The Global Financial Crisis is acknowledged to be the most severe economic downturn since the 1930s, and one that is unique in its underlying causes, its scope, and its wider social, political and economic implications. This volume explores some of the ethical issues that it has raised.

This book aims to move beyond the concepts of 'bureaucracy', 'hierarchical control' and 'performance' that classic organizational and managerial studies often focus upon. Instead, it considers these managerial leverages as instruments that are liable to lead to a decline in positive worker behaviors. It proposes a shift from traditional management towards a type of organization based upon self-control, equality and liberation - a model far better suited to the turbulent business environment of today. In order to support this analysis, it draws on interdisciplinary research, including the Italian Civil Economy tradition, the connection between agapic love and leadership, and philosophical perspectives on management. It will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of management studies, philosophy, organisation studies and business ethics.

This book explores the concept of citizenship, and the role that organizations can or do play in its creation, stimulation and control. Offering multiple organizational perspectives (private and public organisations) and their relation to several types of output (citizenship, poverty, profit, employability), this work presents a rich collection of philosophical thoughts and practices on the subject of citizenship within and without the organizational context. Particular attention is given to this human aspect, an element of unpredictability, a gut feeling, the unknown... something immeasurable that plays a part in human relations and how they organize themselves. Citizenship in Organizations casts new light on the impact of organizations to the notion of citizenship.

This book describes and analyses the impact of the 2007-2008 financial crisis upon the working conditions of employees in the financial services sector in Britain. It tells the story of workers being made to pay the price for a crisis that was not of their own making, but nevertheless caused a deleterious impact on their employment security, remuneration and working conditions. Evidence of fighting back against this has been sparse so that the response of employees is best characterised as 'fright' (grudgingly working harder and longer), 'flight' (leaving the sector through redundancy), and 'falling in line' (accepting the diktat of performance managements systems). Through this book we learn the reasons behind this acquiescence, with its detailed attention to topics such as the stunted development of labour unionism, the prevalence of union-management partnerships, and the occurrence of employment insecurity and labour shedding. Providing a valuable insight into the effects of the financial crash, Employment Relations in Financial Services will be useful to academics, students and also trade unionists.

"Conscience and Corporate Culture" advances the constructive dialogue on a moral conscience for corporations. Written for educators in the field of business ethics and practicing corporate executives, the book serves as a platform on a subject profoundly difficult and timely.
Written from the unique vantage point of an author who is a philosopher, professor of business administration, and a corporate consultant
A vital resource for both educators in the field of business ethics and practicing corporate executives
Forwards the constructive dialogue on a moral conscience for corporations
Offers a philosophical and practical approach to considering business ethics

This volume unites the perspective of business ethics with approaches from strategic management, economics, law, political science, and with philosophical reflections on the theory of Corporate Citizenship and New Governance.

In view of the internationalization of the (global) economy and the free movement of capital, new instruments of political coordination are needed. These societal changes trigger the two closely intertwined challenges examined in this book. The first challenge relates to the role and the self-conceptualization of business firms as corporate citizens within society. Companies are increasingly expected to assume the social responsibility of helping to shape the rule-framework of globalization. The second challenge refers to the form of the engagement in local, national and international processes of governance. To more credibly and effectively tackle these challenges, corporate actors are ever more participating in rule-setting processes together with civil society organizations and the government.

This unique collection of original works examines the relationship between citizen and state. Nine insightful contributions range from a transnational analysis of the corrosive influence of wealth elites on the functioning of the state, to models of state and citizen governance, to contrasting philosophies of citizenship.

This book raises questions about a hallmark mechanism of corporate governance - the use of codes of practice. It undertakes a critical examination of the origins and development of the UK code of corporate governance, which influenced codes devised around the world and practices of organisations well beyond the world of corporations listed on stock exchanges. Much lauded as a model of good governance, its core principles have persisted for almost 30 years. Yet during that time repeated crises in corporate governance have arisen, suggesting that it has not fully addressed the problem it was meant to solve. This book will be valuable reading for scholars working on business ethics, corporate governance, and business history.

Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) are a massive subset of the healthcare industry that negotiate lower costs for healthcare supplies by buying for several hospitals at once. "Group Purchasing Organizations" provides an analysis and critique of this industry.

This book links game theory to business ethics by applying the classic Four Temperaments approach to a wide range of moral emotions, and offers academics and students of game theory a perspective that covers social preferences in a nontraditional way.

The diversity of the workforce and the implications for management continue to be the focus of a great deal of interest. This is partly because of the importance and urgency of the issues that diversity entails and also because of a growing recognition that many of the dilemmas of diversity management are not proving amenable to easy solutions. Indeed, recent research demonstrates that Britain and the US are, in many ways, becoming more, rather than less unequal societies. This book suggests that metaphor and dialectic play a powerful role in shaping our understandings of ourselves and each other. It draws on original research in organizations and in management education to explore how we can become more aware of these processes within ourselves and challenge those assumptions and stereotypes that contribute to maintaining people in disadvantaged positions.

