The Ethical Business will provide up-to-date coverage of key issues and perspectives in business ethics from a critical perspective. After providing an overview of theoretical approaches to ethics, a wide range of relevant practical questions will be explored. The book will cover the issues in greater depth, and in a more critical manner, than other introductory texts.

This study examines the practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) during COVID-19. Little is known about how organizations practice CSR during acute exogenous crises. Overlooking how CSR practices change during a crisis matters because organizations are compelled into trade-offs that carry implications for their CSR initiatives. Analysis of interview data with CSR managers, from 21 Dubai-based business organizations during COVID-19, uncovers changes in the content and process of CSR during the pandemic. The results show that the practice of CSR underwent (...) a fundamental change in focus as organizations shifted to an employee-centric model of CSR and away from an environmental one. Measures placed on organizations and society to combat the pandemic also led to a recalibration of stakeholder and issue salience, with notable effects on CSR that challenge the capability of the power–legitimacy–urgency framework to anticipate these shifts. We consider the impacts associated with the shift in the content of CSR initiatives and process of their implementation and discuss the implications of the findings for CSR theory, research, policy, and practice. (shrink)

Labour issues in global supply chains have been a thorny problem for both buyer firms and their suppliers. Research initially focused mostly on the bilateral relationship between buyer firms and suppliers, looking at arm’s-length and close collaboration modes, and the associated mechanisms of coercion and cooperation. Yet continuing problems in the global supply chain suggest that neither governance type offers a comprehensive solution to the problem. This study investigates collaborative governance, an alternative governance type that is driven by buyer firms (...) setting up a coalition with competitor firms to increase leverage and address the supplier and/or host country-specific labour issues. Based on interviews with managers involved in the establishment and management of such coalitions and supplier firms in the garment industry, we examine the rationale behind collaborative governance and discuss its opportunities and challenges in addressing labour issues in global supply chains. (shrink)

This study examines the moderating effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the association between market orientation and firm performance in the context of an emerging economy. The results from a sample of firms that operate in Dubai indicate that CSR has a synergistic effect on the impact of market orientation on business performance. The results of our research on the moderating effects of CSR on market orientation subsets reveal that although CSR moderates the association between customer orientation and business (...) performance, it does not moderate the association between competitive orientation and interfunctional coordination and performance. The results of this study are discussed, and implications for practitioners and researchers are presented. (shrink)

Although a number of studies have shown that corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities often lead to greater organisational performance in western developed economies, researchers are yet to examine the strategic value of CSR in emerging economies. Using survey data from 280 firms operating in Dubai, this study examines the link between CSR activities and organisational performance. The results show that CSR has a positive relationship with all three measures of organisational performance: financial performance, employee commitment, and corporate reputation. These results (...) reinforce the accumulating body of empirical support for the positive impact of CSR on performance and challenge the dominant assumption that, given the weak institutional framework in emerging economies, CSR activities drain resources and compromise firms’ competitiveness. (shrink)

This paper investigates the religiosity/secularity dichotomy in Naguib Mahfouz’s novels, which is shaped by cultural narratives that convey his ideas. It analyzes a defined corpus of Mahfouz’s narratives that articulate his notions of religiosity/secularity. Through an interdisciplinary methodology combining the application of pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, and contextual analysis, it aims to determine Mahfouz’s potentiality for perceiving and narrativizing religiosity and secularity in twentieth-century Egypt. It discusses how Mahfouz adopts sociopragmatic techniques to give a bright picture of the secularist discourse but (...) a negative one for the Islamist one presented as inevitably incapable, crude, schizophrenic and idiosyncratic. Mahfouz openly destabilizes the religious/secular dichotomy by juxtaposing religious and secular discourses in his early and later narratives, where he scrutinizes secularity, advocating it as the only way out of and uprooting, religiosity. The adoption of an interdisciplinary framework proves to be theoretically and empirically motivated in order to show how Mahfouz’s narratives reflect their originator’s own beliefs and those of the narrated society, including its value systems. (shrink)

This article aims at showing the similarities between the financial and the tech sectors in their use and reliance on information and algorithms and how such dependency affects their attitude towards regulation. Drawing on Pasquale’s recommendations for reform, it sets out a proposal for a constant and independent scrutiny of internet service providers.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented and highly threatening, constrained, and confusing social and educational environment, we decided to expand the traditional focus of the extraneous load in Cognitive Load Theory acknowledging the psychological environment in which learning occurs. We therefore adapted and implemented principles of the CLT to reduce extraneous load for our students by facilitating their educational activities. Given previous empirical support for the principles of CLT, it was expected that the adoption of these principles might enable our (...) students to cultivate attitudes and skills across multiple domains such as online learning and presentation technologies, implementing and maintaining a “classroom atmosphere” in a virtual environment, participating in discussions among large online groups of students, facilitating group work, providing virtual office hours for students, and proactively planning for upcoming semesters. (shrink)

