Religion has been in general neglected or even seen as a taboo subject in organizational research and management practice. This is a glaring omission in the business and society and business ethics literatures. As a source of moral norms and beliefs, religion has historically played a significant role in the vast majority of societies and continues to remain relevant in almost every society. More broadly, expectations for responsible business behavior are informed by regional, national, or indigenous cultures, which in many (...) parts of the world are heavily influenced by religious belief systems and religious institutions. In this essay, we discuss examples of how religion has functioned as a macro social force affecting business and society, discuss some of the key questions and issues related to research in this domain, offer some observations about why religion may be problematic with regard to its effects on business, and conclude by summarizing the articles contained in the special issue. (shrink)

Human trafficking is one of the most lucrative international criminal activities and is widespread across a variety of industries. The response to human trafficking in corporate supply chains has been dominated by analyses of due diligence obligations. Existing scholarship, however, has cast doubt on the effectiveness of corporate due diligence in addressing human trafficking, because human trafficking is the outcome of macro-level social structures that are created by and consist of multiple actors, including business. The outsourcing and sub-contracting model provides (...) incentives throughout the global supply chain to sub-contract further to reduce the cost of labor, which has led to human trafficking remaining a pervasive problem. Business responsibility for human trafficking derives from the fact that business decisions and strategies enable the conditions that allow for human trafficking to occur within their supply chains. To address human trafficking, we propose a social connection and political responsibility model, based on Iris Marion Young’s analysis of social connection and structural injustice, that is holistic, forward-looking, and outcomes-oriented. We differentiate between businesses with a strong connection to human trafficking and businesses with a weak connection, and within this distinction delineate different pathways that firms can take to meet their political responsibilities to address human trafficking. We conclude with implications for future research. (shrink)

This empirical study examines corporate responses to activist shareholder groups filing social-policy shareholder resolutions. Using resource dependency theory as our conceptual framing, we identify some of the drivers of corporate responses to shareholder activists. This study departs from previous studies by including a fourth possible corporate response, engaging in dialogue. Dialogue, an alternative to shareholder resolutions filed by activists, is a process in which corporations and activist shareholder groups mutually agree to engage in ongoing negotiations to deal with social issues. (...) Based on a unique dataset of resolutions filed by member organizations of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility from 2002 to 2005 and the outcomes of these resolutions, our analysis finds that corporate managers are more likely to engage in dialogue with shareholder activists when the firm is larger, is more responsive to stakeholders, the CEO is the board chair, and the firm has a relatively lower percentage of institutional investors. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article examines the issue of gender equality within Islam in order to develop an ethical framework for businesses operating in Muslim majority countries. We pay attention to the role of women and seemingly inconsistent expectations of Islamic and Western societies with regard to appropriate gender roles. In particular, we contrast a mainstream Western liberal individualist view of freedom and equality—the capability approach, used here as an illustration of mainstream Western liberalism—with an egalitarian Islamic view on gender equality. While the (...) article identifies an opportunity for this particular approach to reform patriarchal interpretations and practices of Islam toward gender egalitarian interpretations and practices, it also contests the notions of adaptation and well-being inherent within the capability approach. We suggest that a dialectical approach to understanding the relationships among religion, culture, and business provides a better guide to responsible business action in Muslim Majority countries than does the capability approach. (shrink)

One of the essential ethical issues in the employment relationship is the loss of employee voice. Many of the ways employees have previously exercised voice in the employment relationship have been rendered less effective by (1) the changing nature of work, (2) employer preferences for flexibility that often work to the disadvantage of employees, and (3) changes in public policy and institutional systems that have failed to protect workers. We will begin with a discussion of how work has changed in (...) the last 20 years in countries like Australia and the United States, and then take up the issue of employees as organizational stakeholders and the ethical duties that are owed them, with special attention given to issues of power. We will then consider whether voluntary action by employers such as social auditing is sufficient to ensure equity for employees, and conclude with a discussion of how changes in public policy might ensure greater fairness in the employment relationship by bringing employers and employees together in partnership. (shrink)

