Morality is an abstract consideration, and language is an important regulator of abstract thought. In instances of moral ambiguity, individuals may pay particular attention to matters of interactional justice. Politeness in language has been linked to greater perceptions of social distance, which we contend is instrumental in regulating attitudes toward a brand. We posit that politeness in a brand’s advertising will impact consumers who are attuned to violations of interactional justice [i.e., those with low belief in a just world ]. (...) In three studies, we demonstrate that the politeness used in advertising as well as consumers’ individual differences in BJW affect judgments and attitudes toward brands. Specifically, individuals with a low just world belief are more likely to harbor negative attitudes towards a brand with ethically ambiguous business practices if the language used in advertising is impersonal than when the language used in advertising is personal. Importantly, for individuals with a low BJW, lowered trust due to the advertisement’s language mediated the relationship between politeness and attitudes toward the brand. Theoretical and managerial implications of this research are discussed. (shrink)

Social media is changing social accountability practices. The release of the Panama Papers on April 3, 2016 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) unleashed a tsunami of over 5 million tweets decrying corrupt politicians and tax-avoiding business elites, calling for policy change from governments, and demanding accountability from corporate and private tax avoiders. The current study uses 297,000+ original English-language geo-codable tweets with the hashtags #PanamaGate, #PanamaPapers, or #PanamaLeaks to examine the trajectory of Twitter-based social accountability conversations and (...) the potential for the emergence of a longer-term social accountability user network. We propose that it is the combination of financial inscriptions and evaluative ethical utterances that incite and sustain social accountability conversations and social accountability networks. Financial inscriptions simultaneously remind audiences of both the information event that fomented the initial public reaction and the monetary magnitude of the event. Value-based ethical messaging, in turn, enunciates an ethical stance that simultaneously evaluates existing practices and emphasizes the need for accountability. It is the combining of these two types of messaging that helps to construct and sustain a normative narrative about social accountability. The results illustrate how the repetition and re-working of these two forms of messaging facilitated the construction of a normative narrative that coalesced into a social accountability network which persisted beyond the initial Panama Paper information event and which was re-activated in 2017 when the ICIJ published the Paradise Papers. (shrink)

The ICIJ’s release of the _Panama Papers_ in 2016 opened up a wealth of previously private financial information on the tax avoidance, tax evasion, and wealth concealment activities of politicians, government officials, and their allies. Drawing upon prior accountability and ethics focused research, we utilize a dataset of almost 28 M tweets sent between 2016 and early 2020 to consider the microdetails and overall trajectory of this particular social accountability conversation. The study shows how the publication of previously private financial (...) information triggered a Twitter-based social accountability conversation. It also illustrates how social accountability utterances are intra-textually constructed by the inclusion of social characters, the personal pronoun ‘we,’ and the use of deontic responsibility verbs. Finally, the study highlights how the tweets from this group of participants changed over the longer-term but continued to focus on social accountability topics. The provided analysis contributes to our understanding of social accountability, including how the release of previously private accounting-based financial information can trigger a grassroots social accountability conversation. (shrink)

The current study examines the micro-linguistic details of Twitter responses to the whistleblower-initiated publication of the Panama Papers. The leaked documents contained the micro-details of tax avoidance, tax evasion, and wealth accumulation schemes used by business elites, politicians, and government bureaucrats. The public release of the documents on April 4, 2016 resulted in a groundswell of Twitter and other social media activity throughout the world, including 161,036 Spanish-language tweets in the subsequent 5-month period. The findings illustrate that the responses were (...) polyvocal, consisting a collection of overlapping speech genres with varied thematic topics and linguistic styles, as well as differing degrees of calls for action and varying amounts of illocutionary force. The analysis also illustrates that, while the illocutionary force of tweets is somewhat associated with the adoption of a prosaic and vernacular ethical stance as well as with demands for action, these types of voicing behaviors were not present in the majority of the tweets. These results suggest that, while social media platforms are a popular site for collective forms of voicing activities, it is less certain that these collective stakeholder voices necessarily result in forceful accountability demands that spill out of the communication medium and thus serve as an impulse for positive social change. (shrink)

This study examines the 3.5 m+ English-language original tweets that occurred during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. Starting from previous research, we analyze how character terms such as “the banker,” “politician,” “the teaparty,” “GOP,” and “the corporation,” as well as concept terms such as “ethics,” “fairness,” “morals,” “justice,” and “democracy” were used by individual participants to respond to the Occupy Wall Street events. These character and concept terms not only allowed individuals to take an ethical stance but also accumulated (...) into a citizen’s narrative about social accountability. The analysis illustrates how the centrality of the different concepts and characters in the conversation changed over time as well as how the concepts ethics, morals, fairness, justice, and democracy participated within the conversation, helping to amplify the ethical attributes of different characters. These findings contribute to our understanding of how demands for social accountability are articulated and change over time. (shrink)

