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This paper explores the impact of ethical philosophies on developing an authentic leader's internalized moral perspective. It builds on prior research on moral identity, proposing that ethical philosophies such as deontology, rule utilitarianism, and virtue can be internalized over time to form an authentic leader's internalized moral identity. The paper argues that while virtues and altruism are discussed in the authentic leadership literature, the relevance of other ethical philosophies to authentic leadership has been largely overlooked. These ethical philosophies embedded in business settings can be internalized and become integral to the content of a leader's moral identity rather than merely being lenses for moral reasoning. Authentic leaders' moral identities regulate their moral motivation and actions. In addition, the paper posits that internalized ethical philosophies can be activated by triggering events or changing the domain of moral issues. Authentic leaders with highly internalized moral identities are also encouraged to be morally modest, reflecting on different ethical philosophies when facing new challenges and internalizing them as needed while staying committed to their virtue-centric moral identity. This interdisciplinary paper proposes a framework and presents theoretical propositions to further understand the role of ethical philosophies in shaping an authentic leader's internalized moral perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in sociology and organization studies has consistently documented the tendency for organizations to develop wrongdoing practices that are at odds with the legal and moral frameworks of society. Often, this wrongdoing acquires a degree of normalization where it is endorsed, encouraged, and accepted throughout the organization. Such normalized wrongdoing can have severe negative effects on the whistleblowing opportunities of employees. While these effects are intuitively easy to understand, we still lack an understanding of the significant variation that exists across situations of normalized wrongdoing and how that variation may affect potential whistleblowers. To advance such an agenda, the paper analyzes 14 whistleblower autobiographies. Building on work on normalized wrongdoing within corruption, fraud, and management studies and Niklas Luhmann's theories on organization, the analysis finds that normalized wrongdoing in the autobiographies appears in different intensities that depend on the role of management, the benefits organizations obtain from wrongdoing, and the extent to which wrongdoing norms are internalized by employees. The paper builds on these distinctions to suggest a continuum of normalized wrongdoing from 'weak' to 'strong.' Understanding this variation offers a new set of tools to assess the organizational realities that concerned employees must navigate in when they attempt to resist and address situations of normalized wrongdoing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently more than half of the world's population lives in cities. This is expected to rise to more than two-thirds by mid-century. Thus, our economic, social, and environmental challenges mostly and increasingly play out in urban settings. How can cities be strengthened to address the growing challenges they face? This special issue addresses the ethical implications of revitalizing urban environments, and the roles that diversity and inclusion, as well as social innovation, play in this process. The five papers herein show that it is not easy to strengthen our cities, but with the right policies, political and corporate leadership, and depth of community grounding in ethical principles, it is possible. In this editorial essay, we summarize the contributions of each of these papers to this important conversation, clarify the questions that remain, and offer directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ICIJ's release of the Panama Papers in 2016 opened up a wealth of previously private financial information on the tax avoidance, tax evasion, and wealth concealment activities of politicians, government officials, and their allies. Drawing upon prior accountability and ethics focused research, we utilize a dataset of almost 28 M tweets sent between 2016 and early 2020 to consider the microdetails and overall trajectory of this particular social accountability conversation. The study shows how the publication of previously private financial information triggered a Twitter-based social accountability conversation. It also illustrates how social accountability utterances are intra-textually constructed by the inclusion of social characters, the personal pronoun 'we,' and the use of deontic responsibility verbs. Finally, the study highlights how the tweets from this group of participants changed over the longer-term but continued to focus on social accountability topics. The provided analysis contributes to our understanding of social accountability, including how the release of previously private accounting-based financial information can trigger a grassroots social accountability conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing uses of algorithm-based decision-making in human resources management have drawn considerable attention from different stakeholders. While prior literature mainly focused on stakeholders directly related to HR decisions (e.g., employees), this paper pertained to a third-party observer perspective and investigated how consumers would respond to companies' adoption of algorithm-based HR decision-making. Through five experimental studies, we showed that the adoption of algorithm-based (vs. human-based) HR decision-making could induce consumers' unfavorable ethicality inferences of the company (study 1); because implementing a calculative and data-driven approach (i.e. algorithm-based) to make employee-related decisions violates the deontological principles of respectful employee treatment (study 2). However, this effect was attenuated when consumers had high (vs. low) power distance beliefs (study 3); the algorithm served as assistance (vs. replacement) for human decisions (study 4); or the adoption was framed as employee-oriented (vs. company-oriented) motivated (study 5). Our findings suggested that consumers are aversive to algorithm-based HR decision-making because it is deontologically problematic regardless of its decision quality (i.e. accuracy). This paper contributes to the extant understanding of stakeholders' responses to algorithm-based HR decision-making and consumers' attitudes toward algorithm users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the Islamic religiosity of the local community and the level of corporate environmental responsibility disclosure (CERD) in Iran, an example of an Islamic country. This paper also examines the moderating role of firm size, family ownership, and state ownership. This study is conducted using a sample of 952 observations across firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange. The results indicate that CERD increases with an increase in the level of Islamic religiosity of the province where the firm is located. In addition, findings reveal that firm size and family ownership strengthen the aforementioned relationship. However, we provide evidence suggesting that state ownership weakens the positive relationship between the Islamic religious atmosphere and CERD. The results of this research present a new insight suggesting that the Islamic values governing a local community can significantly affect executives' decisions regarding disclosures, particularly resulting in a decrease in executives' selfishness and encouraging them to disclose more information about environmental responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business ethics (BE) professors play a crucial role in sensitizing business students toward their future ethical responsibilities. Yet, there are few papers exploring the ethical challenges these professors themselves face while teaching BE. In this