Are University Professors Qualified to Teach Ethics?

In the light of recent talk in Canadian business schools about the importance of teaching courses in business ethics, the authors ask whether business professors have the qualifications required to teach business ethics. They point to various ethical dilemmas that arise in a collegial setting and argue that academics who teach business ethics have to first understand the complex ethical situations in which they find themselves if business ethics is to be taught in a meaningful way.     

明清商人伦理形成之内在冲突及其特征

明清商人在传统儒家伦理化和制度歧视的历史背景下,有着自己内在的心理冲突,正是这种内在冲突促使明清商人形成了其特有的伦理特点及其伦理的历史命运,这对当前中国转型期间的经济伦理建设亦有借鉴意义。     

Business Ethics without Philosophers? Evidence for and Implications of the Shift From Applied Philosophers to Business Scholars on the Editorial Boards of Business Ethics Journals

This article considers the relationship between business ethics and philosophy, specifically in relation to the field and persons working in it. The starting point is a grammatical one: business ethics by the rules of grammar belongs to ethics. In terms of academic disciplines, it belongs to applied ethics, which belongs to ethics, which belongs to practical philosophy, which belongs to philosophy. However, in the field of business ethics today one will seldom meet colleagues from philosophy; instead, they will come from business, applying business studies perspectives, approaches, and increasingly quantitative methods. This article provides empirical evidence that today the three top journals with “business ethics” in their titles (and “awarded” a high impact factor) are mostly run (in terms of their editorial boards) by business scholars with PhDs in business. The article compares the three journals today with their inaugural issues and finds that at their inception all three were run by a majority of philosophers. The article discusses six possible explanations for this shift and provides suggestions for how to bring business ethics back to philosophers (and vice versa).     

A Time-Lagged Study of the Relationship Between Big Five Personality and Ethical Ideology

Our objective is to examine the effects of Big Five personality traits on ethical ideologies using a time-lagged design of 406 employees of higher education institutions in Pakistan. Based on low/high idealism versus relativism, we investigate the conceptual linkage between each of the personality traits and moral philosophy. The results illustrate that extraversion and openness to experience believed on subjectivism moral philosophy, agreeableness believed on situationism, and neuroticism believed on absolutism moral philosophies. In addition, contentiousness believed on exceptionism moral philosophy. Furthermore, managerial implications and future research directions are suggested.     

The Use of Social Psychology in Rural Development? Two Readings of Rural Business Owners' Values

Rural development refers to diverse attempts being made to address the problems of rural communities. In Finland, rural development leans heavily on entrepreneurship and small business development. Rural development processes have a strong social psychological component that entails that psychological knowledge is crucial for rural development agents. Nevertheless, psychological knowledge has also been criticised for simplifying highly complex development processes and overstating the role of internal psychological factors. In this paper, we argue that, regarding the relevance and utility of psychological knowledge, the question is not only how extensively different factors are taken into account but also how knowledge about psychological factors is read and interpreted. In this paper, we focus on Finnish rural business owners' values and demonstrate that value survey data can be read from two different social psychological perspectives: those of substantialism and relationalism. Although data and the conducted analyses are kept constant, the two readings produce differing types of knowledge of rural business owners' values; one reveals what business owners ‘truly’ are like and the other informs how to best communicate with business owners. Both readings are potentially useful for rural development work. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

康德哲学与企业文化

本文分析了中国当前企业文化的三种类型即官商、儒商和佛商,指出佛商流行于华南一带,是目前最有生机活力的一种企业文化,但这种生机活力是由于解构一切规范带来的,具有投机性,不具有积极建设性,对市场经济规律没有自觉意识,尤其对于赚钱的目的性不明确,背后受本能欲望的支配;康德哲学和西方基督教文化在这方面的启示是能够提供一种终极关怀,实践理性的道德自律为人的生存指明了一种理想目标。因此,当代企业文化的发展前景依赖于个人自由意志的确立和建立理性的规范,赚钱的目的应归结到完成自由人格。     

‘But everyone else is doing it’: a closer look at the occupational taxpaying culture of one business sector

