I n his recently published book, Georges Enderle discusses wealth creation, human rights, and corporate responsibility. Enderle presents an original argument, according to which business enterprises, as organizations, must create wealth but also carry moral obligations on human rights. It is an intriguing argument, especially when compared to mainstream perspectives on corporate responsibility, usually centered on profit and shareholder returns or on stakeholder value creation. The first part of the book presents an innovative conception of wealth creation. In the following section, Enderle develops a normative-ethical perspective centered on human rights. He carefully defines the purpose of business and economy as the creation of wealth and argues that it should be guided by human rights. The last section is dedicated to showing how his perspective can be applied to the ethics of business organizations. Enderle argues that it is necessary to understand wealth in a comprehensive manner: wealth not only involves economic capital but also encompasses natural, human, and social capital. Enderle argues that the literature dealing with a nation’s wealth that considers only its monetary dimension is limited. When applied to business ethics, this notion of wealth implies, as he seeks to demonstrate throughout the book, a set of corporate ethical obligations. The author draws a parallel between wealth and public and private goods. Public goods are defined by nonexcludability and nonrivalry. The wealth of a society, according to Enderle, is defined by the same characteristics. Wealth can be seen as a combination, and not a mere aggregation, of private and public wealth because they are mutually dependent. There is no way of creating private wealth without existing public wealth, and public wealth depends on the availability of private wealth. An implication of a broader understanding of wealth as private and public is the type ofmotivation behindwealth creation. If it is true that self-interestedmotivations do not underlie preferences and choices for public goods, the creation of wealth, in Enderle’s terms, would also require other-regarding motivations to be carried out. Furthermore, the process of wealth generation has not only the productive dimension—traditionally considered by the mainstream literature—but also a distributive one. In the book, Enderle seeks to demonstrate how corporate responsibility should face income inequalities in business organizations and society at large (chapter 19). Enderle argues for a reduction of executive compensation as a means of diminishing income inequality within business firms. The discussion of inequalities and rewards echoes contemporary work in political philosophy on “limitarianism” (Robeyns 2022), the view that no one should have more than a certain upper limit of wealth 352 Business Ethics Quarterly
{"title":"Corporate Responsibility for Wealth Creation and Human Rights, by Georges Enderle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 332 pp.","authors":"Marcos Paulo de Lucca-Silveira","doi":"10.1017/beq.2022.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2022.5","url":null,"abstract":"I n his recently published book, Georges Enderle discusses wealth creation, human rights, and corporate responsibility. Enderle presents an original argument, according to which business enterprises, as organizations, must create wealth but also carry moral obligations on human rights. It is an intriguing argument, especially when compared to mainstream perspectives on corporate responsibility, usually centered on profit and shareholder returns or on stakeholder value creation. The first part of the book presents an innovative conception of wealth creation. In the following section, Enderle develops a normative-ethical perspective centered on human rights. He carefully defines the purpose of business and economy as the creation of wealth and argues that it should be guided by human rights. The last section is dedicated to showing how his perspective can be applied to the ethics of business organizations. Enderle argues that it is necessary to understand wealth in a comprehensive manner: wealth not only involves economic capital but also encompasses natural, human, and social capital. Enderle argues that the literature dealing with a nation’s wealth that considers only its monetary dimension is limited. When applied to business ethics, this notion of wealth implies, as he seeks to demonstrate throughout the book, a set of corporate ethical obligations. The author draws a parallel between wealth and public and private goods. Public goods are defined by nonexcludability and nonrivalry. The wealth of a society, according to Enderle, is defined by the same characteristics. Wealth can be seen as a combination, and not a mere aggregation, of private and public wealth because they are mutually dependent. There is no way of creating private wealth without existing public wealth, and public wealth depends on the availability of private wealth. An implication of a broader understanding of wealth as private and public is the type ofmotivation behindwealth creation. If it is true that self-interestedmotivations do not underlie preferences and choices for public goods, the creation of wealth, in Enderle’s terms, would also require other-regarding motivations to be carried out. Furthermore, the process of wealth generation has not only the productive dimension—traditionally considered by the mainstream literature—but also a distributive one. In the book, Enderle seeks to demonstrate how corporate responsibility should face income inequalities in business organizations and society at large (chapter 19). Enderle argues for a reduction of executive compensation as a means of diminishing income inequality within business firms. The discussion of inequalities and rewards echoes contemporary work in political philosophy on “limitarianism” (Robeyns 2022), the view that no one should have more than a certain upper limit of wealth 352 Business Ethics Quarterly","PeriodicalId":48031,"journal":{"name":"Business Ethics Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45327805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism, by Christopher Marquis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 312 pp.","authors":"R. Antolín-López","doi":"10.1017/beq.2022.