qualitative paper, we rely on the lenses of ethical sensemaking and dramaturgical performance, and draw from 29 semi-structured interview conducted with BE professors from various countries and field notes from 17 h of observation of BE classes. We identify four kinds of rationalities that professors rely on for making sense of in-class ethical challenges, eventually leading them to engage in one of four corresponding types of performances. By juxtaposing high and low scores of two underlying dimensions (degree of expressivity and degree of imposition), we offer a framework of four emerging performances. Additionally, we show that professors can shift from one performance to another during the course of their interactions. We contribute to performance literature by demonstrating the plurality of performances and explaining their emergence. We also contribute to sensemaking literature by offering support to its recent turn from an episodic (crises or disruption-based) to a relational, interactional, and present-oriented understanding. Since professors' performances have an impact not only on their own teaching experiences but also on students' learning experiences, undermining these would result in compromising the efforts that business schools have been making toward sensitizing future managers to their ethical responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applied ethicists' interest in narratives and narratives ethics has grown steadily. Some thinkers position narratives as supplements to ethics, while others see narratives as new form of ethics comparable to virtue or deontological ethics. In this paper, I analyze some of the main ethical claims being made on behalf of business and literary narratives from the perspective of Aristotelian virtue ethics. I argue that, while narratives can significantly contribute to the development of our character, to a better grasp of virtues and vices, and to a clarification of a virtue ethics framework, this contribution is highly nuanced. In particular, Aristotelian virtue ethics enable us to sensibly and helpfully distinguish the ethical value of narratives within business ethics from narrative business ethics per se. This paper has three parts. Part One offers a provisional definition of narrative and sketches some of the large claims that literary critics, philosophers, theologians, and others have made for narratives' relevance to and value for ethics. In Part Two, using narratives drawn from business and literature, I take up each of these claims in turn and examine whether the claim makes sense and is compelling from an Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective. Part Three gathers together the threads of the arguments in Part Two to specify the modest, but nonetheless significant, legitimate roles narratives might play within Aristotle's virtue ethics. I also point to some limitations inherent in an Aristotelian critique of narrative ethics and suggest some questions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine how an organization narratively constructs its prototypical disabled employee. Data comprise public narratives of the Government of India, the country's largest employer of disabled persons. Narratives during 2008–2016 were considered as this timespan witnessed the design of inclusive legislation that emphasized defining disabled persons and their entitlements. Findings indicate that the label of "disadvantage" was consistently used to portray the target employee. Alongside other narrative material suggesting, for example that the target employee was someone who required employment assistance, this label was supplied to external audiences to convert them into potential partners. This supply of narrative material further reinforced the portrayal of the target employee. Consistent use of this expansive label subsumed changing definitions of who is a disabled person, allowed for aggregations with diverse disadvantaged collectives, and accommodated changes in employment entitlements and ecosystem partners, thereby allowing the reading of change in stable narratives. The contributions of this paper lie in highlighting how the consistent use of an expansive label can cast narrative stability and change as complementary, and in suggesting that narrating a prototypical employee entails shaping the setting outside the employing organization toward employee categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an ethnographic case study based in a UK state school for 11- to 18-year-olds, this paper explores the tensions that arose when the senior leadership team (SLT) introduced a justice-based ethic-of-care that prioritized good grades and equal treatment for all pupils over a feminist ethic-of-care (preferred by most teachers in non-leadership roles) that accentuated individual pupil need and placed greater emphasis on a broader social education. Through highlighting the tensions between a feminist ethic-of-care and a more 'masculine' style, justice-based approach to care-ethics, the paper extends the organisational care-ethics literature. We emphasise that such tensions occurred whether the different ethics were enacted by men, women, or non-binary individuals. In order to better understand the tensions between these two ethical approaches, we draw upon the theoretical work of Donald Winnicott, which highlights the importance both of maternal and paternal roles during infancy. We update Winnicott's ideas, noting how maternal and paternal caring roles can be undertaken by people of varied gender identities. Building on Winnicott's theory, we propose a new 'Parentalist' ethic-of-care, which has the potential to balance and hold together ideas of both a feminist ethic-of-care, and a justice-based ethic. A Parentalist ethic-of-care could support teachers yet recognize the context of the contemporary neo-liberal environment, where most children need to attain formal qualifications in a marketized world, and where such measures of success are highly valued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate Reputation (CR) is essential to value generation and is co-created between a company and its stakeholders, including supply chain actors. Consequently, CR is a critical and valuable resource that should be managed carefully along supply chains. However, the current CR literature is fragmented, and a general definition of CR is elusive. Besides, the academic CR debate largely lacks a supply chain perspective. This is not surprising, as it is very difficult to collect reliable data along supply chains. When supply chains span the globe, data collection is especially challenging, as the chain consists of multiple suppliers and subcontractors, positioned at different tier levels. Recognizing this, the paper examines firstly the current state of CR research through a systematic literature review from a business perspective. The review is combined with a bibliometric mapping approach to show the most influential research clusters, representative of CR research streams and their contributors. This process highlights that the connection between CR and supply chain issues represents a major research gap. Consequently, this paper introduces a research agenda connecting these the two traditionally separated research fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on an institutional logics perspective to illuminate a hitherto underexplored context for CSR professional identity construction. It draws on an empirical study of 65 CSR professionals in South Korea and aims to deepen our understanding of CSR professional identity construction by investigating the contested nature of the CSR professional field between, on the one hand, societal-normative expectations of the profession, and, in the absence of stable professional logics, CSR professionals' desired professional identity, on the other. Our study reveals how CSR professionals engage with, and respond to, this complexity through constructing one of three distinctive professional identities based on different logic constellations. This process reveals a