When individuals embark on their careers they not only become acculturated into their occupational sectors' day‐to‐day norms and practices, but also their taxpaying ones. Although the research on taxpaying cultures is still in its infancy, understanding more about taxpaying cultures could improve our understanding of the processes underlying tax compliance. To this end, this study aimed to build a detailed picture of the taxpaying culture (i.e. the norms and values) of one business sector—the hairdressing/beauty industry. Nineteen small business and self‐employed hairdressers/beauticians were interviewed and a variant of Grounded theory was used to uncover the main themes that ran through the interviews as a whole. The main themes that emerged—which appear to characterize this sector's culture—include a reliance on accountants/tax advisors, the notion of an acceptable level of cash‐in‐hand payments, and the use of different mental accounts for different types of income. Although some of these themes have already arisen in the small business literature they have often been couched in individualistic terms. We build a case that these issues are more cultural than individual—they are tied to occupational group membership as they are socially constructed within occupational groups and are a key component of the group's taxpaying culture. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

企业伦理的管理学态度——论德鲁克的企业伦理思想及其对企业伦理学的拒斥

管理学大师彼得·德鲁克的管理理论中蕴含着丰富的企业伦理思想,其企业伦理思想线索和体系主要表现在三方面：企业责任和伦理必须遵循伦理普适性原则,如同儒家伦理所主张的那样;由于管理者继承了社会的领导权力,因而必须承担社会责任,但仅限于其职能、权力和能力的范畴;管理者必须重视相互依赖的和和谐的关系。但是,德鲁克是“排斥”企业伦理学的。他反对企业伦理作为一个学科而不反对企业伦理本身。     

Business ethics and computer ethics: The view from Poland

An Aristotelian approach to understanding and teaching business ethics is presented and defended. The newly emerging field of computer ethics is also defined in an Aristotelian fashion, and an argument is made that this new field should be called “information ethics”. It is argued that values have their roots in the life and practices of a community; therefore, morality cannot be taught by training for a special way of reasoning. Transmission of values and norms occurs through socialization — the process by which an individual absorbs not only values but also the whole way of life of his or her community. It follows that business ethics and information ethics can be considered kinds of socialization into a profession: role learning and acquiring a new self-identification. This way of understanding fields of applied ethics is especially important for their proper development in Central-Eastern Europe because of endemic factors which are the result of recent political developments there.     

The Fallacies of the Assumptions Behind the Arguments for Goal-Line Technology in Soccer

Lately, a number of referee decisions appear to have reignited the debate over the need to bring more in-game officiating technology into soccer. The fallacies behind the arguments for the inclusion of technology to aid game officials can be narrowed down to those behind current arguments for or against goal-line technology. Both the proponents and opponents of these arguments appear to overemphasise the role of referees to the point of claiming that if refereeing errors could be eliminated in goal-line situations, then the most deserving team would most of the time be expected to win the contest. While we firmly believe that the game of soccer would benefit immensely from infallible officiating, we intend to show that these arguments are founded upon a number of inconspicuous assumptions. First, they assume that goal-line situations can be shown to affect the outcomes of games more than all other game situations. This can easily be shown to be a myth, since goals can be scored from all areas of the playing field. In addition, winning a soccer game, obviously, involves more than just scoring goals. Second, these arguments seem to support the view that referee decisions affect the outcomes of games more than decisions made by players, coaches and managers. This is merely a myth, since one can show that, in light of Cesar Torres's insights, referee involvement in game is limited to regulating situations that demand that the game be restored to its constitutive actualisation. Third, most arguments for goal-line technology tend to support the erroneous view that technology can actually eliminate most ‘crucial’ human mistakes from sport and, thus, ensure fairness of game outcomes. Such a myth can easily be refuted by reference to numerous cases of inconclusive slow-motion video replays in soccer. Therefore, this paper aims at arguing that, instead of reinforcing the scapegoating of referees and overemphasising the importance of isolated referee decisions to the point of attributing victory or defeat to these ‘crucial’ decisions, both sides of the goal-line technology debate need to put forth compelling arguments which go beyond the current misguided search for referee infallibility.