According to Adam Smith, vanity is a vice that contains a promise: a vain person is much more likely than a person with low self-esteem to accomplish great things. Problematic as it may be from a moral perspective, vanity makes a person more likely to succeed in business, politics and other public pursuits. "The great secret of education," Smith writes, "is to direct vanity to proper objects:" this peculiar vice can serve as a stepping-stone to virtue. How can this transformation be accomplished and what might go wrong along the way? What exactly is vanity and how does it factor into our personal and professional lives, for better and for worse? This book brings Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments into conversation with William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair to offer an analysis of vanity and the objects (proper and otherwise) to which it may be directed. Leading the way through the literary case study presented here is Becky Sharp, the ambitious and cunning protagonist of Thackeray's novel. Becky is joined by a number of other 19th Century literary heroines - drawn from the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot - whose feminine (and feminist) perspectives complement Smith's astute observations and complicate his account of vanity. The fictional characters featured in this volume enrich and deepen our understanding of Smith's work and disclose parts of our own experience in a fresh way, revealing the dark and at times ridiculous aspects of life in Vanity Fair, today as in the past.

This volume is divided into three major parts, each of which symbolizes a new virtuous circle that is added to the previous one in order to foster the dissemination of humanistic management (HM) among corporations and social institutions. After an introductory chapter explaining the concept of humanistic management and the plan behind this research project, the first part of the book is devoted to education. The authors address pedagogical strategies that can be used in higher education to introduce students to HM. In turn, the second part of the book focuses on the implementation of HM in corporations, while the third presents an approach for measuring and monetizing the social value generated by corporations through their economic activities. In the closing chapter, the editors illustrate how the three parts of the book can be combined to generate virtuous cycles in corporations.

religious values at the office door. Apartheid was an evil, and business had great power in South Africa. Where there is power, there is also responsibil ity. I prayed about this long and hard. I pushed the companies as much as I thought I could. There were advances and there were setbacks, but finally we prevailed and the Blacks of South Africa secured their freedom. My effort in behalf of the Sullivan Principles was only one of a number of significant efforts of the anti-apartheid movement. All of those other efforts must be recognized, as well. The Sullivan Principles and the manner in which they were implemented in South Africa were in the nature of a grand experiment in the sociopolitical change and economic uplifting of the Black people of South Africa. What is even more important is that the Principles were driven by an ethical and moral imperative, and were voluntarily implemented by a group of enlight ened United States multinational corporations. No grand design or vision is ever perfect. We fall prey to human follies, limited understanding of the future, and necessary compromises to seek not what is perfect but what is possible. Thus, any such effort is subject to criticism from those who seek ideological purity and those who seek to minimize the impact of change from the status quo . ."

Business and NGOs are seen by many to be locked in a perpetual war of values and ideologies. What this book demonstrates is that the war has moved on. Many companies are now engaging with their stakeholders - even those with which they have traditionally had antagonistic relationships - as part of their strategies for improved social and environmental performance. With contributions from an outstanding and diverse group of experts from business, consultancy, research institutes, NGOs and academia, Terms for Endearment investigates the how and why of these new collaborations and provides concrete examples of business working with stakeholder pressure for sustainable development. The book forcibly argues the notion of organizations of civil society setting the standards for business behaviour in the 21st century. For those companies that choose not to pursue high standards of social and environmental performance, confrontation with NGOs must be expected, with negative consequences for sales, costs and social capital, i.e. the bottom line. Terms for Endearment therefore presents business with both a threat and opportunity as we move closer to establishing a social basis for global economic activity.

Risk communication helps companies, governments and institutions minimise disputes, resolve issues and anticipate problems before they result in an irreversible breakdown in communications. Without good risk communication and good risk management, policy makers have no roadmap to guide them through unforeseen problems, which frequently derails the best policies and results in a breakdown in communications and a loss of trust on behalf of those they are trying hardest to persuade. Most policy makers still use outdated methods - developed at a time before health scares like BSE, genetically modified organisms and dioxin in Belgian chicken feed eroded public confidence in industry and government - to communicate policies and achieve their objectives. Good risk communication is still possible, however. In this book, through the use of a host of case studies from four countries, the author identifies a series of methods that are set to work in a post trust society.

