Originally published as Social Responsibility Journal, Volume 4, Issue 1&2, 2008
ISBN: 978 1 84663 808 4
E-ISBN: 978 1 84663 809 1
Guest edited by: Jelena Debeljak and Kristijan Krkac
The ignoring of ethics in business practice bears negative consequences for business, manifested in general negligence, such as pollution, environmental changes, problems in HRS, business relation scale in general, and eventually the maintenance and sustainability of general prosperity and business itself. The purpose of this e-book is to facilitate understanding of where ethical and moral limits actually should be underlined – as that question seems to represent most difficulty. Perhaps because the answer is plain – they are within each and every one of us, and are nurtured by each and every one of us, as that’s where morality comes from. We can try to avoid taking the responsibility, as we - by our fragile human nature - frequently tend to do, but that only makes things worse for no–one else but ourselves. So when shall I start acting upon the realized importance of morality – is perhaps a more convenient question. Our contributors discuss the themes of Ethics and morality in business practice broadly, demonstrating how present and wide-spread it is in this field.
Contents:
Ethics and morality in human resource management
John Simmons
The paper seeks to focus on operationalising corporate social responsibility in the context of employee governance. Its purpose is to evaluate critically the ethics of “mainstream” human resource management (HRM) and to propose an alternative stakeholder systems model of HRM.
Values in organizations: difficult to understand, impossible to internalize?
Merita Mattila
This paper aims to study personnel perceptions about value processing in three case organizations in the Finnish context, especially management's role in organizational change where values are considered.
Corporate governance and innovative leaders
M.A. Musa, S.E. Ismail and S. Othman
The purpose of this paper is to attract readers' attention to the importance of the integration of corporate governance and innovation for companies to strive further in business.
Moral commitments to community: mapping social responsibility and its ambiguities among small business owners
Elizabeth A. Lange and Tara J. Fenwick
The purpose of this paper is to map the different moral positions articulated by small business owners in relation to social responsibility (SR) commitment and practice.
CSR, women and SMEs: the Croatian perspective
Mirna Korican and Ivija Jelavic
The purpose of this paper is to present the idea that CSR needs to be communicated from four different levels – government, community, company, and the individual. It also aims to stress that women managers in Croatia are still discriminated against and to show that managers in SMEs in Croatia need to become more aware of the importance of CSR.
Corporate ethics: an end to the rhetorical interpretations of an endemic corruption
Ben Tran
Crime, fraud, and corruption, are all nouns that pertain to the act of deception that depicts an intention to increase an opportunity in one's favor in an unlawful manner that pertains to an organization's interest and goals. Such offenses are numerous and quite costly and are now a commonplace criminal behavior within corporations. Motivations and purposes for corruption may be subjective but the legality of corruption is not. Thus, the rhetorical interpretations of corruption may be analyzed through two distinctive paradigms, the social behavioral science paradigm and the legality paradigm. This paper seeks to address this issue.
Corruption as a moral issue
Hartmut Kreikebaum
Corruptive behaviour penetrates the business process itself and permeates the mental attitude of decision makers on all hierarchy levels. This paper seeks to present the special legal situation in Germany as the regulatory environment for business transactions and to discuss the moral consequences of an “economy of greed”.
Can we teach ethics and professional deontology? An empirical study regarding the Accounting and Finance degree
Francisco Alegria Carreira, Maria do Amparo Guedes and Maria da Conceição Aleixo
This paper sets out to analyse the role of ethics and moral values in higher education, as well as the articulation with two important professions in the financial area, because ethics and professional deontology play an important role in organizations and society, which have a great concern with corporate social responsibility
Corporate social responsibility, new activism and public relations
Kristin Demetrious
This paper aims to analyse why some contemporary corporate organisations are reluctant to articulate the effect of their market positioning behaviour on the unwilling communities that oppose their activities. It describes the communicative interactions between several large corporate organisations and the grassroots activist groups opposing their activities, in Victoria, Australia.
“What we learn today is how we behave tomorrow”: a study on students' perceptions of ethics in management education
Fernanda Duarte
The purpose of this paper is to investigate students’ perceptions of studying ethics in a business management degree.
Ten principles of corporate citizenship
David Birch
This paper aims to reflect briefly on some of the major principles that have emerged from the developing policies, practices and debates about corporate citizenship in the last ten years or so.