snapshot of professional logics 'in-the-making'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the process of moral agency development as a community-supported process. Based on a multimethod qualitative inquiry, including diaries, focus groups, and documentary analysis, we analyze the experiences of middle managers in two Norwegian hospitals during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that moral agency is developed through a community-embedded value inquiry, emerging in three partially overlapping steps. The first step is marked by moral reflex, an intuitive, value-driven, pre-reflective response to a crisis situation. In the second step, the managers involved the community in value calibration, a collective-ethical sensemaking. In the third step, they took active stances to translate values into actions, with an increased awareness of values and an ability to explain and justify their actions. We label the steps, respectively: value inquiry-in-action, value inquiry-on-action and reflective enactment of value. An analysis of the process reveals two aspects critical for moral agency development: it happens through confrontation with uncertainty, and it is relational, that is, embedded in a community. While uncertainty forces an intuitive moral response, dialogical reflection in the community develops value awareness and relationships of mutual care and support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data access and data sharing are vital to advance medicine. A growing number of public private partnerships are set up to facilitate data access and sharing, as private and public actors possess highly complementary health data sets and treatment development resources. However, the priorities and incentives of public and private organizations are frequently in conflict. This has complicated partnerships and sparked public concerns around ethical issues such as trust, justice or privacy—in turn raising an important problem in business and data ethics: how can ethical theory inform the practice of public and private partners to mitigate misaligned incentives, and ensure that they can deliver societally beneficial innovation? In this paper, we report on the development of the Swiss Personalized Health Network's ethical guidelines for health data sharing in public private partnerships. We describe the process of identifying ethical issues and engaging core stakeholders to incorporate their practical reality on these issues. Our report highlights core ethical issues in health data public private partnerships and provides strategies for how to overcome these in the Swiss health data context. By agreeing on and formalizing ethical principles and practices at the beginning of a partnership, partners and society can benefit from a relationship built around a mutual commitment to ethical principles. We present this summary in the hope that it will contribute to the global data sharing dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a global sample of microfinance institutions (MFIs), this paper offers insights into the trade-off versus synergy debate of adopting multiple institutional goals in hybrid organisations. Additionally, it unravels which organisation- and country-specific determinants associate with top joint performance using machine-learning techniques. We find that the synergy versus trade-off debate is not dichotomous. Rather, MFIs can be strong both socially and financially but not while charging low interest rates. In our sample, 17% of MFIs serve a low-income clientele in need with a diverse range of services while remaining financially sustainable and ask a close-to-average interest rate. These organisations are larger and more mature as well as financially prudent in that they minimize both financial and credit risk. Moreover, they are located in countries where their services can create larger benefits regarding their underlying goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theorisation of fraud has largely been developed in the for-profit sector, and the paper extends this to the not-for-profit sector. Motivated by social control theory, we adopt a qualitative approach to assess the views of key charity stakeholders (social control agents) of charities registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales about fraud. We find that stakeholders, especially donors and beneficiaries, are often reluctant to label 'fraud' as a threat to the sector. This reflects 'trusting indifference', a value embedded in the sector that brings more harm than good to the sector in terms of wrongdoing, by hampering effective social control. Adapting existing theories of fraud to charities, we propose a 'fraud tower' with three layers: the social layer (trusting indifference), organisational layer (opportunity), and individual layer (fraudsters-opportunity seekers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business ethics can be regarded as a field dealing with corporate self-regulation as it relates to the treatment of stakeholders. However, a concern for corporate stakeholders need not take a corporate-centric perspective, as shown by recent efforts (especially Singer in Bus Ethics Q 25(1):65–92, 2015) to situate corporate conduct within Rawls' political theory. Although Rawls was largely mute on the subject himself, his theory has implications for business ethics and corporate governance more specifically. Given an understanding of a "Rawlsian society" as a whole—where corporations as associations are a part—this paper addresses how a Rawlsian perspective would safeguard against corporate harms in society. We argue that a Rawlsian society would primarily regulate corporate conduct through exogenous constraints in the form of legislation. To the extent that business ethics is concerned with endogenous constraints in the form of corporate-centric self-regulation regarding stakeholders, to adopt a Rawlsian perspective is to assume instead a society-centric perspective and to impose exogenous constraints on corporate conduct in the form of legislation for the benefit of citizens. In the context of Rawls' political liberalism, normative concerns in business are accounted for through legislation and the system of background justice. In a clear departure from Singer (Bus Ethics Q 25(1):65–92, 2015, Bus Ethics J Rev 6(3):11–17, 2018a), we further develop our argument to propose that Rawls' theory can be interpreted as providing a rule for corporate governance. The rule—which is imposed exogenously for the good of society—states: After choosing the corporate constraint mechanism (exogenous vs. endogenous) that best promotes the Liberty Principle, choose the corporate control regime (shareholder vs. stakeholder) that maximizes economic efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has examined the relationship between CSR and innovation and has suggested that the former might positively affect the latter; however, the impact of CSR on innovation success needs further attention. This study aims to develop a deeper understanding of how environmental and social CSR are related to innovation performance and whether the implementation of organizational practices might moderate this relationship. The results are based on an unbalanced panel of 14,313 observations of 3713 firms covering 2011–2015. Using random-effects probit models and the estimation of average marginal effects (AMEs), this paper contributes to the literature on CSR by explaining how CSR dimensions affect innovation success differently and by addressing how this effect is influenced by organizational innovation. The results show that while environmental CSR orientation proves beneficial for the generation of process innovation, social CSR orientation contributes to the generation of both kinds of technological innovations only when internal organizational practices are implemented. This study provides valuable insights for managers aiming to implement a CSR perspective in their strategies to support the pursuit of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employees remaining