This paper conducts an ethical analysis of the 2008 closure of a US money market fund entitled the reserve primary fund, which triggered the first run in the money market sector and a resultant liquidity crisis that harmed the entire US financial system. Although many academics and regulators have studied and written about RPF, the question whether the decision that caused the fund to collapse represented any ethical dilemma, has not been addressed to date. With this purpose in mind, the (...) paper will examine the events that culminated in the closure of RPF according to Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics approach. In so doing, the paper aims to extend the applicability of MacIntyre’s concepts to the finance industry in general, and to provide a framework to predict and so potentially prevent crises like that exemplified by the RPF case. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the law related to identity theft, to review corresponding rights, and responsibilities of stakeholders involved in identity theft and to formulate a system of best practices businesses could engage in to prevent or reduce identity theft threats. Utilizing two ethical frameworks based on deontological approaches, the authors conclude that there should be a well-defined management scheme to prevent identity theft, which is easy to comprehend and comply with for all stakeholders. Our proposed (...) management scheme incorporates both legal and ethical elements such that identity theft will be more difficult. Further, our proposal would also address business entities’ practices that are so careless that identity theft is made possible at all or made easier: ethical business practice can do much to reduce or eliminate identity theft. (shrink)

Stockholder and stakeholder perspectives have been positioned in the literature as being in tension, and thus a potential source of innovation and change. However, researchers have overlooked a systematic examination of this presumption in theory and in practice. This study explores the ways that stockholder and stakeholder assumptions are presented by theorists and compares these with expressions of stockholder and stakeholder perspectives used by firms in practice. We argue that theoretical entrenchment dichotomizing these perspectives has disrupted the ability of researchers (...) to leverage this tension. While scholarship remains trapped in a vicious cycle, we also argue that firms in practice express only the acceptance dimension of a virtuous cycle. Our empirical research demonstrates that firms accept and accommodate the paradoxical tension between managing for stockholders versus balancing the interests of stakeholders. This is evidenced by strategies we identify as book‐ending, cadence, continuous and simultaneous co‐mingling, and hybridization. We find that in practice these tensions are more integrated whereas in theory they are treated as more distinct and, often, in conflict. We suggest ways in which both scholarship and practice can better leverage tension as paradoxical opportunity. (shrink)