Companies play an important role in sustainable development. While many companies have incorporated ESG initiatives into their strategies, the specific impact of these efforts on the SDGs remains unclear, especially regarding how these initiatives are prioritized or aligned within corporate strategies. Despite the common relationship between ESG practices and sustainability...
A distinctive question about corporate sincerity arises in two kinds of contexts. In accommodation contexts, a corporate agent expresses the sort of reasonable, conscience-constituting normative commitments that generate a claim to be exempt from a general obligation that applies to it. For this claim to be justified, it must be sincere in expressing these commitments. In moral...
What do firms owe to those around them in terms of consideration, restraint, and active support? This question—which I’ll call the question of “firm responsibility”—first rose to prominence in the modern context in the 1950s. While questions about what one entity owes to others and how it may impose on them are essentially questions about moral responsibility, the debate about...
This literature review draws on Foucault’s concept of problematization to examine how academic discourse “stages” debates on whistleblowing. By staging these debates, different streams of literature assign distinct roles and “scripts” to whistleblowing, shaping the practice of whistleblowing and the subjectivity of the whistleblower. Each stream produces a unique “piece” of...
This paper presents a novel theoretical framework for understanding whistleblowing as a dynamic and recursive sequence of épreuves (tests), drawing on Luc Boltanski’s sociology of critique. Traditionally, whistleblowing research has focused on either the whistleblower’s experience or the organizational response, often treating these aspects in isolation. This study bridges these...
The decision to disclose employee compensation has implications for workplace ethics, motivation, and performance. Pay transparency reduces pay disparity, fostering fairness, and ethical equity. Conversely, pay secrecy can maintain disparity but may drive increased effort. This study proposes a theoretical framework—standard-based entitlement—that explains the non-linear effects...
Family business ethics are uniquely shaped by family influence and a strong emphasis on preserving socioemotional wealth. Although research in this area has grown rapidly in recent years, it remains fragmented and underdeveloped. Advancing the field requires a more integrated approach that consolidates existing concepts and dimensions. This paper synthesizes current knowledge and...
Management and organisation studies (MOS) increasingly recognises the interconnected and globalised nature of business dynamics, yet nuanced power disparities concerning stakeholders from the Global South often remain under-examined. Such power differentials can have ethical implications for researchers studying transnational business relations including the potential for...
Focussing on anti-surveillance art, this article makes the case that the arts have the unique capacity to induce and energize hope and caring in the otherwise hopeless context of a technologically disenchanted world of surveillance capitalism, characterised by a wholesale loss of privacy due to ubiquitous data capture, and an algorithmically powered exacerbation of social...
Recent technological developments have given rise to debates about automation and the future of work. These debates touch on concerns about the availability, nature, and meaningfulness of jobs in the present and near future. The aim of this article is to show that Hannah Arendt’s phenomenology of labor, work, and action can improve current debates about automation and the future...
How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question provides a quick-start guide to addressing ethical challenges by using humor to make complex philosophical concepts accessible. Based on the premise that traditional ethics pedagogy is often stodgy, esoteric, and depressing, the book appeals to students and professionals who find conventional texts unapproachable. By...
Does CEO gender affect family firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR)? And does this relationship vary between countries based on different levels of social and legal gender bias? Drawing on insights from the literature on female leadership and CSR, we utilize social role theory and institutional theory to explore these issues empirically based on a sample of 1555 family...
One key element distinguishing family firms from non-family firms is the role of the family’s religious beliefs, with growing attention on understanding the fit between religion and family in shaping a business’s ethical conduct. A family firm’s behavior is embedded in an institutional context, and it is important to understand how multiple institutional logic shapes a family...
Organizations face a plethora of moral challenges. To address these challenges, they must develop the capacity for moral action. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy and, more specifically, on the concept of moral imagination, we theorize such organizational capacity building as moral learning. We propose three conceptual building blocks, which together form the framework for moral...
The purpose of this article is to encourage greater reflexivity among social innovation practitioners and researchers about the influence of unconscious biases and assumptions on addressing societal challenges. Drawing on previous research and insights gained from our 30 + years’ experience in practice, we present four archetypes of social innovation. Each archetype is rooted in...
Achieving sex-based equity in organizational leadership roles has proven to be a ‘wicked’ problem with existing diversity initiatives providing minimal improvement. In this paper, we address this issue by considering a key inhibiter to women’s leadership advancement—biased perceptions of female leaders’ competence—and links to a climate for inclusion. In Study 1 (N = 236), we...
This paper presents a study on how corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies create value amongst family and non-family firms. Additionally, in our study, we considered the moderating effect of independent directors on the relationship between CSR and firm value. Based on data drawn from companies operating in 61 countries over an 11-year period (i.e. from 2010 to 2020...
While the prevailing perspective on executive leadership has emphasized the effectiveness of a unified command structure, family firms frequently adopt shared leadership structures, such as dyads, triads, or larger co-CEO constellations. Given the widespread use of such structures in family firms, it becomes imperative to understand how family involvement in the firm shapes the...
Business schools increasingly aim to develop responsible leaders and leadership, yet the literature on how to do this effectively remains limited. Furthermore, existing research is dominated by Western theories and cases, marginalizing non-Western insights for leadership development scholarship and practice. By engaging in construct infusion and integrating insights from Western...
Exploring the intricacies of heterogeneity in tax avoidance practices within family firms, a growing trend acknowledges the significant role of chief executive officers (CEOs) in setting the ethical tone and shaping corporate tax strategies. However, these studies often overlook the influence of the CEO’s transgenerational orientation, which becomes crucial when assessing ethics...
This study examines the impact of top executives’ art exposure on corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the lens of altruistic motivations. Utilizing data on artistic elements from China’s national intangible cultural heritage (ICH), we find a significant positive relationship between board chairs’ art exposure and CSR performance, particularly when the arts are...
We explore how power and justice dynamics influence whistleblowing behaviour in family firms, focusing on the under-explored construct of connection power. Power and justice are two important, interrelated forces strongly affecting moral behaviour. We hypothesise a moderated moderation model and use a 2 × 2x2 between-subject experiment with 331 participants to test our conceptual...
Kidfluencing, a social media business in which children serve as primary influencers of audience opinions or behavior, is a rapidly growing entrepreneurial phenomenon where parents build enterprises around the likability and antics of their children. Proponents argue that kidfluencing is simply monetizing the existing antics of kids, critics argue that it is child labor. We...
The goal of this study is to reveal which contextual factors can shape ethical behaviour and decision-making in family firms (FFs), with the aim to uncover emerging themes that help set the stage for future work on FF ethics. To do so, we conducted an integrative literature review. By systematically collecting, reviewing 90 studies and synthesizing their key findings with prior...