Women are underrepresented in managerial positions and company international assignments, in part due to gender discrimination. There is a lack of fair and just treatment of women in selection, assignment and promotion processes, as well as a lack of virtue shown by business leaders in not upholding the principle of assigning comparable women and men equally to positions in management and postings abroad. Female professionals, however, initiate their own expatriation more often than they are assigned abroad by their company, and (...) usually as often as men self-expatriate. What causes women to self-initiate expatriation? Women’s proactivity, in part an attempt to redress the disadvantage they face in managerial career advancement, appears influential, as are career and family motivations. Indeed, during expatriation, women fare well in their career and they repatriate only at the same rate as men. Compared with men, however, women repatriate less often for career than for family reasons. On their return, despite their international experience, women do not gain as much of a financial return on their investment in self-expatriation as do men, suggesting that women may suffer unfair, non-meritorious treatment at home. Overall, self-initiated expatriation provides a new, gendered, social context for researching women’s career advancement. The ethical issues associated with women’s self-expatriation – a lack of fairness and justice in selection, assignment and promotion decisions, and a lack of virtue shown by business leaders in upholding fair and just human resource decisions by gender – suggest practical avenues to resolve these issues. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has generally been recognized as corporate pro-social behavior aimed at remediating social issues external to organizations, while political CSR has acknowledged the political nature of such activity beyond social aims. Despite the growth of this literature, there is still little attention given to gender as the starting point for a conversation on CSR, ethics, and the Global South. Deploying critical insights from feminist work in postcolonial traditions, I outline how MNCs replicate gendered neocolonialist discourses and perpetuate exploitative (...) material dependences between Global North/south through CSR activities. Specifically, I address issues of neocolonial relations, subaltern agency, and ethics in the context of gendered global division of labor through the exemplar of Rana Plaza and its aftermath. In all, I offer new directions for CSR scholarship by attending to the intersections of gender, ethics, and responsibility as they relate to corporate actions in the Global South. (shrink)

Interviews were conducted with 15 entrepreneurial feminists to explore how feminist values are enacted in opportunity recognition and organizational structures within the venture-creation process. Results suggest that opportunity recognition aligned with the needs and values of the entrepreneurial feminists. Opportunity construction was defined as ‘I am the market’, ‘building community with women like me’, ‘enabling others’, ‘do more with my life’, and ‘opportunity knocked’. Organizational structures and governance reflected cooperative, collaborative and ethical principles. Implications to feminist theory are discussed.

Different ethical frameworks have been proposed as appropriate for integrating into crisis management strategies. This study examines an ethic of care approach to crisis management analysing the case of Northern Rock bank which was at the centre of the recent financial crisis in the UK. The development and maintenance of relationships is fundamental to an ethic of care approach and the research recognises this by examining the bank–stakeholder relationship both before and after the crisis. Considerable anger was directed at the (...) bank post-crisis and, subsequently, the management team resigned. An important contention is that because an ethic of care approach had not been followed external parties judged that management should have foreseen the crisis and the harm caused was deemed intentional, even though predicting the crisis would have been difficult and it is improbable any harm was intended. Additionally, this negative reaction was heightened due to three facets of Northern Rock’s history: (i) its previous existence as a building society, (ii) the ‘local’ nature of the bank and (iii) the creation of The Northern Rock Foundation. These historical factors caused local stakeholders to presume a ‘caring’ relationship between themselves, and the bank had continued to exist post-demutualisation. The events of the crisis compelled stakeholders to re-appraise this presumption, amplifying the post-crisis anger. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Many scholars and managers endorse the idea that the primary purpose of the firm is to make money for its owners. This shareholder wealth maximization objective is justified on the grounds that it maximizes social welfare. In this article, the first of a two-part set, we argue that, although this shareholder primacy model may have been appropriate in an earlier era, it no longer is, given our current state of economic and social affairs. To make our case, we employ a (...) utilitarian moral standard and examine the apparent logical sequence behind the link between shareholder wealth maximization and social welfare. Upon close empirical and conceptual scrutiny, we find that utilitarian criteria do not support the shareholder model; that is, shareholder wealth maximization is only weakly linked to social welfare maximization. In view of the dubious validity of this sequential argument, we outline some of the features of a superior corporate objective—a variant of normative stakeholder theory. In the second article, we will advance and defend our preferred alternative and then discuss some institutional arrangements under which it could be implemented. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Programs aimed at increasing women’s entrepreneurship are a rapidly proliferating class of CSR initiatives across the globe with participation by many of the world’s largest corporations. The gendered nature of this phenomenon suggests that feminist approaches to CSR may offer a particularly salient mode of their analysis. In this article, I argue that insights from feminist economics regarding the historically prevalent—but narrow and gendered—definition of work, which artificially separates production from reproduction, provide fruitful tools for theory building when conceptualizing gender (...) through the lens of CSR. I demonstrate that the gendered separation of production and reproduction is typicallytaken as givenin entrepreneurship, and that mainstream CSR research has not sufficiently challenged this perspective. I present a conceptual framework of what is to be gained by examining the CSR, entrepreneurship, and feminist economics literatures in combination, and demonstrate how researchers might use this framework for future research. (shrink)

