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Business Ethics in Africa: The Role of Institutional Context, Social Relevance, and Development Challenges

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Abstract

Business ethics in Africa, as a field of research, practice, and teaching, has grown rapidly over the last two decades or so, covering a wide variety of topical issues, including corporate social responsibility, governance, and social entrepreneurship. Building on this progress, and to further advance the field, this special issue addresses four broad areas that cover important, under-researched or newly emerging phenomena in Africa: culture, ethics and leadership; business, society and institutions; corruption, anti-corruption and governance; and philanthropy, social entrepreneurship and impact investing. In addition to advancing research by addressing some of the imbalances and gaps in the extant literature, this special issue draws attention to indigenous African theories, models and firms. Some challenges facing business ethics, as a field of practice and teaching in Africa, are also highlighted. The paper concludes with a summary of the eight articles in this special issue.

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Acknowledgements

The Guest Editors would like to thank Dr. Arno Kourula, Co-editor (Special Issues) of the Journal of Business Ethics, for his guidance and support throughout the process of this special issue. We were lucky to have well over 100 scholars help with reviewing the papers, and thank them all for helping to improve the quality of manuscripts. The International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility at Nottingham University Business School (UK) hosted a Special Issue Workshop in May, 2018, for which we are grateful. We want to especially thank all those who responded to our call for papers; regrettably, we had to reject most of the submissions due to the high number of submissions. To the 21 authors whose papers were selected, thank you for making this special issue happen, and for your patience through multiple rounds of the year-long review process. It has been an honour to have served as guest editors, and we hope readers enjoy the articles as much as we did editing them.

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This study was not funded by any grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA

    Ifedapo Adeleye

  2. University of Sussex, Sussex, UK

    John Luiz

  3. University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    John Luiz

  4. Nottingham University Business School, Nottingham, UK

    Judy Muthuri

  5. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Kenneth Amaeshi

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  1. Ifedapo Adeleye
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  2. John Luiz
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  4. Kenneth Amaeshi
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Correspondence to Ifedapo Adeleye.

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Adeleye, I., Luiz, J., Muthuri, J. et al. Business Ethics in Africa: The Role of Institutional Context, Social Relevance, and Development Challenges. J Bus Ethics 161, 717–729 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04338-x

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