Has COVID-19 ushered in the end of the office? Or is it the office's final triumph? For decades, futurologists have prophesied a boundaryless working world, freed from the cramped confines of the office. During the COVID-19 crisis, employees around the globe got a taste of it. Confined by lockdown to their homes, they met, mingled, collaborated, and created electronically. At length, they returned to something approaching normality. Or had they glimpsed the normal to come? In The Momentous, Uneventful Day, Gideon Haigh reflects on our ambivalent relationship to office work and office life, how we ended up with the offices we have, how they have reflected our best and worst instincts, and how these might be affected by a world in a time of contagion. Like the factory in the nineteenth century, the office was the characteristic building form of the twentieth, reshaping our cities, redirecting our lives. We all have a stake in how it will change in the twenty-first. Enlivened by copious citations from literature, film, memoir, and corporate history, and interspersed with relevant images, The Momentous, Uneventful Day is the ideal companion for a lively current debate about the role offices will play in the future.

Modes of Explanation is the first book in decades to attempt to bring these conflicting approaches together and to offer a compelling narrative to explore how the paradox of 'explanation' can converge.

Life sciences have huge controversial social implications. In doing experiments with animals, plants or humans the welfare of these living beings can be hampered; in communicating research results private and public interests can be harmed (patents!) or at least severely influenced; in being a member of a research group issues of human rights (such as discriminatory behaviour) can become prominent; individual and collective forms of responsibility because of controversial types of research can become urgent.

Funding organizations can confront scientists and engineers with new ethical issues; the public at large or, as is the case with sustainability, future generations can challenge existing ways of doing research, and educating and teaching can confront scientists with new ethical issues.

In this book, resulting from an expert workshop at Wageningen University and Research Centre, European and American experts discuss such topics and theories as the relationship between ethics, professional ethics and business ethics, the public responsibility of researchers and communicating, organizing, teaching and discussing ethical issues.

"The complete story of the devastating BP oil spill of 2010. The author puts forward an objective account of what happened, a documentation of the true costs, not the hyperbolic costs, and an explanation of the science and business of the spill and its remediation"--

This is the second volume of papers in the topical area of environmental management. Arising from work done by the International Centre for the Environment at the University of Bath, the papers address inter-disciplinary environmental themes particularly from a business and management perspective.

It is imperative for the business community to act now to create global, industry-wide standards of conduct. Corporate strategy expert S. Prakash Sethi along with notable experts on issues of global codes of conduct take an in-depth look at global structures and how regulation works from a corporate perspective, providing case studies of several industries and governments who have begun implementing voluntary codes of conducts, including Equator Principles, ICMM, and The Kimberly Process. He assesses the many types of self-regulations that are currently underway and provides critical analysis for making these more effective, making this a must-read for academics, policy-makers, and corporate leaders.

This title takes an international perspective on the topical issues of marketing ethics and ethical communications. The contributors are professors of business in various European institutions who bring their international background and experience to this body of work.

Hoffman explores worldwide developments in the field of business ethics. The book is unique in that it not only discusses ethical issues faced by transnational corporations, but it also addresses the possibilities for international cooperation after the cold war, as well as regional business ethics issues from around the world. Included in the volume are discussions of business ethics in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Pacific Rim, and North and South America. A variety of issues and cases are contained in the volume including: the BCCI scandal, the IBM-Fujitsu case, intellectual property rights, transnational codes of ethics and theoretical and empirical studies about the moral responsibilities of transnationals, ethics and international law, ethics and development, and business ethics and cultural differences.

The work begins with a brief introduction that summarizes major themes contained in the book. The essays are collected in five sections. Section one contains cases and issues that are unique to regions and nations worldwide. Section two focuses on cases involving ethics and international law. These first two sections include a number of regional studies including ones from Brazil, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Hong Kong, and case studies including the BCCI scandal and the IBM-Fujitsu case. Section three features analyses of ethical issues faced by transnational corporations, for example, their relationship to host nations, their social responsibilities, and ethics programs within transnationals. Section four contains a summary and a debate about the development of transnational codes of business conduct including a discussion of efforts being sponsored by the United Nations. Finally, section five looks into the ethical problems that arise during economic development. Included here are contributions that raise questions about ethics and emerging financial markets, land-use, and the role of multinational corporations. This volume of essays will be an important resource for courses in business ethics, and international law, as well as a useful addition to business, academic, and public libraries.

Corporate Social Responsibility, Human Rights and the Law examines the responsibilities of business enterprises for human rights from a legal perspective. It analyses the legal status of the 'corporate responsibility to respect human rights' as articulated by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). This concept currently reflects an international consensus and is promoted by the UN. The book contemplates the various founding perspectives of the UNGPs, and how the integration of notions such as 'principled pragmatism' and 'polycentric governance' within its framework provides insights into the future course of law and policy, compliance, and corporate respect for human rights. The book thus takes a global focus, examining the interaction of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), human rights, and the law in a broader global governance context. Setting out a possible future scenario for the legalization of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights that is informed by the UNGPs' founding perspectives and reflects current realities in the human rights landscape, this book will be of great interest to scholars of business ethics, international human rights law, and CSR more broadly.