This article explores how ethical agency, as ‘other-oriented’ caring, emerged from feelings of being ‘different’ in a cultural organization by drawing on feminist ethics of care. By analyzing interview material from an ethnographic study, we centralize the relationship between feelings of being ‘different,’ vulnerability and the development of sensibilities, practices and imaginaries of care. We elaborate on how vulnerability serves as a ground for caring with rather than for others, and illustrate how it allowed individuals to challenge both organizational, normative (...) diversity discourses and essentialization of differences. We contribute to the literature on critical diversity management by furthering problematizations of instrumental diversity management from the perspective of care, and to the organizational literature on feminist care ethics by empirically exploring how ethical agency emerges from tensions related to feeling ‘different.’ While previous studies have shown how marginalized individuals use their sense of ‘otherness’ to negotiate, conform to and resist organizational norms, practices and discourses, we provide further insights on how it also can drive concern and care for others, and thus serve as possible ground for ethical change initiatives within organizations. (shrink)

Although corporate social responsibility practice increasingly addresses gender issues, and gender and CSR scholarship is expanding, feminist theory is rarely explicitly referenced or discussed in the CSR literature. We contend that this omission is a key limitation of the field. We argue that CSR theorization and research on gender can be improved through more explicit and systematic reference to feminist theories, and particularly those from feminist organization studies. Addressing this gap, we review developments in feminist organization theory, mapping their relevance (...) to CSR. With reference to six major theoretical perspectives in CSR scholarship, we note feminist research relating to each. Drawing upon FOS theory and CSR theory, we then develop an integrated theoretical framework for the analysis of gender issues in CSR. Our framework enables us to identify research strengths in the gender and CSR literature, as well as gaps therein, to open new conversations and to posit future research directions for this emerging area of scholarship. Our paper illustrates how a better grounding of CSR in feminist theory can contribute to CSR research more broadly. (shrink)

Our contribution in this paper is to highlight the ethical implications of workforce engagement strategies in an age of austerity. Hard or instrumentalist approaches to workforce engagement create the potential for situations where engaged employees are expected to work ever longer and harder with negative outcomes for their well-being. Our study explores these issues in an investigation of the enactment of an engagement strategy within a UK Health charity, where managers and workers face paradoxical demands to raise service quality and (...) cut costs. We integrate insights from engagement, paradox, and ethic of care literatures, to explore these paradoxical demands—illustrating ways in which engagement experiences become infused with tensions when the workforce faces competing requirements to do ‘more with less’ resources. We argue that those targeted by these paradoxical engagement strategies need to be supported and cared for, embedded in an ethic of care that provides explicit workplace resources for helping workers and managers cope with and work through corresponding tensions. Our study points to the critical importance of support from senior and frontline managers for open communications and dialogue practices. (shrink)

This study examines local communities’ lived experiences and organizations’ care-giving processes regarding four oil and gas projects deployed in three countries. Analyzing the empirical data through the lens of ethics of care reveals that, together with mature justice, the inclination to care conceived at the focal organization creates an ethical culture encouraging caring activities by individuals at the local level. Through close communications with communities, project decision makers at the local level recognize the demanded care of local communities and develop (...) organizations’ caring capacity. The empirical analysis revealed that the care-giving process can also be influenced by the power dynamics of the network of stakeholders. This research emphasizes on the success of a bottom-up approach in caring for local communities, and sheds light on the capability of large organizations in giving care to their distal stakeholders by adopting this approach. Furthermore, it indicates that justice and care both have some useful characteristics and are complementary but, most importantly, are socially constructed and not mutually exclusive. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for business institutions to position themselves as stakeholder-caring companies or organizations. However, there is little research on conceptualizing stakeholder-caring as a component of brand image. Through a theoretical lens of brand-consumer interactions, this paper introduces a new construct—stakeholder-caring image—and proposes a model that examines stakeholder-caring’s antecedents (integrity and courtesy) and its consequence (customer satisfaction). The two antecedents—integrity and courtesy—capture intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of brand-consumer interaction practice, respectively, while the consequence (customer satisfaction) is one important behavioral (...) outcome in marketing. The proposed model was tested with Hong Kong customers (n = 296) via a systematic survey. The data were analyzed using LISREL. Several measurement and structural models were constructed to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings reveal that the effect of integrity on customer satisfaction is mediated by a stakeholder-caring image. However, contrary to the conventional wisdom, we surprisingly find that courtesy is not effective to build a stakeholder-caring image. Managerially, this research offers guidance on how to develop stakeholder-caring image and subsequently increase customer satisfaction. In addition, we discuss the nuanced distinction between a stakeholder-caring image and related brand constructs, such as “sincerity” in Aaker’s (1997) brand personality framework. (shrink)

