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Business Ethics in the Greater China Region: Past, Present, and Future Research

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Abstract

While business ethics has generated a great deal of research internationally over the last few decades, academic reviews of the business ethics literature remain limited. Moreover, there has been little attempt to date to analyze this literature specifically in the Greater China region, which has been experiencing rapid socioeconomic growth and dynamic evolution of business ethics in recent decades. This paper addresses this research gap by undertaking a comprehensive and critical appraisal of the business ethics literature on Greater China. In particular, it maps out the existing research findings, identifies limitations in methodology, and suggests future directions for business ethics research in this region. The findings indicate that the scholarly interests cover 24 research themes, including corporate social responsibility and social performance; ethical beliefs, judgment, values, decision-making, and culture; workplace ethics and behavior; marketing ethics and consumer behavior; and sustainability. This review reveals a growing imbalance between empirical and conceptual/theoretical studies on business ethics. In addition, the published works covered in this review heavily rely on survey method and convenience sampling, with a predominant focus on a single individual level of analysis. Importantly, this study identifies four directions for future research: contextualized theoretical development, addressing multilevel research, developing research design tailored to the Chinese context, and ensuring more diversified and rigorous data collection.

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Notes

  1. This paper uses the terms “Chinese context” and “Greater China context” interchangeably. The term “Chinese context” usually encompasses both mainland China and other Greater China areas. Similarly, when “China” is used independently in this paper for simplicity, it refers to Greater China, rather than mainland China.

  2. For example, in Huang and Kung’s (2010) study on the drivers of environmental disclosure, it was easily agreed by the two coders that the theme was sustainability. In the case of Chen and Chang’s (2013) study, exploring the influences of greenwash on green trust and the mediating mechanisms of green consumer confusion and green perceived risk, the first reading revealed that it overlapped the topics of sustainability and consumer and marketing research. Following discussions between the two coders and consultation with other researchers familiar with the business ethics field, we determined the topic to be the latter because the study explicitly focused on explaining green consumer behavior, rather than sustainability itself. For Millar and Choi’s (2010) study of MNCs’ worker identity and the ethical vulnerability caused by over-reliance on expatriate managers and under-reliance on local managers, we categorized it as both the topic of “industrial and labor relations” and “international management” because the labor issues discussed in the article were highly intertwined with the contextual features of international management. We acknowledged the high degree of subjectivity in the determination of topic choice, and double- or triple-checked to ensure a balance between topic width and depth.

  3. Due to double counts of topics in some articles, the total number of topics exceeded the number of articles.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the three reviewers for their helpful comments. This research was supported by Jiangsu Philosophy & Social Science Funding Programme of Jiangsu Department of Education (Project No. 2015SJD618) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71202025, 71573213, 71402093, 71572016). Authors also thank the seminar participants of the Business Ethics in China Forum at Shanghai Jiaotong University, for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Particularly, the authors acknowledge the research assistance by Chenziyuan Xu, Mingxing Du, Yao Zeng, Ruiying Chen, and Ya Luo.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China

    Juelin Yin

  2. School of Management, University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia

    Ali Quazi

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  1. Juelin Yin
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  2. Ali Quazi
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Correspondence to Juelin Yin.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 9.

Table 9 The Greater China context: considering contextual features
Full size table

Appendix 2: List of Journals Included in this Review

The search scope of this review included the following three sources over the time span of 1984–2015:

  • Step 1 Top general management journals, following Aguinis and Glavas (2012): Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, International Journal of Management Reviews, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Personnel Psychology, and Strategic Management Journal.

  • Step 2 Main business ethics journals, with reference to Ma (2009) and Ma et al. (2012): Journal of Business Ethics, Business & Society, Business Ethics Quarterly, Business Ethics: A European Review, and Business & Society Review.

  • Step 3 Asia- or China-focused management journals, referring to Peng et al. (2001): Asian Journal of Business Ethics, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, and Management and Organization Review.

Appendix 3

See Table 10.

Table 10 Distribution of articles across the journals
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Yin, J., Quazi, A. Business Ethics in the Greater China Region: Past, Present, and Future Research. J Bus Ethics 150, 815–835 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3220-9

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