Ideologies in Markets, Organizations, and Business Ethics: Drafting a Map: Introduction to the Special Issue

J Bus Ethics Ideologies in Markets, Organizations, and Business Ethics: Drafting a Map: Introduction to the Special Issue Michaela Haase 0 1 2 3 4 Emmanuel Raufflet 0 1 2 3 4 0 Emmanuel Raufflet 1 & Michaela Haase 2 Guest Editors: Michaela Haase & Emmanuel Raufflet 3 HEC Montre ́al , 3000, chemin de la Coˆte-Sainte-Catherine, Montreal, QC H3T 2A7 , Canada 4 Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaft, Marketing Department, Freie Universita ̈t Berlin , Arnimallee11, 14195 Berlin , Germany - and Kramer 2006; Brammer and Millington 2008 ; Caroll and Shabana 2010 ; Schreck 2011; Brennan et al. 2014 ). However, the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the impact of ideologies on markets, organizations, society, business, and, more specifically, CSR and business ethics. It became clear that what was presented prima facie as a mere lack of governance, the result of bankers’ greed and malfeasance, or the irrationality of the financial markets could not be understood without reference to ideologies and the values or worldviews related to them (Padelford and White 2009; Lusch and Webster 2011; Davies and McGoey 2012) . More specifically, this crisis revealed that in this expanding body of CSR literature, insufficient attention has been paid to the role that ideologies play in the way policies and markets are designed and decisions are made, and how corporate actors understand, interpret, and conduct business and CSR. This special issue of the Journal of Business Ethics examines the ties between ideology, markets, CSR, and business ethics. The remainder of our introduction is organized in three sections. The first section aims to map out ideology in terms of ideas and beliefs, on the one hand, and the subjective and objective dimensions of ideology, on the other hand. The second section ties ideology with management research, generally and more specifically CSR/business ethics research, practice, and education. The last section introduces the contributions of the nine articles published in this special issue. On the Commonalities of and Differences Between Ideology and Knowledge The term ‘‘ideology’’ was coined by Antoine L. C. Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), a French philosopher of enlightenment and director of the Institute de France. As part of the enlightenment project, Destutt’s intention was to object to the legitimization of knowledge on the basis of religion, metaphysics, or authority. Destutt de Tracy equated ‘‘ideology’’ with ‘‘empirically approved knowledge about ideas’’ and thus provided the term with a positive connotation (Haase et al. 2009) . His intent was to map different forms of ideas (ideos) in an organized way (logos) in order to promote an objective and systematic form of knowledge. Thus, knowledge and ideology were viewed as being separate on the basis of empirical evidence and methodical standards. Based on the works of Cheal (1979) , Schmid (1981) , and Van Dijk (1998), we approach the meaning of the concept of ideology by broadly understanding ideologies as frameworks of ideas. From the cognitive perspective, ideology relates to ideas or frameworks of ideas, on the one hand, and to beliefs and beliefs systems or worldviews, on the other hand. Both ideas and beliefs are essential for the understanding of ideology and its impact on theory and practice: they drive the development of knowledge and influence business practice. A division between knowledge and ideology that puts knowledge on the bright side and ideology on the dark one is hard to justify. The reasons for the inadequacy of such a division between knowledge and ideology are, first, that ideas and the belief in ideas play a significant role in science (we include all sciences—natural, social, and others—in this statement). With reference to Lakatos’s work in the philosophy of science (1978), we argue that ideas are among the constituents of the hard cores of theories, while the scholarly beliefs in these ideas are what drive the empirical development of theories. More or less, all papers in this special issue deal with such ideas: they address, for example, interpretations of business–society interactions (Djelic and Etchanchu 2015; Dey and Lehner 2016) ; the relationship between employer and employee (Greenwood and Van Buren III 2016); or compare the ideas related to the concepts of tolerance and respect (Lozano and Escrich 2016) . A broad, pragmatic concept of theory includes these beliefs and the scholarly practices related to them. Second, the endeavor to change practices or to initiate social movements against prevailing practices must be accompanied by a critical reflection on ideologies. In addition, when criticized, doubted, or even rejected, ideas do not simply disappear into thin air; they tend to be substituted for other ideas based on the perception that the promotion of an alternative and ‘‘better’’ or more ‘‘adequate’’ or more ‘‘sophisticated’’ ideology is required. Illustrative of this ‘‘replacement’’ p (...truncated)