Journal of Business Ethics最新文献

This paper examines greenwashing practices in environmental funds. We utilize a unique data set of US equity mutual fund holdings between 2012 and 2021 to calculate the funds’ carbon footprints. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we find that, following their commitments to sustainability, environmental funds fail to reduce their carbon footprints relative to a matched group of conventional funds. We also find, using an event study, a significant increase in the flows of environmental funds in response to these commitments. The combination of the failure to reduce carbon footprints and the surge in inflows provides evidence of greenwashing by environmental funds, raising concerns about their fiduciary duty. Our findings also show that greenwashers tend to initially have low flows and high portfolio carbon emissions suggesting that they announce their commitments to sustainability just to attract investors.

In response to Russia’s war of aggression and the accompanying human rights violations in Ukraine, several scholars have called for all multinational companies to divest and leave the country; otherwise, they become accomplices to the aggressor. This article reconstructs the arguments in favor of this general call. The first contribution of this article is to extend complicity theory to the context of crimes of aggression and atrocities to promote this demand. Although this extension of complicity theory ensures internal coherence, the call for a general divestment of all companies is tantamount to comprehensive economic sanctions. In contrast, recent developments in sanction theory as part of just war theory suggest that targeted sanctions are the legitimate sanctions that states prefer. Therefore, the second contribution is to evaluate sanctions morally and analyze and discuss the moral implications of three categories of goods and services (sanctioned, essential, and nonessential). This discussion shows no moral justification for a general call for all companies to leave an aggressor state. Companies have moral obligations to comply with legitimate sanctions, moral duties concerning essential goods, and moral permissions concerning nonessential goods.

This study examines the multi-contextual dynamics of refugee entrepreneurship through the lens of embeddedness. It attempts to explain the interplay of inclusion and exclusion within a host society. For this purpose, the study qualitatively analyses the narratives of 39 Syrian refugee entrepreneurs and four critical informants in Türkiye. Our findings reveal a diverse set of refugee entrepreneurs, categorized into survival, ethnic-targeting, and integrating entrepreneurs, based on their motivations and level of embeddedness. Interestingly, as refugee entrepreneurs become more embedded in the host country, they experience increased exclusion due to various societal factors. To navigate these challenges, entrepreneurs continually negotiate their societal position using innovative strategies to combat exclusion. Our study incorporates social, political, institutional, and spatial contexts across host, home, and third countries. Thus, it extends the embeddedness literature by highlighting refugee entrepreneurs' multi-layered and multi-locational embeddedness. Our findings also emphasise the significant role of political embeddedness, which Research often overlooks. Differentially excluding refugee entrepreneurs from society and their counter-strategies are closely tied to their limited political embeddedness. Finally, we discuss the ethical and policy implications of promoting the inclusion of refugee entrepreneurs and contributing to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. We argue that clear integration policies, removal of institutional barriers, and international cooperation are necessary.

Consumers spend billions of dollars per year on homeopathic products. But there is powerful evidence that these products don’t work, i.e., they are not medically effective. Should homeopathic products be for sale? I give reason for thinking that the answer is ‘no.’ It has been suggested that the sale of homeopathic products involves deception. This might be so in some cases, but the problem is simpler: it is that these products don’t do what people buy them to do. More precisely, homeopathic products don’t meet the “desire-satisfaction condition,” according to which products for sale in markets should satisfy the desires that people buy them to satisfy. I defend my view against objections, and conclude by acknowledging some of the practical difficulties of banning products people want to buy.

This study examines the dynamics of how ideas about entrepreneurship are transmitted from Public Organizations (POs) and Non-Public Organizations (NPOs) to Indigenous entrepreneurs, using a case study in Ecuador based on 29 interviews and field observations. Employing the concept of Institutional Translation, a three-stage translation process model was developed, encompassing the conveyance of ideas about entrepreneurship from POs and NPOs, the response by Indigenous entrepreneurs, and the evaluation of translation outcomes. This process occurs within a high institutional distance context, reflecting significant cultural and social disparities between these actors, complicating the translation process. The findings indicate that POs and NPOs do not differentiate Indigenous entrepreneurs from others and fail to consider essential cultural components, such as traditional knowledge, when conveying ideas about entrepreneurship. Conversely, Indigenous entrepreneurs exhibit diverse levels of adoption and rejection of these ideas, highlighting their agency and resilience in protecting and continuing to use their traditional knowledge in their entrepreneurial activities despite external pressures. This research makes three contributions: it advances the field of Indigenous entrepreneurship by theorizing the complex process of transferring ideas about entrepreneurship from external actors to Indigenous entrepreneurs; it enhances business ethics discourse on the critical role of cultural differences by examining the ethical challenges arising from the interaction; and it addresses overlooked aspects within Institutional Translation by exploring a high institutional distance context where cultural disparities complicate the translation process.