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2022.4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48031,"journal":{"name":"Business Ethics Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48722240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BEQ volume 32 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"F. D. Hond, Bradley R. Agle, Laura Albareda","doi":"10.1017/beq.2022.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2022.7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48031,"journal":{"name":"Business Ethics Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43362066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We address how to ethically evaluate workplace practices when workplace behavioral norms conflict with employees’ attitudes toward those norms, which, according to research on psychological contract violations, regularly occurs. Drawing on Scanlonian contractualism, we introduce the intersubjective reflection process (IR process). The IR process ethically evaluates workplace practices according to whether parties to a workplace practice have intersubjectively valid grounds to veto the practice. We present normative and empirical justification for this process and apply the IR process to accounts of workplace moral dilemmas. We end by identifying future directions for research related to the IR process.
{"title":"When Workplace Norms Conflict: Using Intersubjective Reflection to Guide Ethical Decision-Making","authors":"Tobey K. Scharding, Danielle E. Warren","doi":"10.1017/beq.2021.44","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2021.44","url":null,"abstract":"We address how to ethically evaluate workplace practices when workplace behavioral norms conflict with employees’ attitudes toward those norms, which, according to research on psychological contract violations, regularly occurs. Drawing on Scanlonian contractualism, we introduce the intersubjective reflection process (IR process). The IR process ethically evaluates workplace practices according to whether parties to a workplace practice have intersubjectively valid grounds to veto the practice. We present normative and empirical justification for this process and apply the IR process to accounts of workplace moral dilemmas. We end by identifying future directions for research related to the IR process.","PeriodicalId":48031,"journal":{"name":"Business Ethics Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49507658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alternative currencies are means of payment that circulate alongside—as an alternative or complement to—official currencies. While these currencies have existed for a long time, both society and academia have shown a renewed interest in their potential to decentralize the governance of monetary affairs and to bring people and organizations together in more ethical or sustainable ways. This article is a review of the ethical and philosophical implications of these alternative monetary projects. We first discuss various classifications of these currencies before analyzing the ethical challenges linked to the way they tackle social and environmental issues. We also examine the incentive-based and coercive mechanisms used by these currencies from an ethical perspective and debate the promises and perils of monetary decentralization and democracy. We conclude by identifying an agenda for future research.
{"title":"The Ethics of Alternative Currencies","authors":"L. Larue, Camille Meyer, M. Hudon, J. Sandberg","doi":"10.1017/beq.2021.52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2021.52","url":null,"abstract":"Alternative currencies are means of payment that circulate alongside—as an alternative or complement to—official currencies. While these currencies have existed for a long time, both society and academia have shown a renewed interest in their potential to decentralize the governance of monetary affairs and to bring people and organizations together in more ethical or sustainable ways. This article is a review of the ethical and philosophical implications of these alternative monetary projects. We first discuss various classifications of these currencies before analyzing the ethical challenges linked to the way they tackle social and environmental issues. We also examine the incentive-based and coercive mechanisms used by these currencies from an ethical perspective and debate the promises and perils of monetary decentralization and democracy. We conclude by identifying an agenda for future research.","PeriodicalId":48031,"journal":{"name":"Business Ethics Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45797684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I. Beccarini, Daniel Beunza, F. Ferraro, Andreas G. F. Hoepner
How is the tension between conflict and deliberation resolved in shareholder engagement? We address this question by studying shareholder engagement as a deliberative process with three stages: establishing dialogue, solution development, and solution implementation. We theorize that two interactionist mechanisms, deliberative interaction and the voicing of disagreement, play different roles at different stages of the process. We test our hypotheses with a proprietary database of 169 environmental, social, and governance engagements with US public companies over 2007–12. We find that while deliberative interaction does not help advance the engagement process, it positively moderates the effect of disagreement in the solution development stage. By contrast, in the solution implementation stage, deliberative interaction amplifies the negative effect of disagreement, thus hindering progress in the engagement. Our article contributes to shareholder engagement, deliberation theory, and interactionist organization theory by establishing that engagement effectiveness is an interactional achievement shaped by both deliberation and disagreement.
