Business Ethics Quarterly

ABSTRACT: Biological, brain, and behavioral sciences offer strong and growing support for the virtue ethics account of moral judgment and ethical behavior in business organizations. The acquisition of moral agency in business involves the recognition, refinement, and habituation through the processes of reflexion and reflection of a moral sense encapsulated in innate modules for compassion, hierarchy, reciprocity, purity, and affiliation adaptive for communal life both in ancestral and modern environments. The genetic and neural bases of morality exist independently of institutional frameworks and social structures. The latter not only shape moral behaviors within circumscribed limits, they also imply a plurality and compartmentalization of roles which may enable or impede the habituation of virtue. Becoming a virtuous agent entails the practical refinement of predispositions in situ as a member of a community of practitioners rather than entailing a normative ethical educational project seeking an intellectual resolution of abstract moral questions.

Eugene Sadler-Smith

Before Virtue: Biology, Brain, Behavior, and the “Moral Sense”

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to enter the conversation about stakeholder theory with the goal of clarifying certain foundational issues. I want to show, along with Boatright, that there is no stakeholder paradox, and that the principle on which such a paradox is built, the Separation Thesis, is nicely self-serving to business and ethics academics. If we give up such a thesis we find there is no stakeholder theory but that stakeholder theory becomes a genre that is quite rich. It becomes one of many ways to blend together the central concepts of business with those of ethics. Rather than take each concept of business singly or the whole of “business” together and hold it to the light of ethical standards, we can use the stakeholder concept to create more fine-grained analyses that combine business and ethics; or more simply, we can tell many more, and more interesting, stories about business.

R. Edward Freeman

Bus Ethics Q

The Politics of Stakeholder Theory: Some Future Directions

利益相关者理论的政治学：未来发展方向

Some observers of the data economy have proposed that we treat data as labor. But are data contributions labor? Our folk conception of work emphasizes its importance and effort, such that work has a special interpersonal priority and deserves appreciation and compensation. The folk conception does not generally favor counting data as work, and so it serves as an error theory for reluctance to regulate data as labor. In contrast, labor regulation and policy focus on the political economy of labor, and in particular the bargaining dynamics that participants in a labor market face. Labor regulation aims to protect workers against the threats characteristically posed by such bargaining dynamics. Data-transferring interactions between internet platforms and users share similar bargaining dynamics, and so there is a promising functional similarity between labor regulation and proposals for data regulation that would facilitate data strikes and data unions.

Julian David Jonker

Is Data Labor? Two Conceptions of Work and the User-Platform Relationship

数据是劳动吗？工作与用户-平台关系的两种概念

From where does management acquire its authority to act in the name of the corporation? The orthodoxy that shareholders alone authorise management is frequently criticised for treating the corporation as the property of shareholders, rather than as a distinct legal person in its own right (Ciepley, 2013; Deakin, 2012; Robé, 2011; Stout, 2012). However, Hobbes’s theory of incorporation in Leviathan shows this influential critique of shareholder primacy to rest on a non sequitur. It does not follow from the (correct) observation that the corporation is a legal person to the conclusion that its interests are distinct from those of shareholders. Just as individuals become citizens of a state when they authorise a sovereign, shareholders are incorporated when they authorise a representative assembly to act in their interests. Shareholders thereby form a single corporate person and are ultimately responsible for whatever is done in their corporate name.

Samuel Mansell

Who Speaks for the Corporation? A Hobbesian Theory of Managerial Authority and Shareholder Responsibility

谁为公司发声？管理者权威与股东责任的霍布斯理论

When considering the implications of the shareholder-stakeholder debate in defining the purpose of a company, epistemological clarity is vital in this emerging theory of the firm. Such clarity can prevent recurrence based solely on rephrasing key terms. To understand how various stakeholders develop and interpret a shared purpose, I argue for the necessity of a pragmatist approach that is normative and process-oriented. Mental models play a crucial role in interpretive processes that define decision-making, where individual perspectives converge. The figures of Milton Friedman and Ed Freeman serve as “beacons,” as artefacts, in the transmission of knowledge through which we, as individuals, shape a shared understanding. In current societies, profound polarization obstructs solutions to grand challenges. Pragmatism starts by questioning the underlying values of everyone involved. It assumes that sound deliberative processes are the only way to reach real solutions—not only for the mind but, above all, for the heart.

Frank Jan de Graaf

Building a Purpose of the Company: Friedman and Freeman as Beacons in a Pragmatist Theory of the Firm

构建公司宗旨：弗里德曼与弗里曼在实用主义企业理论中的指引

Studies of non-standard, project-based forms of work prevalent in the creative industries have typically theorized the relational dynamics of work as a competitive process of social capital accumulation involving an individualistic, self-enterprising, zero-sum, and winner-takes-all struggle for favourable social network-positioning. Problematizing this prevailing conceptualization, our empirical case study draws on fifty in-depth interviews and two focus groups with creative workers in Ghana to show how relations of mutual aid, including elaborate efforts to live harmoniously with others, are intricately intertwined with economic practices of getting by and getting ahead. Our analysis abductively mobilizes insights from Afro-communitarian ethics to theorize the mutual aid we observed as a complex socio-economic practice of relational resource redistribution contingent on degrees of social proximity. In applying “a theory from the South” to foreground the role of moral obligations, social harmony, and hands-on practices of mutual aid in non-standard forms of work, we contribute a “decolonial critique” of relationality of relevance to scholars of creative work and business ethicists.

Ana Alacovska

Robin Steedman

Thilde Langevang

Rashida Resario

The Relational and Redistributive Dynamics of Mutual Aid: Implications of Afro-Communitarian Ethics for the Study of Creative Work

互助的关系与再分配动力：非洲社群主义伦理对创意工作研究的启示

There is an ongoing debate over the moral limits of the market. Many participants endorse the plausible idea that a market’s moral status depends, at least in part, on its consequences. For example, Satz holds that markets whose operation undermines citizens’ ability to interact as equals are bad. And Brennan and Jaworski maintain that markets trading in any good or service permissibly possessed may be arranged to operate without bad consequences. This plausible normative claim about markets depends on a descriptive one. Namely, that individual markets have descriptive properties which would provide a suitable basis for their consequentialist evaluation. This descriptive claim, I argue, is false. Markets’ consequences are a joint production. There is no principled means by which the consequences of one may be distinguished from those of another. Thus, the plausible idea is false. A market’s moral status cannot depend on its consequences.

Abbreviation	Bus. Ethics Q.
Journal Impact	3.34
Quartiles(Global)	ETHICS(Q1)

ISSN	1052-150X, 2153-3326
h-index	92

Publication Information	Publisher: Cambridge University Press，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 1996，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:14.70%， Gold OA Rate: 44.30%

Business Ethics Quarterly

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Before Virtue: Biology, Brain, Behavior, and the “Moral Sense”

The Politics of Stakeholder Theory: Some Future Directions

Is Data Labor? Two Conceptions of Work and the User-Platform Relationship

Who Speaks for the Corporation? A Hobbesian Theory of Managerial Authority and Shareholder Responsibility

Building a Purpose of the Company: Friedman and Freeman as Beacons in a Pragmatist Theory of the Firm

The Relational and Redistributive Dynamics of Mutual Aid: Implications of Afro-Communitarian Ethics for the Study of Creative Work

Who Speaks for the Corporation? A Hobbesian Theory of Managerial Authority and Shareholder Responsibility

Building a Purpose of the Company: Friedman and Freeman as Beacons in a Pragmatist Theory of the Firm

Are Markets Amenable to Consequentialist Evaluation?

Is Data Labor? Two Conceptions of Work and the User-Platform Relationship