silent about ethical aspects of work or organization-related issues, termed employee ethical silence, perpetuates misconduct in today's business setting. However, how and why it occurs is not yet well specified in the business ethics literature, which is insufficient to manage corporate misconducts. In this research, we investigate how and when exploitative leadership associates with employee ethical silence. We draw from the conservation of resources theory to theorize and test a cognitive resource pathway (i.e., work meaningfulness) and a moral resource pathway (i.e., moral potency) to explain the association between exploitative leadership and employee ethical silence. Results from two studies largely support our hypotheses that work meaningfulness and moral potency mediate the effect of exploitative leadership on ethical silence contingent on performance reward expectancy. Theoretical and practical implications are thoroughly discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends Being-centered and spiritual leadership theory using non-self from the Buddhist philosophy to further our understanding of how inner life functions as the source of spiritual leadership. While spiritual leadership theory has received widespread acceptance and considerable empirical support, its developmental process and potential for being used to pursue self-centered ends remain underdeveloped. Drawing on non-self from the Buddhist emptiness theory, we identify different egoistic forms of attachment at each level of being that can lead to forms of suffering in spiritual leadership. Then we show how leaders operating at lower levels of being can fall into the trap of practicing a form of pseudo-spiritual leadership that is overly focused on self-centered or instrumental purposes and economic rationality. We then introduce mechanisms to move beyond pseudo-spiritual leadership practices and discuss implications for future theory, research, and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the impact of CEO and board gender diversity on the risk management decisions of 179 U.S. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) during the 2001–2018 period. Using a bottom-up analysis on the properties in REIT portfolios, we find significant risk reduction associated with gender-diverse REIT leadership. We document that REITs with a woman CEO, in combination with more women on the board, display less active trading and a longer hold period for assets. In addition, REITs with more gender-diverse leadership are more geographically focused, which for REITs is considered a lower risk investment strategy. Finally, REITs with more gender-diverse leadership are more actively investing in environmentally sustainable real estate. We conclude that gender diversity in real estate firms carries real-life implications for U.S. cities, given their key role as developers, owners, and operators of the built world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of interpersonal comparisons of utility is about the possibility (or not) of comparing the utility or welfare or the mental states in general, of different individuals. Embedded in the conceptual framework of utilitarianism, interpersonal comparisons were admissible in economics as part of the theoretical justification of welfare policies until the first decades of the twentieth century. Under the strong influence of the scientific philosophy of positivism as reflected in the works of early neoclassical economists and as epitomized by Lionel Robbins, utility comparisons were subsequently rejected as a value judgement. Robbins' methodological stance is still prevalent among mainstream economists. Despite the explicit rejection of comparability by the majority of economists, interpersonal comparisons are necessary for many key policy issues, such as progressive taxation, social welfare policies, GDP-based welfare comparisons, cost–benefit analysis, and public goods provision. In this paper, the case of interpersonal utility comparisons is discussed as an illustrative example of the usefulness of the study of the role of value judgements, and generally of the interrelationship between ethics and economics. It is argued that the current tension between theory and policy practice might be resolved through the efforts of prominent economists and philosophers to challenge positivism, and especially its problematic treatment of value judgements and of ethical assumptions in general. The discussion also provides more strength to the view that policy makers and their economic advisers cannot avoid ethical questions in their analysis of the workings of the economic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the global financial crisis, banks have become more regulated to advance ethical sales cultures throughout the sector. Based on case studies of three retail banks, we find that they construct the 'appropriate advisor' in different ways. Inspired by Bakhtin's work on ethics, we propose a vocabulary of relational ethics centered on the 'answerable self.' We argue that this vocabulary is apt for studying and discussing how organizations advance ethical sales cultures in ways that instead of encouraging value congruence and alignment allow for ethical openness. In such cultures, employees—as moral agents—are morally questioning, critically self-reflexive, and answerable for their own actions toward others in their social relationships. Our paper makes three theoretical contributions, namely, problematizing the idea of cultural alignment and value congruence, demonstrating that identity regulation can both comprise and support the 'answerable self,' and advancing our understanding of the interdependence of ethical openness and ethical closure in fostering ethical sales cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spiritual leadership has gained much traction among researchers and practitioners for its value-laden approach as it engenders feelings and expressions of a leader's spirituality at the workplace by intrinsically motivating the followers to envision work as a calling, thereupon culminating in greater organizational performance. However, despite the significant attempts to consolidate the literature, organizational scholarly knowledge on spiritual leadership seems fragmented and incohesive. This is because the extant reviews pertaining to this field often employ subjective approaches in encapsulating the literature. It is due to these limitations, leadership researchers might find it difficult to appreciate the advances made in the realm of spiritual leadership, to grasp a holistic understanding of its objective insights, and to chart a course for future research. Therefore, through our study, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the past, present, and future of spiritual leadership research. This study combines a bibliometric analysis with a literature review wherein we analyzed 337 papers published between 1980 and 2021. First, through bibliographic coupling, citation analysis, prestige analysis, and co-word analysis of extant studies, we highlight the prominent authors, influential works, leading organizations, countries, and journals in the realm of spiritual leadership. Second, through our content analysis of the leading articles obtained from clustering, we map the emergent core themes in spiritual leadership literature. Third, based on these emergent themes, we offer a comprehensive conceptual framework. Finally, we determine and present potential avenues for future research by employing the TCCM framework that could stimulate scholarly research in this domain and discuss theoretical and managerial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prevailing focus of global value chain (GVC) analysis has been on the dominance of highly consolidated Northern retailers over suppliers in the global South. The rise of regional and domestic value chains (RVCs/DVCs) within the Global South which intersect with GVCs, has been found to involve private governance by Southern lead firms. However, we have limited insight into the