Alfred Stepan’s “twin-tolerations” thesis (2000) is a model for explaining different ways that religious and political authority come to be reconciled. In this paper, we investigate some obstacles and challenges to realizing a reconciliation between religious and political authority in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) that might result in a transition away from a theocratic monarchy to a more consultative form of political authority. Whereas most analyses of religion and politics in KSA focus on geopolitics, the rentier state model, (...) or economic and military aid from the United States, we also consider local factors that emphasize the agency of political and non-political actors within KSA, focusing in particular on education policy and how this policy is a barrier to political reform. Our position is not meant to replace the standard models, but rather to supplement them by offering a multi-variable perspective on the challenges and prospects for meaningful political reform in KSA. (shrink)

Organizational legitimacy is an important resource, which provides access to other resources. As such, it impacts the survival chances of organizations. In this study, we examine the individual judgments of the owner-managers of small-and-medium size enterprises (SMEs) of the legitimacy of their own enterprise as well as their perception of the legitimacy evaluations of relevant stakeholders. This research is based on interviews with owner-managers of SMEs located in the Lorraine region of France. The results show that when legitimacy is perceived (...) as acquired, their judgments are based on instrumental, relational and moral evaluations, whereas when legitimacy is perceived as being deferred, judgement is based on mainly instrumental evaluations and when they report not being in position to judge their own legitimacy, their judgements are based on moral evaluations. In addition, the legitimacy judgements employed are associated with the different types of legitimacy sought by the SME owner-managers. Moreover, they perceive the validity cues coming from clients and employees as the most important sources of legitimacy. Other stakeholders are accorded secondary importance in granting legitimacy. (shrink)

In this paper, an intelligent neural network-based controller is designed and implemented to control the speed of a permanent magnet synchronous motor. First, the exact mathematical model of PMSM is presented, and then, by designing a controller, we apply the wind turbine emulation challenges. The designed controller for the first time is implemented on a Arm Cortex-M microcontroller and tested on a laboratory PMSM. Since online learning neural network on a chip requires a strong processor, high memory, and convergence guarantee, (...) this article uses the offline method. In this method, first, for different work points, the neural network is trained by local controllers, and then, the trained network is implemented on the chip and used. Uncertainty in the parameters and the effect of load torque as challenges of control systems are applied in the proposed method, and a comparison with other methods is performed in the implementation results section. (shrink)

During the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, stress and anxiety were pervasive among the masses due to high morbidity and mortality. Besides the fear of coronavirus was also particularly driven by social media. Many people started to look for faith and spiritual connections to gain comfort. The role of spiritual ties and religious beliefs in relation to coping with pandemic stress gained the attention of researchers in some parts of the world. This cross-sectional survey aimed at assessing the intensity (...) of stress and anxiety symptoms experienced by people and how much they were alleviated by employing spiritual connections. The study sample comprises 795 respondents with 52% males and 48% females living in Saudi Arabia. The brief online study questionnaire collected data about background variables, anxiety and stress scale from DASS-21, and items from the WHOQOL instrument assessed the use of spiritual beliefs to cope. Multiple regression models were tested to determine the role of spiritual connections after adjusting demographic variables. Results illustrated that after adjusting for gender and age, participants' anxiety symptoms decreased by units with each unit increase in the use of spiritual connections, and participants’ stress symptoms reduce by units with each unit increase in coping with spirituality. Additionally, females’ risk to experience anxiety and stress symptoms was more than males and, respectively. An increase in age decreases the likelihood of experiencing anxiety symptoms and stress symptoms by and units respectively. Findings support the protective role of spiritual connections despite small beta coefficients. The social and cultural context in Saudi Arabia favors deep-rooted connections with spirituality and faith. Our findings support that the reliance on spiritual connections helped older people to deal with exaggerated fear during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and reduces the risk of experiencing anxiety and stress symptoms. Females and younger participants were relatively vulnerable to developing these symptoms. We discussed these findings considering some recent studies that reported similar relationships and made recommendations for future research. (shrink)

The purpose of Key Approaches to Biblical Ethics is to address fundamental as well as practical questions of methodology in examining the ethical material of the Bible. Sixteen scholars of international reputation, most of them leaders in the field of biblical ethics, discuss questions of biblical interpretation from the perspectives of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament ethics in close dialogue with one another. In the present volume both established and new approaches to biblical ethics are presented and discussed. The (...) result is a volume of unprecedented scholarly interaction that provides key insights into issues of biblical ethics that play a significant role both for biblical interpretation as well as for methodological questions in Jewish and Christian ethics today. (shrink)