{"title":"The Contingent Role of Conflict: Deliberative Interaction and Disagreement in Shareholder Engagement","authors":"I. Beccarini, Daniel Beunza, F. Ferraro, Andreas G. F. Hoepner","doi":"10.1017/beq.2021.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2021.46","url":null,"abstract":"How is the tension between conflict and deliberation resolved in shareholder engagement? We address this question by studying shareholder engagement as a deliberative process with three stages: establishing dialogue, solution development, and solution implementation. We theorize that two interactionist mechanisms, deliberative interaction and the voicing of disagreement, play different roles at different stages of the process. We test our hypotheses with a proprietary database of 169 environmental, social, and governance engagements with US public companies over 2007–12. We find that while deliberative interaction does not help advance the engagement process, it positively moderates the effect of disagreement in the solution development stage. By contrast, in the solution implementation stage, deliberative interaction amplifies the negative effect of disagreement, thus hindering progress in the engagement. Our article contributes to shareholder engagement, deliberation theory, and interactionist organization theory by establishing that engagement effectiveness is an interactional achievement shaped by both deliberation and disagreement.","PeriodicalId":48031,"journal":{"name":"Business Ethics Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47940660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Responsible innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) calls for public deliberation: well-informed “deep democratic” debate that involves actors from the public, private, and civil society sectors in joint efforts to critically address the goals and means of AI. Adopting such an approach constitutes a challenge, however, due to the opacity of AI and strong knowledge boundaries between experts and citizens. This undermines trust in AI and undercuts key conditions for deliberation. We approach this challenge as a problem of situating the knowledge of actors from the AI industry within a deliberative system. We develop a new framework of responsibilities for AI innovation as well as a deliberative governance approach for enacting these responsibilities. In elucidating this approach, we show how actors from the AI industry can most effectively engage with experts and nonexperts in different social venues to facilitate well-informed judgments on opaque AI systems and thus effectuate their democratic governance.
{"title":"Deep Learning Meets Deep Democracy: Deliberative Governance and Responsible Innovation in Artificial Intelligence","authors":"Alexander Buhmann, Christian Fieseler","doi":"10.1017/beq.2021.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2021.42","url":null,"abstract":"Responsible innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) calls for public deliberation: well-informed “deep democratic” debate that involves actors from the public, private, and civil society sectors in joint efforts to critically address the goals and means of AI. Adopting such an approach constitutes a challenge, however, due to the opacity of AI and strong knowledge boundaries between experts and citizens. This undermines trust in AI and undercuts key conditions for deliberation. We approach this challenge as a problem of situating the knowledge of actors from the AI industry within a deliberative system. We develop a new framework of responsibilities for AI innovation as well as a deliberative governance approach for enacting these responsibilities. In elucidating this approach, we show how actors from the AI industry can most effectively engage with experts and nonexperts in different social venues to facilitate well-informed judgments on opaque AI systems and thus effectuate their democratic governance.","PeriodicalId":48031,"journal":{"name":"Business Ethics Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42254057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
F inancial markets may be mercurial in their own right, but Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely seem to view finance a bit like mercury itself: it can be useful, but it’s dangerous and makes for bad medicine. Though finance has been around for thousands of years, the book charts the recent rise and proliferation of finance and financial markets—primarily in the United States over the last forty years—and considers its connection to inequality in society. The book makes the case for thinking that this process of financialization of our economy is in some significant ways responsible for growing and deleterious inequality, directly opposing an ideology that takes access to finance to provide the solution to such inequality. Lin and Neely define financialization as “the wide-ranging reversal of the role of finance from a secondary, supportive activity to a principal driver of the economy” (10, emphasis original). They argue that such a reversal has occurred in the United States, and they set about