implications of this changing value chain context for the role of public governance, or different groups of workers. South African fruit provides a rich example of rapid shifts in RVCs/DVCs governed by different private and public actors. The following two questions are addressed: How is the public–private governance of labour standards evolving in the context of RVCs and DVCs that intersect with GVCs? What are the implications for workers operating across different value chains? Conceptually, the paper draws on GVC analysis of governance and power, to examine the governance of labour standards across intersecting value chains. Our analysis highlights the intentional and unintentional mechanisms through which power and standard-setting are diffused away from Northern lead firms to a wider array of public and private actors operating across RVCs/DVCs. While existing analysis of governance and power focuses on singular GVCs, our study highlights diffusion of power across intersecting value chains, with significant and uneven implications for the public–private governance of labour standards. Our findings carry significant ethical implications for the governance of labour standards, as end-markets continue to shift South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grievance landscapes form in rapidly industrialising contexts where social and environmental impacts are inevitable. This paper focuses on the complex operational and organisational settings in which grievances arise and the industrial pathologies that form around resource development projects. The arguments draw on classic and contemporary literature on "grievance", "right" and "entitlement", and the authors' own sustained engagement with global mining companies and local communities. Our contention is that the grievance landscape is far more critical to understanding environmental, human rights, and mining interactions than the managerial systems that companies construct to signal compliance with voluntary international norms. These managerial systems, or operational-level grievance mechanisms, map the procedural contours of how a local grievance would travel once it is made visible to the company. In practice, however, it is fiction, illegibility and invisibility that dominate. Across the pathologies, the common denominator is the corporate propensity to avoid recognising the legitimacy of a local grievance and the source of its cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The renewed engagement with Aristotle's concept of practical wisdom in management and organization studies is reflective of the wider turn towards practice sweeping across many disciplines. In this sense, it constitutes a welcome move away from the traditional rationalist, abstract, and mechanistic modes of approaching ethical decision-making. Within the current engagement, practical wisdom is generally conceptualized, interpreted or read as a form of deliberation or deliberative judgement that is also cognizant of context, situatedness, particularity, lived experience, and so on. We argue that while this way of conceptualizing practical wisdom moves closer to practice in accounting for the concrete and particular reality within which individuals enact ethics, it does not adequately account for practice in the ontological and relational sense posited in practice theories. Practical wisdom conceptualized on the deliberative dimension still retains a higher emphasis on distinct entities (individuals/institutions), reflexive agency, conscious mental states, goal-directed action, and intentionality. In other words, it puts a higher stress on individual wisdom, as opposed to practice or the relational interaction of the individual and social inhering in practice. We offer an alternative conceptualization of practical wisdom based on the dispositional mode of being in the world which is rarely deliberate, intentional, or reflective. Our conceptualization integrates Aristotle's original ethical framework, which is already embedded in a practice-based ontology, with insights from practice theories to show how practical wisdom is intuitively channelled in the dispositional mode in a given social configuration of virtues/ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate social irresponsibility continues despite institutional pressures for socially responsible behavior, resulting in disasters like the Kalamazoo River Oil Spill and the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. We conduct an in-depth abductive analysis of the Kalamazoo River Oil Spill to explain factors that enable corporate forgetting work projects. Specifically, we illustrate how a corporation's political activities allow it to gain the power to suppress its mnemonic community's voices, thereby attenuating an irresponsible event's memory from the minds of its stakeholders, protecting its image, and maintaining legitimacy in the shareholder and state's eyes. We also highlight how the remembrance and forgetting of an irresponsible incident diverges between stakeholders based on their characteristics, future goals, and aspirations and whether they directly suffered from the disaster. Our research makes notable contributions to forgetting work literature by highlighting the importance of corporate political activities and context on the success of corporate forgetting work projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines non-Western perceptions of inclusion and exclusion through an examination of right mindfulness practitioners in Vietnam. It contributes to the critical inclusion literature that problematizes inclusion by showing how right mindfulness practitioners rejected the concepts of inclusion and exclusion, and moreover, resisted attachments to feelings of inclusion or exclusion, treating both states as empty and non-enduring. Surprisingly, our study shows how inclusion can generate fear at fulfilling others' collective expectations, whereas exclusion generated a sense of freedom arising from a release from those expectations. Further, our study traces these counter-intuitive findings to right mindfulness practitioners' moral reasoning based upon Buddhism's canonical philosophical ideas. We conclude by highlighting the pressing need for critical perspectives and for further non-Western perspectives to inclusion that contribute to a body of cross-cultural work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing understanding that modern slavery is a phenomenon 'hidden in plain sight' in the home countries of multinational firms. Yet, business scholarship on modern slavery has so far focussed on product supply chains. To address this, we direct attention to the various institutional pressures on the UK construction industry, and managers of firms within it, around modern slavery risk for on-site labour. Based on a unique data set of 30 in-depth interviews with construction firm managers and directors, we identify two institutional logics as being integral to explaining how these companies have responded to the Modern Slavery Act: a market logic and a state logic. While the institutional logics literature largely assumes that institutional complexity will lead to a conciliation of multiple logics, we find both complementarity and continued conflict in the logics in our study. Though we identify conciliation between aspects of the market logic and the state logic, conflict remains as engagement with actions which could potentially address modern slavery is limited by the trade-offs between the two logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When conflicts regarding industrial operations erupt between countries, relationships between corporations and stakeholders may be affected. We combine insights from stakeholder theory and studies on government and corporate social responsibility to investigate how intergovernmental politics shapes stakeholder engagement. Relying on attribution theory and a qualitative analysis of the Finnish Metsä-Botnia (hereafter Botnia) company during the intergovernmental conflict between Uruguay and Argentina, we explore the