The popular view of shareholder activism focuses on shareholder resolutions and the shareholder vote via proxy statements at the annual meeting, which is treated as a "David vs. Goliath" showdown between the small group of socially responsible investors and the powerful corporation. This article goes beyond the popular view to examine where the real action typically occurs-in the Dialogue process where corporations and shareholder activist groups mutually agree to ongoing communications to deal with a serious social issue. Use of the (...) capitalized word "Dialogue" is intended to distinguish this formal process between corporations and shareholders from all the other forms of dialogue or twoway communication exchanged between a corporation and its stakeholders. The phenomenon of Dialogue between a corporation and dissident shareholders has not been analyzed in the academic literature or in the popular press because it occurs behind the scenes and out of sight from media scrutiny. Yet this is where a great deal of social change initiated by shareholder activists is negotiated. This article contributes both theoretically and empirically to the study of Dialogues between shareholder activists and corporations. We explain how Dialogues occur in the context of the shareholder resolution process and examine two Dialogues that focus on international labor issues in two industries. Then data on Dialogues during the period, 1999-2005, from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility are analyzed. This research contributes to knowledge about the Dialogue process and the emerging literature on corporation-stakeholder engagement. (shrink)

Downsizing has become a significant public issue that has not yet been significantly studied by business ethicists. It is proposed that reasonable social and psychological contracts bound the moral free space of managers contemplating downsizing; the degree of constraint is also dependent on the organization's resource munificence. A framework for considering the extent of managerial moral free space and implications thereof for managerial practice are offered.

Although not always termed “organizational justice,” the fairness of organizations has been a consistent concern of management thinkers. A review of the 1900–1965 time period indicates that management theorists primarily conceptualized organizational justice in utilitarian terms, although each theory emphasized distributive and procedural justice to different degrees. There is clearly a need for contemporary scholars to consider non-economic rationales for organizational justice, but the willingness of earlier scholars to make utilitarian arguments about organizational justice and productive efficiency helped legitimize the (...) idea of fairness in organizations as an arbiter of value. Further, each theory tempered absolute managerial autonomy with some inherent check thereon. Researchers interested in organizational justice should therefore take a historical perspective in considering how management theory includes consideration of justice-related concerns. (shrink)

Given the growing interest in religion and spirituality in the community and workplace, we consider what light one of the oldest sources of human ethics, the Torah, can throw on the vexing issues of contemporary employment ethics and social sustainability. We specifically consider the Torah because it is the primary document of Judaism, the source of all the basic Biblical commandments, and a framework of ethics. A distinctive feature of Jewish ethics is its interpretive approach to moral philosophy: that is, (...) immersion and sense making in a dense, lived-in, complicated moral world, which is particularly useful with regard to ethical analyses of the workplace. Rather than discover or create a new ethic for the employer–employee relationship, we seek to harness general principles and norms from the Torah to contemporary business conditions. In the spirit of sustainability, rather than plunder the new, we recreate from existing resources. Interpretations from the Torah provide a rich source of moral and practical guidance for contemporary business ethics while also responding to academic and popular interest in spirituality and business. These tenets, however, have not to date been specifically directed at current predicaments in employment. We redress this by deriving principles from the Torah and applying them to ethical issues in contemporary employment practices. Practical guidance for both research in and practice of employment ethics is also provided. (shrink)

The current proxy voting system in the United States has become the subject of considerable controversy. Because institutional investment managers have the authority to vote their clients’ proxies, they have a fiduciary obligation to those clients. Frequently, in an attempt to fulfill that obligation, these institutional investors employ proxy advisory services to manage the thousands of votes they must cast. However, many proxy advisory services have conflicts of interest that inhibit their utility to those seeking to discharge their fiduciary duties. (...) In this article, we describe the current proxy advisory network as an example of how current notions of conflicts of interest fall short when explaining the behavior of an interconnected set of market players whose remit is to act in the best interests of their investors. We discuss what participants in this system should do to bring transparency and accuracy to the proxy advice industry. (shrink)

