In this paper we propose the question, “How can we construct ethical theories that recognize complexity in business decisions and offer persuasive moral positions?” We examine alternative positions, argue for moral pluralism as the most reasonable alternative, and examine Rossian moral pluralism as the most plausible form of pluralism to use in this project.

Amid concerns regarding the moral and social impact of the modem corporation, this paper begins its enquiry by considering the very purpose that modem business is meant to serve and the moral frameworks guiding that pursuit. In an attempt to test the applicability of an ancient theory of virtue, fieldwork has been conducted which seeks to evaluate such a framework for its conceptual power at the point of new business creation. As key Aristotelian concepts are unearthed in the study of one entrepreneurial case study, the central tenets of purpose, virtue and balance emerge as relevant concepts to consider in the context of new venture formation.

The paper presents a model of ethical decision making applied to software piracy, and hypothesizes relationships among the ethical context, moral approbation, and issue-contingent factors in the decision. A study (not yet completed) is proposed to test the hypotheses, which, if supported, emphasize the important influence of work and non-work social environments in an individual’s decision to steal software.

A great deal of effort has been made in recent years to try to measure integrity and its antithesis, corruption. These efforts have largely focused on individual organisational issues, cases, events or major failures. However, piecemeal approaches to integrity reform tend to prop up only one element of the system, rather than examining all of the essential elements of support. What is needed is a perspective on the system as a whole, the values that ground the system, the complex organisational spider-web and cultural settings within which organisations operate. This paper describes some recent work in Australia in the area of integrity systems assessment.

The call for practical guidance is a catch phrase for a widespread tendency among present theories of business ethics. Many of these explicitly seek to provide very detailed and concrete instructions for business practioncrs. We argue that on the whole this quest for practical guidance is based on a misapprehension of what applied normative theories can realistically achieve. This concern is further elaborated with special reference to the current paradigm of contractarian business ethics, Donaldson and Dunfee’s Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT).

This paper challenges a pervasive, if not always explicit assumption of the present state of theorising in business ethics. This is the idea that a workable theory of organizational ethics must provide a distinctive, unitary and integrative perspective on its subject matter. In this paper we will sketch the broad outlines of an alternative understanding of business ethics, which focuses on constraints on corporate conduct that cannot reasonably be rejected. These constraints stem from at least three different levels or spheres of social reality, i.e. the preconditions of a well-ordered society, the internal morality of economic activity and the preconditions of autonomous agency.

This paper attempts to provide a careful review of previous research concerning culture’s effect on businesspersons’ ethical judgment. Specifically, the paper tries to present an inventory of past studies that address the relationship between culture and businesspersons’ ethical judgment; to provide a classification of the instruments used by the studies in measuring the ethical judgment and culture; and to identify future directions in the development of research tools in this subject.

This symposium focuses on the current state, challenges, and future prospects of sustainability reporting. One goal is to communicate the considerable progress that has been made in developing standards and in getting support from large corporations, which are beginning to use these standards to prepare sustainability or "triple-bottom-line" reports. A second goal is to foster discussion about the issues that remain to be addressed, including the questions of access to which kinds of information, the capability of providing independent audits and who should audit, and comparability of reports. Issues of credibility are paramount.

This brief paper sets out some of the context and activities for sustainability reporting in Europe - many colleagues within IABS have noted that much of the leading activity in the field seems to be occurring in Europe. I, therefore, describe some of the current activity and also observe on the context in which this is occurring.

This presentation described a study that examined the role of social capital in firm-stakeholder relationships as a source of business value with a particular focus on measurement possibilities. Previous research and two case studies led to a model that included the mutual motivation to engage, a specification of the dimensions of the quality of the firm-stakeholder relationship, a latent-manifest portrayal of social capital, and the embedding of intangible business value in the resource dependence view of the firm. The quality of the firm-stakeholder relationship appeared to be the most promising focus for measurement efforts on intangible business value.

We analyse the determinants of firm social performance within a sample of over 500 publicly listed UK corporations. Our analysis distinguishes between three dimensions of firm social performance (community performance, employee performance, and environmental performance) and emphasises the importance of industry stakeholder pressures and organizational news media visibility as stimuli for improved social performance. The findings indicate that corporate social performance characteristics vary systematically across industries and that news media visibility is a significant stimulus for all dimensions of firm social performance, suggesting that recent moves to “name and shame” corporations with poor social and environmental performance are likely to have had an important impact on the behaviour of companies. However, we find that news media visibility has a significantly stronger impact upon community and employee performance than it does on environmental performance.

Corporate social responsiveness (CSR) can be seen as part of a firm’s overall corporate strategy, where firms allocate resources in order to achieve both longterm social objectives and competitive advantage. Identifying which resources are critical for social responsiveness, and even whether a firm’s resources can be enhanced by undertaking CSR activity, have become pressing issues for both researchers and practitioners. This paper will shed light on these questions by comparing the treatment of resources in two theories of the firm: the resource based and behavioural theories perspectives. The paper concludes with implications from these perspectives for the future research and practice of CSR.

This paper examines the patterns in voluntary social and environmental disclosures made by a sample of over 300 large UK companies drawn from a diverse range of industrial sectors. The analysis distinguishes between two types of disclosure (social and environmental) and it examines how each type of decision is determined by firm and industry characteristics. We find significant associations between disclosure and company ownership, size, media visibility, profitability and industry. Furthermore, we find the effect of ownership structure to vary both between and within investor groups. The shareholdings of internally-managed pension funds are found to have a positive effect, and those of investment tnists and hedge funds are found to have a negative effect, on the propensity for a firm to disclose. Thus, investor activism to promote disclosure seems to follow from a focus upon a long-term time horizon and sufficient scope to broaden that focus beyond the financial performance of the firm, to social and environmental impacts.

The aim of this paper is to present the results of an empirical research in 25 European large companies in Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland in Corporate Social Responsibility topic, highlighting the existing CSR practices in companies and their effects on the managerial agenda, defining the impact of CSR on a scries of variables within the organisation in order to verify the existence of a dynamic model for the adoption and implementation of CSR in corporations.

Examinations of corporate social responsibility orientation (CSRO) have tended to concentrate on CEOs and other managers at various levels in large organizations. There has been little check on the effect of firm size or on small business owners’ CSRO. This paper examines those questions as well as others more commonly addressed, such as the effect of gender and industry, to be able to compare small business owners’ response patterns to those of managers in larger firms.

We examine the conditions under which corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects create value for the finn. Specifically, we measure and examine the impact of centrality, specificity, proactivity, visibility, and voluntarism on value creation among targe Spanish finns corporations. We find that specificity, visibility, and voluntarism are related to value creation. In the case of voluntarism, the relationship is inverse. We draw conclusions from these findings about the nature of CSR activity by large finns in Spain.