mediating role of political attributions—defined as the stakeholder network actors' inferences regarding governmental motives—in the process by which intergovernmental politics shapes stakeholder engagement. We induce three types of political attributions: instrumentalizing, which points to the undeclared instrumental motives of governments; radicalizing, which refers to the beliefs that governments immoderately intensify confrontation; and acting in bad faith, which relates to the perceptions that governments act in inconsistent and/or morally inappropriate ways. Our results show how these attributions combine in specific configurations to explain how intergovernmental politics shapes stakeholder engagement throughout the conflict. Our study theorizes the role of governments as stakeholders in stakeholder engagement and expands organizational studies of attribution to the stakeholder and global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article clarifies the relationship between moral personhood and moral management in ethical leadership from a Confucian perspective. Drawing from four Confucian classics, this study integrates the leader's ethical values and activities undertaken to promote virtues in followers. The harmonisation of moral personhood and moral management is facilitated by two cardinal Confucian beliefs: innate human nature and moral self-cultivation. From a Confucian viewpoint, all human beings are endowed with a good nature that enables them to become virtuous persons and leaders. Ethical leaders subdue their selfish desires and extend their natural moral feelings of true goodness, righteousness, propriety and wisdom to others. Moral personhood and moral management are inseparable because to cultivate oneself morally is to help others to become moral persons. By synthesising moral personhood and moral management, a Confucian worldview of ethical leadership contributes to leadership studies in two main ways: safeguarding against the leader's abuse of power, and advancing organisational change through path-shaping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying and discussing boundary violations between people is important for potentially averting future harm. Organizations typically respond to boundary violations in retributive ways, by punishing the perpetrator. Interestingly, prior research has largely ignored the impact of sexual boundary violations and retributive dynamics on teams. This is problematic as teams provide an obvious setting not only to detect and discuss troubling behavior by peers, but also for learning how to prevent future harm. Therefore, in this study we explore team-level experiences regarding sexual boundary violations and organizational responses to these incidents. Drawing on an in-depth case study, our findings shed light on the profound negative consequences of a retributive organizational response to sexual boundary violations. Additionally, our findings show how a restorative approach, inviting teams to reflect on the violations and their impact, can help teams to recover. Our main contribution involves a model that demonstrates how the interplay between sexual boundary violations, retributive, and restorative organizational responses affects teams. This model shows how combining these responses can acknowledge distress within teams, heal relationships between team members through dialogue, and open up the possibility to learn from these events. This model extends prior research focusing on individual actions and outcomes regarding violations. Additionally, by combining retributive and restorative organizational responses in one model, we extend the literature on restorative organizational responses to boundary violations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a social enterprise pursue its ethical mandate of social impact growth while navigating the perils of the most vulnerable stage in a venture's life—scaling up? We observe a small inclusivity social enterprise attempting to scale up rapidly to create equality for people with disabilities throughout the world. Our embedded, ethnographic study is terminated with the venture's unfortunate demise after their dramatic effort to scale up failed. By examining scaling decision-making and conflicts around creation reasoning longitudinally, our study identifies over-use of effectual logic—a creation reasoning type considered more ethical and more appropriate for high-innovativeness contexts than causal logic—as a major factor in the venture's failure. From this insight, we extend the parameters of effectuation theory to scaling up and dimensionalize its ethical implications. Guidance for social entrepreneurs to scale up successfully while maintaining ethical integrity is also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activism undertaken by CEOs has been on the rise in recent years. Research on this practice has been primarily concerned with determining the conditions under which a CEO's public statements on sociopolitical issues are beneficial or detrimental to her firm's business performance. We complement this instrumental perspective on CEO activism with an ethical investigation of the implications of CEO activism for the democratic process. Drawing on political philosophy, we show that the answer to the question of whether CEO activism is conducive to the democratic process depends on the view of democracy that is adopted. From the perspective of liberalism, the sole requirement that an instance of CEO activism must fulfill is that it is lawful, provided that the applicable law sufficiently protects people's essential rights. However, from the viewpoint of republicanism, this is not a sufficient condition. Besides being law-abiding, CEOs should be "civic-minded" when intervening in public debates, i.e., concerned with the quality and fairness with which those debates are conducted. Based on the literature on republicanism, we suggest four possible criteria that civic-minded CEOs can apply to gauge the democratic conduciveness of a possible public intervention: added insight, timeliness, constructiveness, and transparency. Our article complements the predominantly instrumentally oriented literature on CEO activism and contributes, more broadly, to the literature that explores the normative dimensions of corporate political involvement, as well as to a growing strand of research that draws on philosophical theory to inform business leaders' ethical decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on workplace ostracism and helping behavior has yielded mixed results. This study integrates social learning theory and social role theory by constructing a multilevel model to examine the relationship between supervisor ostracism and helping behavior that focuses on the mediating role of coworker ostracism and the moderating role of subordinate gender. Using a two-wave, multisource approach, data were collected from 382 employees and 43 immediate team leaders in four business corporations in Guangxi Province, China. The results of path analysis reveal that supervisor ostracism has a cross-level effect on helping behavior through the mediating role of coworker ostracism. Furthermore, the positive direct effect of supervisor ostracism on coworker ostracism and the negative cross-level indirect effect of supervisor ostracism on helping behavior via coworker ostracism was stronger for men than women. These findings expand and deepen our understanding of the ostracism field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abundant research exists on the restructuring operations of large, publicly listed firms. However, little is known about the antecedents of layoffs in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Building on the stakeholder salience theory and arguments on social proximity, this study posits that SMEs are less likely to dismiss employees than large firms. We argue that the existence of strong interpersonal ties between employees and managers makes it hard for SME owners and managers to dismiss employees. Empirically analyzing a large sample