Human resource management (HRM) education has tended to focus on specific functions and tasks within organizations, such as compensation, staffing, and evaluation. This task orientation within HRM education fails to account for the bigger questions facing human resource management and employment relationships, questions which address the roles and responsibilities of the HR function and HR practitioners. An educational focus on HRM that does not explicitly address larger ethical questions fails to equip students to address stakeholder concerns about how employees are (...) treated or the ethical dilemmas facing employers with regard to the employment relationship, and ironically makes the HRM function less strategic to the organization. In this paper, we identify some of the key ethical issues within the employment relationship, discuss how extant HRM education often fails to address these issues or help students to become aware of them, and offer a framework for integrating ethics into HRM education. (shrink)

In this paper, the issue of plant closings is analyzed from the perspective of halakhah (the Written Law of Judaism). Two levels of analysis in halakhah must be differentiated: the legal (enforced by courts) and the moral (not enforced by law, but rather framed in terms of duty to God). There is no legal mandate to keep an unprofitable plant open, but there are a number of moral imprecations (particularly "acting more generously than the law requires") that might influence an (...) employer''s decision making. Using analogical reasoning to infer moral and/or legal obligations may be a fruitful means for businesspeople to analyze business situations in terms of ethical implications. (shrink)

Scholars have studied the various pressures that companies face related to socially responsible behavior when stakeholders know the particular social issues under consideration. Many have examined social responsibility in the context of environmental responsibility and the general approaches companies take regarding environmental management. The issue of currently unregulated, but potentially hazardous, chemicals in consumer products is not well understood by the general public, but a number of proactive consumer product companies have voluntarily adopted strategies to minimize use of such chemicals. (...) These companies are exceeding regulatory requirements by restricting from their products chemicals that could harm human or environmental health, despite the fact that these actions are costly. They do not usually advertise the details of their strategies to end consumers. This article uses interviews with senior environmental directors of 20 multinational consumer product companies to investigate why these companies engage in voluntary chemicals management. The authors conclude that the most significant reasons are to achieve a competitive advantage and stay ahead of regulations, manage relationships and maintain legitimacy with stakeholders, and put managerial values into practice. Many of the characteristics related to the case of chemicals management are extendable to other areas of stakeholder management in which risks to stakeholders are either unknown or poorly understood. (shrink)

Chief Executive Officers and other organizational leaders can affect how corporate social responsibility initiatives are perceived in their organizations. However, in order to be successful with regard to promoting CSR, leaders need to have strong network competencies and to move beyond charismatic leadership. In this paper we offer a critique of charismatic leadership as it relates to CSR, posit that the intellectual stimulation brought about by transformational leadership is more important in this regard, propose that internal and networking is a (...) leadership competence highly relevant to CSR, and emphasize the importance of working through highly credible opinion leaders in promoting CSR. (shrink)

In his invited essay for Business & Society’s 60th anniversary, Archie B. Carroll refers to human rights as “a topic that holds considerable promise for CSR [corporate social responsibility] researchers in the future.” The objective of this article is to unpack this promise. We discuss the momentum of business and human rights in international policy, national regulation, and corporate practice, review how and why BHR scholarship has been thriving, provide a conceptual framework to analyze how BHR and corporate social responsibility (...) relate to each other, and provide a research agenda outlining how BHR can expand business and society scholarship in general and one of its foundational constructs, CSR, in particular, beyond the current confines of the business and society field. (shrink)

The 25th anniversary of R. Edward Freeman’s Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach provides an opportunity to consider where stakeholder theory has been, where it is going, and how it might influence the behavior of academics conducting stakeholder-oriented research. We propose that Freeman’s early work on the stakeholder concept supports the normative claim that a stakeholder’s contribution to value creation implies a right to stakeholder voice with regard to how a corporation makes decisions. Failure to account for stakeholder voice works to (...) the detriment of stakeholders. We further propose that business ethicists and stakeholder scholars have a role to play with regard to supporting the interests — including a right to voice — of non-shareholder stakeholders through advocacy, teaching, and scholarship. We use the example of industrial relations teaching and scholarship as a model for future business ethics teaching and scholarship. (shrink)