The abundance of information technology and electronic resources for academic materials has contributed to the attention given to research on plagiarism from various perspectives. Among the issues that have attracted researchers’ attention are perceptions of plagiarism and attitudes toward plagiarism. This article presents a critical review of studies that have been conducted to examine staff’s and students’ perceptions of and attitudes toward plagiarism. It also presents a review of studies that have focused on factors contributing to plagiarism. Our review of (...) studies reveals that most of the studies on perceptions of plagiarism and attitudes toward plagiarism lack an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the perceptions of plagiarism and other contextual, sociocultural and institutional variables, or the relationship between attitudes toward plagiarism and students’ perceptions of various forms of plagiarism. Although our review shows that various factors can contribute to plagiarism, there is no taxonomy that can account for all these factors. Some suggestions for future research are provided in this review article. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungReligiöse Polemik ist ein Phänomen, welches sich in antiker wie spätantiker Zeit in ganz unterschiedlichen Kontexten beobachten lässt. Einen besonderen Bereich derselben stellt die Kritik an den Mythen des jeweils in den Fokus genommenen Gegners dar, welche insbesondere in dem christlichen, antihäretischen Schrifttum immer wieder aufscheint. Der vorliegende Artikel soll dem Leser anhand einer Detailanalyse ein konkretes, äußerst facettenreiches Beispiel dieser antihäretischen Mythenkritik vorstellen. Es handelt sich dabei um eine Passage aus dem Kapitel 100 der Häresien über den Islam aus (...) der Feder des Johannes von Damaskus. Ist dieses Kapitel grundsätzlich entsprechend seiner theologischen wie religionsgeschichtlichen Bedeutung bereits eingehend erforscht, gilt dies jedoch nicht für einen größeren Komplex dieses Textes, der sich an die Erwähnung einer „Schrift von der Kamelstute Gottes“ anschließt. Dies ist umso überraschender, als es sich hierbei um eine der längsten Passagen des Kapitels handelt, welche sich zudem durch einen ganz eigenen Charakter und ironischen Unterton auszeichnet. Dabei sind es vor allem zwei Aspekte, die hier einmal näher beleuchtet werden sollen: 1. Johannes’ kreativer und zugleich spielerischer Umgang mit zwei unterschiedlichen und ursprünglich in keinem Zusammenhang zueinander stehenden islamischen Vorlagen – einerseits der zu Teilen im Koran, aber vor allem in der islamischen Tradition bezeugte Mythos einer außergewöhnlichen Kamelstute, andererseits die bekannte Beschreibung der Paradiesflüsse –, die er aufgreift, miteinander kombiniert und fort spinnt. 2. Johannes’ Spiel mit mehreren Bedeutungsebenen durch den Einsatz zahlreicher intra- wie intertextueller Bezüge, welches schließlich in eine radikale Kritik der islamischen Paradiesvorstellung einmündet und damit einen Topos der nachfolgenden byzantinischen Islampolemik vorbereitet. (shrink)

This article examines Kamel Daoud’s treatment of solidarity and the absurd in Meursault, contre-enquête and posits that the question of how to live in solidarity with others is central to the novel, although the word ‘solidarity’ never appears in it. After recalling Camus’s discussion of the absurd in Le Mythe de Sisyphe and of solidarity in L’Homme révolté, the article examines the manner in which Haroun, Daoud’s narrator and the brother of the Arab Meursault killed in L’Étranger, reveals his (...) own failures of solidarity. He justly criticizes Meursault for privileging his confrontation with the absurd over the death of the Arab he did not even name, but Haroun too has killed. Haroun has, however, a greater understanding of solidarity than his fellows: he at least recognizes that murder is significant. He thus joins Meursault as an unworthy prophet who proclaims the absurd while surrounded by people who flee from it—and proclaiming the absurd can be a gesture of solidarity when one speaks for others, as Haroun speaks for his brother Moussa. Daoud’s novel reminds us that there are no final answers telling us how to live in solidarity with others and that we must do so all the same. (shrink)

The purpose of this symposium is to explore the ways in which literature, broadly construed to include poetry and narrative in a variety of modes of representation, can change the world by providing interventions in justice. Our approach foregrounds the relationship between the activity demanded by some individual literary works and some categories of literary work on the one hand and the way in which those works can make a tangible difference to social reality on the other. We consider three (...) types of active literary engagement: doing philosophy, ideological critique, and necessary rather than contingent performance. Kate Kirkpatrick opens with Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013), reading the narrator as not only a critic of colonial and postcolonial discourse but also a literary exemplar of the search for justice when it is difficult to know to what level of explanation to attribute its absence. Rafe McGregor demonstrates how the final season of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–19) makes a radical break from the previous three, exposing the misanthropy at the core of right-wing populism and calling for a fundamentally democratic response from the left. Finally, Karen Simecek argues that poetry in performance has a potentially reparative function for the ethically lonely – the vulnerable, the oppressed, and the persecuted – in society. (shrink)