of European Union firms, the results confirm that the likelihood of layoffs is lower in SMEs than in large firms, even when performance declines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether and how a CEO's personal traits (gender, altruism, age, and founder) influence organizational performance. Building upon upper echelons theory, this study develops a conceptual framework that gives explicit recognition to how the institutional environment surrounding the CEOs shapes their characteristics, which, in turn, are reflected in the different organizational strategies and performance. This study moves beyond the existing focus on for-profit corporations and conducts the empirical analysis on a novel, hand-collected, longitudinal dataset of 1342 firm-year observations of 128 faith-based charity organizations operating in a major developing, Muslim-majority country in the period 1996–2019. This study reveals that those faith-based charity organizations led by CEOs with specific personal traits (woman, altruistic, young, and founder) exhibit better organizational performance. Importantly, CEOs' personal traits, however, do not have a uniform, systematic effect; their effect is generally strengthened when the CEO is also the founder of the faith-based charity organization, given the greater latitude of managerial discretion that a CEO has in managing the organization. Our findings have important implications for individual charity organizations; their board of directors; and their stakeholders, in particular the communities they serve, as well as the whole society where they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although extant literature has covered the differences between unethical behaviors in relation to perpetrators and targets, most of this research has not considered the effects of observed unethical behaviors on employees. In this study, we focus on observed unethical behaviors of peers targeted at their organization and examine how witnessing a peer engage in an organizationally targeted unethical behavior would impact the observer. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, we propose that organizational identification will inform emotions, which in turn will shape employee silence, depending on how employees appraise the observed unethical behavior. We theorize that peer unethical behaviors would induce anger, anxiety, and vicarious shame, which will guide employees' quiescent and prosocial silence behaviors. In addition, we suggest that the proposed relationships would vary with the level of organizational identification. With a sample of 329, results from a between-subject scenario study generally supported our hypotheses. There was a combined effect of peer unethical behaviors and organizational identification on anger, anxiety, and shame, which in turn led to employee silence in the cases of anxiety and shame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over four decades, the topic of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation has attracted considerable attention from the fields of economics, finance, management, public policy, law, and business ethics. As scholarly interest in CEO pay has increased, so has public concern about the ethics of high CEO pay. Despite growing interest and pressure among the public and government to reduce CEO pay, it has continued to increase. Using a multi-method design incorporating a pilot study, two online experiments, and an event study, we investigate the impact of CEO pay on consumer purchase intent and find that this negative relationship is magnified under conditions of brand crisis. We also find that the negative interaction of high CEO pay and brand crisis on purchase intent is more negative when the brand has strong equity. Finally, when the CEO is awarded high pay while the firm they manage is undergoing a brand crisis, consumers lose trust in the firm's brand which reduces consumer purchase intent. This research provides insight on how governance decisions can impact consumer perceptions of corporate brands and consumer behavior, with implications for public policy leaders, boards of directors, CEOs, and Chief Marketing Officers regarding how to manage and message CEO pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relation between earnings information content and the use of trust words, such as "character," "ethics," and "honest," in the MD&A section of 10-K. We find that earnings announcements of firms using trust words have lower information content than earnings announcements of firms that do not use trust words. We also find that the value relevance of earnings is lower for firms using trust words than those not using trust words. Further, firms using trust words are more likely to receive a comment letter from the SEC, pay higher audit fees, and have lower corporate social responsibility scores. Overall, our results suggest that firms that use trust words in the 10-K are associated with negative outcomes, and trust words are an inverse measure of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognized that workplace sexual harassment has significant negative psychological and personal consequences, and employees facing harassment suffer reductions in productivity. Our contribution is to propose a novel measure of workplace sexual harassment risk and provide a fuller estimation of the firm value impact of sexual harassment. In contrast to recent studies that focus on short-run market reactions to media announcements of harassment scandals, we use employee job reviews to identify low-profile harassment incidents that better reflect the pervasive, toxic environment pertaining to sexual harassment than do newsworthy scandals, and we measure the longer-term effect on firm value starting from the date when harassment risk affects employee morale. We identify firm harassment risk by analyzing employee job reviews and estimate the sexual harassment score (SH) through textual analysis of online job reviews. Our sample of high-SH firms, or firms with unusually high-SH scores, exhibits significant reductions in future stock performance and profitability. For example, firms with a top 2% SH score earn a value-weighted risk-adjusted stock return of − 17% in the 1-year period after high-SH classification, and this damage is concentrated in firms with higher investor attention. Furthermore, high-SH firms experience a decline in operating profitability and an increase in labor costs during a 5-year period around high-SH classification. Our evidence suggests that sexual harassment can cause greater damages to firm value than previously documented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In lower-income countries, owner-managers of small businesses take on heavy social responsibilities toward members of their extended family. However, using business resources to answer family needs can harm business, hence contradict broader responsibilities toward business stakeholders and society at large. In contexts where jobs are scarce and unemployment means deep poverty, this conundrum often translates into an ethical choice between recruiting needy relatives or avoid nepotism. To study such ethically loaded recruitment decisions, I adopt a stakeholder salience perspective. Focusing on Rwanda, a small East African country, I use interview data to examine how owner-managers articulate their social responsibilities toward family and toward other stakeholders, and how this influences recruitment. I observe that owner-managers either nest, balance, or separate social responsibilities toward family and nonfamily stakeholders and preferentially recruit relatives or strangers accordingly. This study suggests that stakeholder salience depends on a process of stakeholder categorization, which is influenced by the cultural and political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the literature on organizational justice enactment is becoming richer, our understanding of the role of the deontic justice motive remains limited. In this article, we review and discuss theoretical approaches to