This study addresses the growing interest in the social impact assessment of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Using the benefit (value) transfer approach, this study seeks to demonstrate how the social return on investment (SROI) of a CSR inclusion initiative promoting disability sport participation can be assessed. Literature on CSR inclusion initiatives, social impact measurement, disability sport participation and disability interventions/organizations was reviewed and compared. This helped identify the stakeholders and social outcomes to include, and the assumptions for the financial proxies and beneficiary percentages. Based on data provided by the Rugby Football League in England, an application to Inclusion Rugby League— a CSR inclusion initiative promoting disability sport participation—was then conducted. The SROI of Inclusion Rugby League is 3.39:1—a social return of £3.39 for £1 invested. Our research quantifies the positive social impact of a CSR inclusion initiative in monetary terms, providing insights for assessing SROI. This study informs future research on the social impact assessment of CSR initiatives, offering valuable guidance for organizations and their managers in making a case for further investments in CSR. Moreover, it encourages potential funders to engage in CSR initiatives.

This paper examines how alternative forms of organising integration in resource-scarce environments expand across settings, by considering the role of local embeddedness and an ethic of care in enabling this expansion. It builds on theories of imitation in organization studies in combination with theories of ethics of care and bricolage applied to welfare and migration studies. The paper is informed by the case of Yalla Trappan, a work cooperative of immigrant women in the city of Malmö, Sweden, and the attempts to diffuse this organization and its methods to other cities in the country. The findings indicate that the expansion of alternative forms of integration into resource-scarce contexts is enabled by simultaneous practices of imitation and bricolage, ingrained in an ethic of care. The article shows, first, how many important practices were developed by imitating accounts of the original ideas, through a broadcasting mode of imitation. Next, it explains why the local translation of these practices in resource-scarce contexts, consisting of ‘bricolage work’ based on material, market, institutional, human, and cultural elements, was necessary. The conclusion is that the expansion of novel forms of integration requires imitation, but of a kind that involves the bricolage of local translations. Such bricolage is always collective (which does not diminish the importance of individual agency), multi-spatial and not just local, and wrapped in an ethic of care, rather than in an economic logic. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these findings with the ethics of migration.

Research on racism in the workplace has long focused on organizational remedies for this moral problem. Given the acknowledged inadequacies of organizational solutions such as anti-racism training, attention is now turning to how immigrants manage their individual experiences of racism in a western context. Employing an agentic lens, this article describes a qualitative study of 43 African nurses in the UK in which their capacity for withstanding workplace racism is examined. It investigates how participants draw upon a range of religious coping strategies to make sense of and respond to racism. The data indicate that African nurses rely on specific coping strategies at different points in time and across various contexts, adapting their coping approaches to accommodate their personal growth and individual experiences. This underscores the versatility, context-dependency, and temporal aspects of religious coping among immigrants. The study’s findings are particularly interesting given the limited role that religion plays in western organizations.

Economic migration is a significant and growing development around the world but has produced unequal outcomes and experiences for marginalized groups. To theoretically explain such inequalities, we argue that integration experiences of immigrants in the host country differ based on the privilege that their demographic category bestows on them (or not). We elucidate our arguments by unpacking the concept of ‘privilege’ to theorize two key sources of privilege—locational and historical—and explain them using the global economic divide (Global North vs. Global South) and local social divides (race and caste). We propose that locational and historical privilege manifest as various types of capital that immigrants carry into their host countries. We juxtapose these two sources of privilege and its levels (low vs. high) to develop a typology of immigrants—Marginalized, Peripheral, Assimilated, and Wanted—that captures differences in migrants’ integration experiences. By shining a light on the systematic differences between immigrants based on privilege, our research brings additional nuance to the scholarship on immigrant workers and inclusive organizations; and broadens avenues to make human resource practices more ethical by taking these differences into account.

In response to increasing concerns about environmental degradation, companies started to introduce actions that portrayed their attentiveness to these issues. This commitment, however, hardly translates into actual improvements in corporate environmental performance and outcomes, which leads to accusations of greenwashing. In this conceptual paper, I use the idea of loose coupling to offer an alternative explanation of the disconnection between corporate environmental commitments and outcomes. Whilst companies are often perceived as rational and well-integrated bureaucracies, they, in fact, consist of subassemblies that are simultaneously coupled and responsive yet hold a certain degree of separateness and independence. Such loose coupling isolates an organisation from the external environment and gives the external stimuli only limited access to the system, allowing an organisation to persist. Such an understanding of organisations indicates that greenwashing might result from loose coupling caused by causal indeterminacy as well as a fragmented external and internal environment.