to show this through the growth of the financial sector itself, the influence of finance within the corporate world, and the burden of debt and financial planning placed onto individual households. They maintain that financialization thus understood is bad in itself insofar as it mistakes the source of economic value, but it is also instrumentally bad insofar as these mechanisms needlessly exacerbate inequality. They argue that these processes unfold in a number of ways. Financial institutions extract economic rents far in excess of their value. Such institutions engage in predatory practices, complexifying their products while leveraging political power to lobby for less regulation. Meanwhile, corporations have been distracted from delivering value to customers and security to employees; instead, they are pressured to please shareholders and grow financial wings themselves. Meanwhile, households have become increasingly rackedwith debt, andwe are told that a failure to get out of debt signifies poor saving habits and a lack of financial literacy. For Lin and Neely, the 2008 financial crisis was a largely missed opportunity to confront and reform these practices. Instead, governments sought to restore the status quo, confronting “too big to fail” with acceptance and regulation to avoid failure. Lin and Neely maintain that, in so doing, we have collectively failed to challenge this central, overbearing, and self-serving role that finance plays in the economy. Taken together,Divested is a powerful catharsis of the current economic moment. It uses resources from history, economics, sociology, and beyond to craft a narrative for how finance came to have such a central place in our economy (and in our lives). And it is not shy in communicating that this is an unhealthy and ultimately 203 Book Reviews
{"title":"Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance, by Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 232 pp.","authors":"Kenneth Silver","doi":"10.1017/beq.2021.50","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2021.50","url":null,"abstract":"F inancial markets may be mercurial in their own right, but Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely seem to view finance a bit like mercury itself: it can be useful, but it’s dangerous and makes for bad medicine. Though finance has been around for thousands of years, the book charts the recent rise and proliferation of finance and financial markets—primarily in the United States over the last forty years—and considers its connection to inequality in society. The book makes the case for thinking that this process of financialization of our economy is in some significant ways responsible for growing and deleterious inequality, directly opposing an ideology that takes access to finance to provide the solution to such inequality. Lin and Neely define financialization as “the wide-ranging reversal of the role of finance from a secondary, supportive activity to a principal driver of the economy” (10, emphasis original). They argue that such a reversal has occurred in the United States, and they set about to show this through the growth of the financial sector itself, the influence of finance within the corporate world, and the burden of debt and financial planning placed onto individual households. They maintain that financialization thus understood is bad in itself insofar as it mistakes the source of economic value, but it is also instrumentally bad insofar as these mechanisms needlessly exacerbate inequality. They argue that these processes unfold in a number of ways. Financial institutions extract economic rents far in excess of their value. Such institutions engage in predatory practices, complexifying their products while leveraging political power to lobby for less regulation. Meanwhile, corporations have been distracted from delivering value to customers and security to employees; instead, they are pressured to please shareholders and grow financial wings themselves. Meanwhile, households have become increasingly rackedwith debt, andwe are told that a failure to get out of debt signifies poor saving habits and a lack of financial literacy. For Lin and Neely, the 2008 financial crisis was a largely missed opportunity to confront and reform these practices. Instead, governments sought to restore the status quo, confronting “too big to fail” with acceptance and regulation to avoid failure. Lin and Neely maintain that, in so doing, we have collectively failed to challenge this central, overbearing, and self-serving role that finance plays in the economy. Taken together,Divested is a powerful catharsis of the current economic moment. It uses resources from history, economics, sociology, and beyond to craft a narrative for how finance came to have such a central place in our economy (and in our lives). And it is not shy in communicating that this is an unhealthy and ultimately 203 Book Reviews","PeriodicalId":48031,"journal":{"name":"Business Ethics Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43500150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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