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Article
How to Assess Multiple-Value Accounting Narratives from a Value Pluralist Perspective? Some Metaethical Criteria
Nowadays businesses are often expected to create not just financial, but multiple kinds of value—and they report on this using numbers and narratives. Multiple-value accounting narratives, such as those requir...
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Article
Existentialist Perspectives on the Problem and Prevention of Moral Disengagement
We bring the distinct and complementary existentialist perspectives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to bear on the phenomenon of moral disengagement in managerial decision-making. Existentialist thi...
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Chapter
Create a New Story About Business
This essay argues that the first step in making successful companies a reality is for leaders to actively incorporate values and ethics into all of their business decisions and to encourage others to follow th...
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Chapter
Short Term vs. Long Term: A Skeptical View … and an Alternative
This essay addresses the criticism concerning Freeman’s ideas of stakeholders and ethics and how they can only be applied in a long-term view. Instead, the author redefines the problem: the narrative of busine...
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Chapter
Airline Horror Stories Indicate an Ethical Problem
This essay begins by providing examples of unethical customer service stories to exemplify the relevance of ethics in daily life. Freeman then argues that the current wave of interest in business ethics undoub...
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Chapter
Let’s Disband The Academy of Management
This essay argues for a new group to emerge – the “Crits” (Committee for Critical Studies in Management) – and calls for the elimination of the “Academy of Management.” The author then goes into the process of...
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Chapter
Business, Ethics and Society: A Critical Agenda
In recent papers and presentations we have satirized what the field of business and society has become (R. Edward Freeman, “Let’s Disband the Academy of Management,” 1989 SIM Division Chair Address, and R. Edw...
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Chapter
The “Business Sucks” Story
The purpose of this essay is to suggest that one of the dominant modes of thought in our society is a profound mistrust and misunderstanding of the role of business. A dominant myth in society is that business...
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Chapter
Teaching Business Ethics in the Age of Madoff
This essay provides an overview of the foundational history of business ethics, especially from an academic research standpoint. The authors also cover four popular misconceptions perpetuated by business schoo...
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Chapter
Creating Ties That Bind
The work of Donaldson and Dunfee (Ties That Bind: A Social Contracts Approach to Business Ethics, 1999) offers an example of how normative and descriptive approaches to business ethics can be integrated. We sugge...
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Chapter
Ethics and the Algorithm
This essay opens with a description of how advances in information technology have changed our lives, specifically in the case of data and tracking consumer behavior online. Then, the authors suggest that soci...
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Chapter
Corporate Social Responsibility: A Critical Approach
The purpose of this work is to give several reasons why we should give up the idea of corporate social responsibility. Freeman and Liedtka draw on their extensive experience in hel** managers think about the...
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Chapter
Understanding Stakeholder Capitalism
The essay begins by discussing the background and evolution of stakeholder capitalism and the effects of the business ethics movement. In an attempt to juxtapose the rhetoric of the right with the rhetoric of ...
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Chapter
Managing for Stakeholders: Trade-Offs or Value Creation
One of the central uses of stakeholder theory, in its original form, was as a counterpoint to the idea that corporations should be managed in the interests of shareholders. As the theory developed the debate w...
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Chapter
Responsible Capitalism: Business for the Twenty-First Century
This chapter sketches the tenets of the old narrative of businesses (a focus on profits) more precisely, and highlights some of the partial suggestions for reform. Then, the authors turn to a set of principles...
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Chapter
A Puzzle About Business Ethics
This short essay presents several ethical dilemmas associated with business and the business world. The authors argue that the denial of the relevance of the simplest moral notion that we are responsible for t...
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Chapter
Healthy Tension Between Business and News Media
This essay establishes the historically bad reputation of business and the tension between business and the news media that often leads to conflict and debate. The author suggests that this conflict is a posit...
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Chapter
The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Create Value for Stakeholders
The essay explains why society should view social responsibility as an obligation to create value for stakeholders instead of simply making a profit. Moreover, Freeman and Elms establish that there is no singl...
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Chapter
Business Ethics: A Literary View
There has been a recent surge of interest in business ethics by managers and scholars alike. The purpose of this essay is to diagnose this recent interest and to suggest an alternative way of understanding the...
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Chapter
Business As a Humanity: Epilogue
This chapter begins by examining the history of business schools and establishing the presence of three important phases: the formative period, the scientific / modern period, and the porter / peters era. In t...