This study examines how the American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) uses character and concept words to communicate normative narratives to different internal audiences. Our analysis of 552 editorials published in the AICPA’s Journal of Accountancy during the 1916–1973 period illustrates how the AICPA communicated similar yet different normative narratives to firm partners and students. During this time period, the centrality of ethically infused words such as ethics, conduct, and independence not only varied across different time periods but also (...) across different target audiences. The findings draw attention to the importance of considering the audiences for ethical narratives as well as the ways that the intra-textual positioning of concepts and characters allow organizations to speak to slightly different audiences within the same communication medium. (shrink)

Nine codes of ethics from companies in the Swedish financial sector were subjected to a content analysis to determine how they address and treat employees. The codes say a great deal about employee conduct and misconduct but next to nothing about employee rights, their rightful expectations or their value to the firm. The normative analysis – echoing some of the value-based HRM literature – draws on the foundational values of respect, equality, reciprocity and care. The analysis shows that most of (...) the codes are in conflict with these values. Such a treatment is then in conflict with fairness and risks harming the employees. Some of the features that make these codes ethically problematic are typical of how corporate codes have been described in previous code studies. Consequently, the normative analysis reaches beyond the scope of this material and in the end, what is at stake, is a very typical code design. (shrink)

Changes in modern societies originate the perception that ethical behaviour is essential in organization’s practices especially in the way they deal with aspects such as human rights. These issues are usually under the umbrella of the concept of social responsibility. Recently the Report of the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO on Social Responsibility and Health has addressed this concept of social responsibility in the context of health care delivery suggesting a new paradigm in hospital governance. The objective of this paper (...) is to address the issue of corporate social responsibility in health care, namely in the hospital setting, emphasising the special governance arrangements of such complex organisations and to evaluate if new models of hospital management (entrepreneurism) will need robust mechanisms of corporate governance to fulfil its social responsiveness. The scope of this responsible behaviour requires hospitals to fulfil its social and market objectives, in accordance to the law and general ethical standards. Social responsibility includes aspects like abstention of harm to the environment or the protection of the interests of all the stakeholders enrolled in the deliverance of health care. In conclusion, adequate corporate governance and corporate strategy are the gold standard of social responsibility. In a competitive market hospital governance will be optimised if the organization culture is reframed to meet stakeholders’ demands for unequivocal assurances on ethical behaviour. Health care organizations should abide to this new governance approach that is to create organisation value through performance, conformance and responsibility. (shrink)

Due to the prevalent influence of legal trends in driving ethical homogenization and persistent decoupling between ethical substance and symbolism in today’s organizations, scholars are calling for a renewed interest in the structural makeup of ethical codes. This article explores the disclosure trends and examines the contents of codes of ethics in the context of Canadian publicly listed acquirers. Relying on the analysis of codes’ public availability, structure, purpose, and promoted values, four clusters of behavior are identified. Although many firms (...) avoid the public disclosure of their codes, the results indicate that code of ethics’ patterns in sample firms are not driven merely by regulatory forces but increasingly shaped by aspirations for building a sustainable values-based corporation. The reported differences across clusters demonstrate that many companies in Canada overcome isomorphic pressures by displaying some originality in the writing of their codes. While symbolism in codes of ethics’ design and adoption prevails in publicly listed acquiring firms, the study provides evidence of an emerging trend of substantial commitment to social responsibilities. (shrink)

This paper presents a review of 100 empirical papers studying corporate codes of ethics in business organizations from the time period mid-2005 until mid-2016, following approximately an 11-year time period after the previous review of the literature. The reviewed papers are broadly categorized as content-oriented, output-oriented, or transformation-oriented. The review sheds light on empirical focus, context, questions addressed, methods, findings and theory. The findings are discussed in terms of the three categories as well as the aggregate, stock of empirical CCE (...) studies in comparison with previous reviews, answering the question “where are we now?” Content and output studies still stand for the majority of the studies, whereas the transformation studies are fewer. Within these areas, two new trends are found to have emerged: discursive analyses and a focus on labor conditions. The review finds that the content of CCEs is still predominantly self-defensive, that CCEs are insufficient in themselves in terms of protecting workers’ rights, that CCEs are likely to encounter tensions when implemented across national and organizational boundaries, and that while perception of CCEs is generally positive, CCEs may lead to both positive and negative outcomes. Based on these findings, potential areas for further exploration in the area of CCE research are suggested. (shrink)