Business Ethics: a Double Bind (original) (raw)

The Anthropology of Business Ethics: Worth Thinking about

This article deals with epistemological thoughts about business ethics. My intention is to consider business ethics as a research subject in anthropology and not to judge the relevance of the morality or ethics: in other words, the integration of activities in a " common good " category. The article examines the philosophical ground of this notion and explores whether business ethics is related to this philosophical background. While, from an anthropological point of view, it is better to draw a value judgment from the notion of " business ethics " (applicability, truthfulness, intentionality, and so on), the argument presented here is that it is better to consider " business ethics " as a category of work management at the meeting point between theory and practice, and to observe in situ how this notion is used, articulated and circulated in the daily life of a workplace.

Applied Ethics: Anthropology and Business

Applied Ethics is society’s response to need to resolve social control problems posed by cultural crisis. Applied ethics is a term used to describe attempts by non-philosophers, or ethicists, to use philosophical methods to identify morally correct courses of action in human life. Business anthropology is a relatively new subfield of traditional anthropology. Business anthropologists represent a mix of traditional academic researcher, business teachers, private consultant practitioners and technical staff members of business enterprises. We define these as “career anthropologist.” As a group they face a wide variety of ethical conflicts based on their status and role in the business context. In this paper we explore these conflicts and how the anthropological institutional establishment has attempted to address the needs of “career anthropologist.” We do this by applying a structural-functional analysis of the role ethics plays in our understanding of socio-cultural institutions. Then we apply this to a review of the evolution and institutional development of ethical thinking in anthropology for the past 75 years as manifested by the SfAA, AAA and more recently, NAPA. Finally, we propose an applied ethical approach as a solution to the crisis based on a return to core values represented by what we call, The Boasian Code.

Mind the Gap! The Challenges and Limits of (Global) Business Ethics

Journal of Business Ethics, 2018

Though this paper acknowledges the progress made in business ethics over the past several decades, it focuses on the challenges and limits of global business ethics. It maintains that business ethicists have provided important contributions regarding the Evaluative, Embodiment, and Enforcement aspects of business ethics. Nevertheless, they have not sufficiently considered a fourth part of a theory of moral change, an Enactment theory, whereby the principles and values business ethicists have identified might actually be followed. Enactment theory argues that appeals to ethical leadership, moral imagination, and communicative participation have been insufficient to the task of closing the gap between what businesses do and what they ought to be doing. To address this problem, a theory of moral change focusing on the relations of power within which individuals and businesses operate needs to be developed. Drawing on the work of John Gaventa, the paper sketches some directions in which business ethics should proceed to help diminish this gap. The upshot is that business ethics needs greater connection with economic, social, and political theories. It also suggests that there are important limits to fostering the ethics of global business.

Ethics in Business Anthropology: Crossing Boundaries

Journal of Business Anthropology, 2014

The door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world (van Gennep 1960: 20) The theme of the 2012 American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in San Francisco was 'Borders and Crossings.' A session on 'Ethics in Business Anthropology' seemed appropriate given the number of anthropologists increasingly crossing borders from academia to business and moving into business as a full-time career or operating between academia and business. The session that we planned would deal with the expanding notion of what crossing thresholds into a new world 1 The articles in this issue are based upon papers presented in a session entitled 'Ethics in Business Anthropology' held at the 2012 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, California, USA. Some of the participants in that session elected not to include papers here and we invited Allen Batteau, who did not present a paper in that session, to join in this issue.

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics: Reviving the Virtue of Wisdom

From 'Handbook of Philosophy of Management' ed. Cristina Neesham & Seven Segal, 2019

Underpinning all our judgements about how to live and how to act is our conception of what we are as human beings. Current forms of life have entrenched assumptions about human nature deriving from the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Their conception of humans is now embodied in business practices where neoliberal ideology is dominant. It has been reinforced and virtually placed beyond questioning, not only by the triumph of neoliberal managerialism, which identifies 'good' with profitability in an unconstrained market, but by the fragmentation of philosophy itself, which, by accepting the separation of science and the humanities, excludes possibilities for challenging the assumptions on which neoliberal managerialism is based. The discipline that investigates the question 'What are humans?' and then 'What are their potentialities?', 'Which potentialities should be realized?' and 'How to make these potentialities prevail?' is philosophical anthropology. It is argued here that philosophical anthropology, inspired by the quest for self-knowledge as central to developing the virtue of wisdom, challenges the Hobbesian/Lockean tradition and can replace it, with better results for a more ethical society and more ethical business. Reacting against this tradition, leading philosophical anthropologists have argued that humans are essentially cultural beings, creating themselves and their institutions, their relations to others, to society and to nature, through the concepts they develop, embrace and assume in their actions. These concepts can be questioned and modified or replaced, in search for wisdom and for living wisely. Superior concepts are those that do more justice to the potentialities of humans and other life forms, and that can more successfully orient people to create the future. It is through philosophical anthropology that traditional virtues can be revived and effectively defended: our challenge is not only to develop better concepts to orient ourselves, but to show how these concepts can be acted upon and thus incorporated into social reality (and ultimately, physical reality). The implications of philosophical anthropology for business ethics are hereby discussed in this context.

Ethics at the Centre of Global and Local Challenges: Thoughts on the Future of Business Ethics

Journal of Business Ethics

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Ethics at the centre of global and local challenges. For much of the history of the Journal of Business Ethics, ethics was seen within the academy as a peripheral aspect of business. However, in recent years, the stakes have risen dramatically, with global and local worlds destabilized by financial crisis, climate change, internet technologies and artificial intelligence, and global health crises. The authors of these commentaries address these grand challenges by placing business ethics at their centre. What if all grand challenges were framed as grand ethical challenges? Tanusree Jain, Arno Kourula and Suhaib Riaz posit that an ethical lens allows for a humble response, in which those with greate...

Business Ethics in a Global Context

Introducing Management in a Global Context, 2015

The title of this chapter is a bit of a misnomer: there is not, nor has there been, a global business ethics; moral relativism is prevalent. Moral relativism holds that ethical opinions are true or false only relative to some particular viewpoint, i.e. culture, religion, or a historical period, and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others. Even this is not universally accepted and is continually debated. There is disagreement about what is ethical, and because morality cannot be objectively right or wrong, so we ought to tolerate the behaviour of others even when we disagree about the morality of it. Today there are many philosophical positions that underpin moral and ethical judgments across different people and cultures, and some of these are explored later in the chapter. Diversity is nothing new and there has never been a universal business ethic. For example, the Jaina Anekantavada principle of Mahavira (c. 599–527 BC) holds that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth. Since long before Herodotus (c. 484–420 BC), the Greek historian, recorded it, societies have always regarded their own ethical systems as superior to all others.