and evidence of the deontic justice motive and deontic justice enactment. While the prevalent understanding of deontic justice enactment focuses on compliance, we argue that this conceptualization is insufficient to explain behaviors that go beyond the call of duty. We thus consider two further forms of deontic behavior: humanistic and supererogatory behavior. Drawing on the concepts of situation strength and person strength, we further argue that the reduced variance in behavior across morally challenging situations makes deontic justice enactment visible. We thus observe deontic justice enactment when an actor's deontic justice motive collides with strong situational cues or constraints that guide the actor to behave differently. We formulate propositions and develop a theoretical model that links the deontic justice motive to moral maturation and deontic justice enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inquiries into organisational scandals repeatedly attribute wrongdoing to the normalisation of deviance. From this perspective, the cause of harm lies not in the actions of any individual but rather in the institutionalised practices of organisations or sectors. Although an important corrective to dramatic tales of bad apples, the normalisation thesis underplays the role of management in the emergence of deviance. Drawing on literatures exploring ideas of amoral (Carroll in Bus Horiz 30(2):7–15, 1987) or ethically neutral leadership (Treviño et al. in Calif Manag Rev 42(4):128–142, 2000) we seek to bring management back into the explanation of organisational wrongdoing. Amoral theorists point to management's ethical silence, but they also describe the way in which that silence is sustained by a series of organisational characteristics. We build on this work in arguing that it is management's deliberate focus on bottom line performance, the diffusion of responsibility and high levels of organisational identification that explain the emergence of wrongdoing. We apply these ideas to the case of the UK's Stafford hospital which hit the headlines in 2009 when it was reported that poor standards of care had led to a mortality rate markedly above that expected for a hospital of its type. We conclude with a discussion of the circumstances which translate amoral management into unethical outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the relationship between climate change social norms (CCSN) and corporate cash holdings for U.S. firms. We find that county-level CCSN is significantly positively associated with cash holdings. Our main finding is robust to a battery of robustness tests. In a subsample analysis, we find that firms have relatively low cash holdings in low CCSN counties even when faced with high climate risk. For such firms, the lack of cash buffer could be harmful to a broader set of stakeholders faced with heightened climate risk. We also show that cash holdings are a potential mechanism through which CCSN influences future environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Overall, our study suggests that county-level CCSN has significant implications for corporate cash holdings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effects of donation incentives on labor supply in an online labor market through a field experiment (n = 944). We manipulate the donation purpose of the incentive to be either unifying or polarizing and the size of the donation relative to the workers' wage. Our experimental design allows us to observe the decision to accept a job (extensive margin) and different dimensions of productivity (intensive margin). We predict and show that a unifying donation purpose attracts more gig workers and improves their productivity compared to a polarizing donation purpose. We discuss the implications of these results in order to understand the role of donation incentives and labor supply in online labor markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether the level of integrity in a society, i.e., social integrity, affects stock price crash risk. We explore two competing hypotheses. On the one hand, exposure to high levels of integrity may reduce managers' incentives to obfuscate information, thereby leading to lower crash risk. On the other hand, social integrity may weaken outsiders' monitoring of managerial behaviors, thus giving managers more opportunities to obfuscate information and, consequently, leading to higher crash risk. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms, we find that firms located in regions with higher integrity have lower future stock price crash risk. This result is confirmed by a difference-in-difference analysis with an exogenous shock to social integrity. Further analysis suggests that increased information transparency is a potential channel through which social integrity affects stock price crash risk. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that the negative effect of social integrity on crash risk is more pronounced in firms with weaker internal control systems and firms with less negative media coverage. Overall, our study provides novel evidence that the ethical environment plays a significant role in shaping business ethics and influencing stock price crash risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial portion of produce harvested around the world is wasted because it does not meet consumers' shape expectations. Only recently has research begun investigating the causes underlying misshapen produce rejection by consumers. Generally, this limited research has concluded that misshapen produce is subject to an ugly penalty, leading consumers to form biased expectations regarding product attributes (e.g., healthiness, tastiness, or naturalness). In this research, we propose that this ugly penalty extends to the moral valuation of misshapen produce and that this moral penalty is rooted in the feelings of disgust evoked by the visual appearance of such produce. Across five studies and two pilot studies, we show that misshapen fruits and vegetables are disgust elicitors, and that felt disgust causes consumers to make negative moral associations with produce which, in turn, leads to decreased preference. We also show that pairing misshapen produce with a positive unconditioned stimulus (i.e., an image of attractive individuals) is an efficient solution to counteract the effect of this stereotype. This research contributes to the growing body of work demonstrating the link between consumption behaviors, consumer preferences, and morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management and organization researchers are being called to conduct research that is more caring, yet the concept of care and how to practice it within the profession is undertheorized. Adopting a feminist epistemology and methodology, we develop the concept of care by weaving the personal, ethical, and political into the research process. First, we reflect critically on how aspects of care—attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Tronto, Moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care, Routledge, 1993; Tronto, Caring democracy: markets, equality, and justice, New York University Press, 2013)—unfolded in our personal research experiences, and secondly, we conduct a review of articles published in management and organization studies and analyse expressed or concealed conceptions of care in scholars' accounts of research purpose and ethics. We find three ethical sensibilities at the heart of enacting care: encountering the 'other', interpreting roles and responsibilities, and deliberating needs and resources. We contribute to a feminist research ethics by highlighting issues related to care that are concealed in dominant ethos guiding management and organization research. Further, we develop methodological insights for implementing an ethic of care as an alternative ethical standpoint in business research ethics. Finally, we provide suggestions for how to embed more care within research ethics practices in academic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]