third party certification in entity formation law is inappropriate.

This paper describes the general disregard for relationships that leads to unethical behavior in business as well as in one’s personal life, using an illustration from 4,000 years ago and from today. Volkswagen has been characterized as just one more example of ethical violations that lead to long-lasting environmental, financial, and personal impacts. The story of Jacob’s life reflects the origin of this type of ethical behavior and stands in parallel to the eighty-year history of the Volkswagen corporation.

It is important for philosophers to find out positive approaches for increasing mutual understanding on those fundamental questions in both the Confucian and Aristotelian traditions of doing virtue ethics. The Aristotelian concept of the good and the Confucian concept of dao pose a question about the way human beings see the final principle of ethics. Staying within the realm of human life, Confucius develops two co-related perspectives of seeing the dao of human being. The first perspective sees the dao as standing for the ultimate truth and goodness for human beings. Setting aside the Aristotelian metaphysics of nous, this conception does not stand that far removed from Aristotle’s view of the good. The second perspective sees the dao as the right way for individuals to start. This notion seems far from Aristotle’s view of right choice. The reason is that Confucius’s manner of comprehension embraces both understanding and insight, while that of Aristotle focuses solely on understanding. But Aristotle’s concept of right choice is, in some indirect way, related to Confucius’s view of the right way. For both Confucius and Aristotle, the right way refers to our initiating acting on something connected to the end with no more thinking.