Journal of Business Ethics最新文献

Based on the deontological ethical perspective and concepts from blame psychology such as the defensive attribution hypothesis and culpable control, it is argued that people are predisposed to blame a transportation company when it is involved in an accident. This was tested in a scenario of an airline accident of uncertain cause, finding that respondents blamed the airline the most among a list of five blamable entities (pilots, mechanics-maintenance-inspectors, the weather, ground crew-air traffic control, and airline). Additionally, based on the virtue theory of ethics and the moral character perspective of blame psychology, it was hypothesized that manipulation of the virtue of the airline (mercenary versus altruistic) would result in less blame assigned to the altruistic airline in a quasi-experiment where the other factor was outcome of the accident (safe landing with a few injuries versus crash with many fatalities). However, the two factors significantly interacted in an unexpected way. The mercenary airline suffering a crash was blamed less than the altruistic airline that crashed, while the mercenary airline that safely landed was blamed more than the altruistic airline that safely landed. The managerial implications of blame bias toward the company are addressed.

This paper examines how accounting can both entrench and challenge an inhumane and costly neoliberal policy—namely, the Australian government’s offshore detention of asylum seekers. Drawing on Bruff, Rethinking Marxism 26:113–129 (2014) and Smith, Competition & Change 23:192–217 (2019), we acknowledge that the neoliberalism underpinning immigration policies and the practices related to asylum seekers takes an authoritarian tone. Through the securitisation and militarisation of the border, the Australian state politicises and silences marginalised social groups such as asylum-seekers. Studies have exposed accounting as a technology that upholds neoliberalism by representing policy as objective and factual. Curiously, there has been a wilful intention by successive Australian governments to silence the accounting for offshore detention. We seek to demystify this unaccounting and unaccountability by exploring counter-accounts produced by meso-level organisations that support asylum seekers. We apply a close-reading method in analysing limited governmental accounts and various counter-accounts to demonstrate how counter-accounts give visibility to practices that an authoritarian neoliberal regime has obfuscated. We also reflect on the potential for counter-accounting to foster broader social change by holding the Australian government accountable to moral and ethical standards of care for human life. This paper considers the intersections between accounting and authoritarian neoliberalism and presents counter-accounts as mechanisms that can challenge these neoliberal norms.

In this paper, we explore the experiences of EU migrants working in UK restaurants in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. We do so through a care ethics lens, which we bring together with the integrative approach to organisational silence to consider the ethical consequences of the organisational policies of political silence adopted by the restaurant chains in our qualitative empirical study. We develop the concept of political organisational silence and probe its ethical dimensions, showing how at the organisational level it falls short of constituting a practice of caring for migrant workers in politically divisive and hostile times. We argue that organisational policies of political silence emphasise the exploitative nature of the business of (im)migration, which prioritises concern for profits over care for the needs of others. Organisations refuse caring responsibility for migrant workers, leaving care to the migrants themselves and their co-workers and managers. Whilst peer-care practices partially fill this politically silent care-vacuum, this leaves individuals to negotiate difficult tensions without institutional support at a time of increased uncertainty, complexity, hostility, violence, and vulnerability. Drawing lessons from our study and its aftermath, we call for a care manifesto to inform the business of (im)migration, which would need to include caring political responsibility towards migrant workers exercised through caring political organisational voice as well as silence.

Workplace incivility is experienced ubiquitously by immigrants. While a growing body of literature has sought to identify the causes and the outcomes of this phenomenon, what remains largely underexplored is the role of legal status in configuring how workplace incivility manifests in the immigrant experience. To advance the extant literature, in this article we investigate the question: How does legal status inform the ways in which immigrants exercise agency in response to workplace incivility? In addressing this question, we draw on the methodological resources provided by duoethnography and develop vignettes to make visible the dynamics with workplace incivility that we have individually encountered in the academic organizations in which we have been located—based in the UK and Canada. In juxtaposing the vignettes against one another, we are offered a glimpse into how legal status shapes the forms and the depth of agency available to immigrants to respond to incidents of workplace incivility. In light of our findings, we problematize the nexus between an immigrant’s agency and workplace incivility as well as consider the implications this nexus has to ongoing debates in business ethics.

The use of female AI agents, such as vocal assistants, chatbots and robots, is on the rise, but the indiscriminate feminization of these AI agents poses novel ethical concerns about their impact on gender relations in society. This conceptual article argues that AI agents, even virtual ones, can display sexed cues (bodies, faces, and voices) beyond mere gendered cues (e.g., names, pronouns, hairstyle) and questions how assigning artificial female gender and sex to AI agents can harm women and transform gender power dynamics. Grounded in the Social Shaping of Technology and Technofeminism with an existentialist feminist lens, this work parallels the scrutiny that the use of gendered and sexed cues in female advertising models has faced over past decades to critique the deceptive practice of linking artificial gender and sex in female AI agents. It suggests that by restricting a narrow view of gender to a narrow view of biological sex, the use of female AI agents limits women’s self-concepts by binding their identities to deceptive, narrow body/face/voice-centric scripts, while facilitating covert manipulation, enforcing harmful stereotypes, amplifying objectification, and exacerbating gender power imbalances. This research offers ethical guidelines for the further development of AI agents based on transparency, justice, and care, addressing this new form of surveillance capitalism and sexual oppression, and providing insights to create a more authentic, equitable, and caring technological landscape.

