This paper applies Alain Badiou’s ethic-of-truths to the context of business ethics. Business ethics is redefined as self-regarding, aspirational, and internal to a given firm. Firms are defined as sites. The event is a radical innovation experienced by a given firm. Ethics emerges as the challenge of fidelity to the truths engendered by the event.

In this paper the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company’s decision to continue rubber production during Liberia’s chaotic civil war is critically discussed. Evaluating whether this decision, in intent or execution, violated ethical norms for MNEs operating internationally is complicated by the fact that such norms seem not to exist. If as Windsor (2004) suggests such norms are only likely to be established through an evolutionary path then it should be asked whether Firestone’s experiences, and discussion thereof, have informed the development of norms in any meaningful way. It is argued here that conflicting conclusions about the meaning and morality of Firestone’s decisions have meant that the case study has contributed little in the way of meaningful norms for future decisions made by MNEs in conflict zones. Further it is argued that the underlying chaos of broad, violent conflict may make consensus around specific norms—and progress along the path to the development of norms—more laborious and fraught with difficulty than other policy arenas such as labor and environmental standards.

I am grateful to the Editors of for the opportunity to respond to the address given by Steve Williams at the Vincentian Conference of 2013, and published in the preceding pages. Mr. Williams takes the 2008 crisis of Western capitalism as his focus and offers at least two distinct narratives: in the first of these he outlines his experience of an extensive and complex professional, commercial world in . In a more extensive, second theme he offers some constructive suggestions as a means to recovering from this cataclysm and moving away those characteristics which he identifies as somehow causal. I will interpretively retrace Mr. Williams’s insights of the recent financial crisis. I will also comment on the challenges he outlines towards a resolution of this crisis. I draw on selected business and professional ethics positions, along with my personal experience of management practice and the pedagogy of business ethics in Western Management Schools. I delimit this appreciation of market capitalism as the systemic dominant social paradigm, the status quo.

Privacy issues surrounding the use of social media sites have been apparent over the past ten years. Use of such sites, particularly Facebook, has been increasing and recently business organizations have begun using Facebook as a means of connecting with potential customers or clients. This paper presents an empirical study of perceived privacy violations to examine factors that influence the expectations of privacy on Facebook. Results of the study suggest that the more important Facebook is to users, the more likely they are to perceive privacy violations and the more likely those violations are to be considered serious. Furthermore, how information is used is more important than the way this information is accessed.

This paper consists of the text of a key-note address to the Vincentian Business Ethics Conference in Chicago in 2013. The content is substantially as delivered; some few ad hoc comments have been removed to preserve consistency of meaning in a printed text. The speech is presented by a senior executive of a number of FTSE listed firms. It offers his insights into the 2007 / 8 financial crisis and some retrospective interpretations of both ‘what’ happened and ‘how’ this changed things. These insights, and some clear criticisms, are complemented with his suggestions for a way to reconstruct business in society less unsustainably.

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.