After almost 30 years of publications, Journal of Business Ethics (JBE) has achieved the position of main marketplace for business ethics discussion and knowledge generation. Given the large amount of knowledge produced, an assessment of the state of the art could benefit both the constructive development of the discipline and the further growth of the journal itself. As the evolution of a discipline is set to be reflected in the evolution of its leading journal, we attempt to characterize changes in (...) the intellectual structure of business ethics through a bibliometric analysis of articles published in JBE . Specifically, we conduct a knowledge-stock analysis to assess the evolution, major trends, and current state of the journal. Additionally, we use citation and co-citation analysis to provide an accurate description of the content and the advancement of research in business ethics. Through the results of our analysis, we are able to: (1) pinpoint the characteristics of the growing stock of knowledge published by JBE over the years; (2) identify the most influential works on business ethics research; and (3) detect the formation and evolution of schools of thought in business ethics. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Ethics at the centre of global and local challenges. For much of the history of the Journal of Business Ethics, ethics was seen within the academy as a peripheral aspect of business. However, in (...) recent years, the stakes have risen dramatically, with global and local worlds destabilized by financial crisis, climate change, internet technologies and artificial intelligence, and global health crises. The authors of these commentaries address these grand challenges by placing business ethics at their centre. What if all grand challenges were framed as grand ethical challenges? Tanusree Jain, Arno Kourula and Suhaib Riaz posit that an ethical lens allows for a humble response, in which those with greater capacity take greater responsibility but remain inclusive and cognizant of different voices and experiences. Focussing on business ethics in connection to the grand challenge of environmental emergencies, Steffen Böhm introduces the deceptively simple yet radical position that business is nature, and nature is business. His quick but profound side-step from arguments against human–nature dualism to an ontological undoing of the business–nature dichotomy should have all business ethics scholars rethinking their “business and society” assumptions. Also, singularly concerned with the climate emergency, Boudewijn de Bruin posits a scenario where, 40 years from now, our field will be evaluated by its ability to have helped humanity emerge from this emergency. He contends that Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell illustrates how human rights take centre stage in climate change litigation, and how business ethics enters the courtroom. From a consumer ethics perspective, Deirdre Shaw, Michal Carrington and Louise Hassan argue that ecologically sustainable and socially just marketplace systems demand cultural change, a reconsideration of future interpretations of “consumer society”, a challenge to the dominant “growth logic” and stimulation of alternative ways to address our consumption needs. Still concerned with global issues, but turning attention to social inequalities, Nelarine Cornelius links the capability approach to global and corporate governance, arguing that CA will continue to lie at the foundation of human development policy, and, increasingly, CSR and corporate governance. Continuing debate on the grand challenges associated with justice and equality, Laurence Romani identifies a significant shift in the centrality of business ethics in debates on managing differences, positing that dialogue between diversity management and international management can ground future debate in business ethics. Finally, the essay concludes with a commentary by Charlotte Karam and Michelle Greenwood on the possibilities of feminist-inspired theories, methods, and positionality for many spheres of business ethics, not least stakeholder theory, to broaden and deepen its capacity for nuance, responsiveness, and transformation. In the words of our commentators, grand challenges must be addressed urgently, and the Journal of Business Ethics should be at the forefront of tackling them. (shrink)

Gender greatly impacts access to opportunities, potential, and success in corporate leadership roles. We begin with a general presentation of why such discussion is necessary for basic considerations of justice and fairness in gender equality and how the issues we raise must impact any ethical perspective on gender in the corporate workplace. We continue with a breakdown of the central categories affecting the success of women in corporate leadership roles. The first of these includes gender-influenced behavioral factors, such as the (...) requirements and expectations of gendered verbal and nonverbal communication styles as well as appearance. We move on to address the impact of family on corporate leadership opportunities and success, discussing the asymmetrical evaluation of an individual’s potential, authority, and competence based on gender stereotypes of familial obligations and expectations. Finally, we address how gender impacts access to networking and sponsorship opportunities and the long-term effects of systematic limitations on women’s inclusion in the upper echelons of corporate leadership. We conclude with a summary of the questions and issues raised by our discussion and direct individuals to consider how different ethical systems and moral requirements might influence their interpretations of gender and leadership in the corporate workplace. (shrink)