Intelligent technology introduces both opportunities and challenges in the realm of employee ethics. While intelligent technology is widely believed to combat employee unethical behavior by enhancing transparency and reducing discretionary decisions, it may also inadvertently promote unethical conduct by triggering awareness of job substitution (i.e., intelligent technology awareness [ITA]). This study investigates how ITA affects accountants’ unethical decision-making (i.e., UDM). Drawing on the cognitive appraisal theory of stress and self-regulation theory, we theorize a double-edged sword impact of ITA on UDM. Our results suggested that ITA could be appraised either as a challenge, leading to a reduction in self-regulation depletion and subsequent UDM, or as a threat, resulting in an increase in self-regulation depletion and subsequent UDM. Further, we found that organizational support for development attenuated the relationship between ITA and threat appraisal. However, the link was more pronounced when individual adaptability was high. This study offers vital insights for managing employee unethical behavior amid an evolving trend of intelligent technology-induced job replacement.

We build on scholarly work on social innovation and social psychology to contribute to research on integral human development. This research stream builds on the ethical principles of virtue ethics and humanistic personalism to claim that organizations have the role of helping individuals develop through meaningful interaction with others. It also implicitly assumes that any initiative aimed at achieving this purpose and developing the relational dimension of marginalized individuals will have a homogenous and positive impact. We test this assumption by investigating the impact of a social innovation introduced by Opera Prison for inmates, who are a particularly marginalized category. The social innovation we study takes the form of novel theatrical activities that aim at fostering inmates’ social skills—that is, the cognitive and interpersonal abilities that are required for engaging in positive interpersonal interactions. Because participation in theatrical activities is not exogenous in our setting, we adopt an instrumental variable technique to analyze 396 questionnaires from a random sample of 178 inmates. In contrast to the assumption of integral human development, we find that engagement in theatrical activities has a heterogeneous effect, depending on the specific social skills considered and the characteristics of the inmates involved. Based on this evidence, we contribute to problematizing research on integral human development, virtue ethics, and humanistic personalism and imparting it with greater empirical traction. We also advance research on social innovations by clarifying the blurry relationship between social innovations and social impact.

Benevolent leadership as a typical human-centered leadership pattern has been constantly advocated but often sacrificed to the prevailing performanceism in today’s organizations. However, it still remains unclear on how to effectively facilitate the emergence of benevolent behavior for leaders, which would potentially hinder the adoption of benevolent leadership and its attainment of high priority. In the current research, we go beyond the workplace to explore one deliberate way leaders can bring family resources into their leadership practice to emerge more benevolent behaviors at work. From the experience-based leadership development perspective, supported by the theory of role accumulation across domains, we take a mixed-method approach to uncover the effect of positive parenting experience on benevolent leadership behavior via parent-leader role enrichment. In Study 1, we conduct a qualitative analysis based on the text content and interview provided by parent-role leaders to preliminarily reveal that being a parent makes a leader perform more behaviors with benevolent nature. In Study 2, we draw from the benefits of being a parent generated in Study 1 and the cross-role accumulation perspective to develop a theoretical model to delineate how the positive parenting experience yields benefits for benevolent leadership behavior. Results show that positive parenting experience can benefit parent-role leaders’ benevolent leadership behavior via perspective-taking ability. Meanwhile, both the positive parenting experience’s direct effect on perspective taking and its indirect effect on benevolent leadership behavior are stronger for individuals involved in high-quality co-parenting with their spouse, highlighting the important collaboration effects in the process of achieving parent-to-leader enrichment across domains.

Fairness in agri-food supply chains receives increasing consumer, industry, and political attention but is currently under-conceptualized and lacks appropriate frameworks for measurement. Therefore, building on a theoretically grounded conceptualization of consumer dispositions toward fairness in agri-food supply chains, we developed and validated a 14-item fairness measurement scale (FAIRFOOD). The scale comprises of four dimensions (economic, environmental, social, and informational) which are manifestations of the same construct (higher-order structure). We empirically validate the scale and its reliability using four studies and eight independent samples from Italy (n = 1386) and the UK (n = 1379). The findings reveal that FAIRFOOD is related, yet distinct from theoretically relevant constructs such as ethical consumption and pro-environment behavior. The FAIRFOOD scale is a strong predictor of outcomes such as willingness to purchase Fairtrade certified products, as well as boycott and negative Word of Mouth intentions if a brand treats other supply chain actors unfairly. Regarding business strategy, rather than focusing on one dimension of fairness independently, managers should adopt a holistic approach, devising initiatives that address all four dimensions in tandem.

Corporate debt default risk poses significant challenges in the business world, requiring a multifaceted approach for effective mitigation. This study, grounded in an ethical decision-making framework, investigates the influence of Confucian culture on shaping ethical corporate culture and managers’ moral capacity and its subsequent impact on corporate debt default risk. Our findings indicate that companies deeply influenced by Confucian culture tend to exhibit lower debt default risks. Specifically, companies that embrace Confucian values demonstrate an enhanced ethical corporate culture and heightened individual moral capacity. These factors play crucial roles in the ethical decision-making process, thereby reducing the likelihood of engaging in risky financial behaviors. Further analysis reveals that the inhibitory effect of Confucian culture on debt default risk is particularly pronounced in enterprises operating within regions characterized by poor integrity environments and weak product market competition. This inhibitory effect can lead to a reduction in the cost of corporate debt financing and the risk of stock price crashes. Overall, this study contributes to the understanding of the interplay between culture, business ethics, and corporate risk management.