The “ethics” of being profit focused
S. Mercia Selva Malar
This paper seeks to emphasise the importance of firms being responsible to society.
Revisiting rights and responsibility: the case of Bhopal
Loong Wong
This paper seeks to examine the activities and consequential effects of a transnational corporation in a developing country. Via an examination of the industrial accident in Bhopal and a discursive examination of the firm's strategies, the paper seeks to contest the firm's claims that it has been acting responsibly. The paper further suggests that the contexts and development of the relationships, and claims by Union Carbide and its supporters, and its place within the global economy, must be critically examined and subjected to a systemic analysis if corporate social responsibility is to have any significant resonance.
Paradigms in corporate ethics: the legality and values of corporate ethics
Ben Tran
It has always been claimed that business ethics are ambiguous and thus hard to define. As such, with recognizable unethical corporate behaviors as an epidemic, it is hard to hold perpetrators accountable. Even more detrimental are the miscommunication, the misunderstanding, the misinterpretation, and the misuse of the various paradigms in business ethics. Such flawed values and legality of business ethics paradigms cannot persist. There exist a gap and a bridging in the analysis of the paradigms in business ethics between the practitioners and the ethicists. This paper aims to provide an elaborate analysis of the values, trust, and legality of corporate behaviors in business ethics utilizing various paradigms.
Business ethics? A global comparative study on corporate sustainability approaches
Sharon Moore and Julie Jie Wen
The purpose of this paper is to see whether ethical and sustainable corporate strategy is not just an “add on” for good community relationships and publicity, and whether companies across the globe are approaching sustainability differently.
The organisation's captives: the no mean production of the contemporary administrative techniques
Alex Coltro
This paper seeks to understand administrative action, to know its deeper and excellent roots. Such roots, for the West, are based in the concept of reason and its derivatives.
Accountability discourses in advanced capitalism: who is now accountable to whom?
Miriam Green, Wim Vandekerckhove and Dominique Bessire
This paper aims to argue that the concept of “accountability” has changed and become perverted. Originally the concept meant answerability or the act of rendering an account. Those who were traditionally accountable were the powerful in organisations, public institutions and international bodies. The paper seeks point out that the notion of “accountability” has largely been emptied of its substance, as over the past few decades the concept of accountability has become perverted in discourse and in practice. The powerful are often no longer held accountable and are able to make those to whom they have hitherto been accountable, accountable to them instead.
Corporate social responsibility in India: towards a sane society?
Aruna Das Gupta and Ananda Das Gupta
Based on a survey, this paper seeks to confirm that Indian corporates are already working on the guideline of the Global Compact.
“Me, myself & I”: practical egoism, selfishness, self-interest and business ethics
Jelena Debeljak and Kristijan Krkac
This paper aims to elucidate some of the arguments against egoism in the current debate, as well as to create some new arguments, or rather objections (epistemological and ontological from the position of egoism as moral solipsism), and to explicate some arguments against egoism (descriptive, normative, and ideological) as being not so convincing. It also aims to explicate Jesus's second commandment in a fashion similar to that of Adam Smith when he tried to combine self-love with sympathy.
Fighting a smoky fire: an analysis of Philip Morris's CEO speeches according to image restoration strategies
Maria de Fatima Oliveira
This paper seeks to investigate Philip Morris's responses to a decade-long crisis through the analysis of its CEO's speeches. It also aims to reveal the rich potential of corporate speeches as examples of crisis management strategies.
Back to basics: an Islamic perspective on business and work ethics
Riham Ragab Rizk
In the light of major corporate failures worldwide, business ethics have become an increasingly important area of managerial competence and responsibility. Most studies on business ethics in general and the work ethic in particular have been based on the experiences of Western nations, with a primary focus on the Protestant work ethic (PWE) as advanced by Max Weber. This paper aims primarily to explore the Islamic perspective to ethics, which follows the Judeo-Christian tradition as the last of the three great monotheistic religions.
About the Social Responsibility Journal
The Social Responsibility Journal, the official journal of the Social Responsibility Research Network, is interdisciplinary in its scope and encourages submissions from any discipline or any part of the world which addresses any element of the journal's aims. The journal encompasses the full range of theoretical, methodological and substantive debates in the area of social responsibility. Contributions which address the link between different disciplines and / or implications for societal, organisational or individual behavior are especially encouraged.
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