Journal of Business Ethics

The study examines employee, managerial, and ethics officer perceptions regarding their companies’ codes of ethics. The study moves beyond examining the mere existence of a code of ethics to consider the role that code content and code process (i.e. creation, implementation, and administration) might play with respect to the effectiveness of codes in influencing behavior. Fifty-seven in-depth, semi-structured interviews of employees, managers, and ethics officers were conducted at four large Canadian companies. The factors viewed by respondents to be important with respect to code effectiveness include: provisions of examples; readability; tone; relevance; realism; senior management support; training; reinforcement; living up to standards; reporting requirement; anonymous phone line; communicating violations; and enforcement. The factors found to be potentially important include: justification for provisions; employee involvement; and sign-off requirements. Factors found not to be important include: objectives for the code; prior distribution; testing; and relating one’s performance review to compliance with the code.

Paul Bond is a lawyer who overheard two other lawyers at his office discussing the proposed purchase of a company by one of their clients. He proceeds to buy shares of this company. Would you rate Bond’s behavior completely fair, acceptable, unfair, or very unfair? I posed this vignette to samples of university students in China, Taiwan, and the U.S. Most students in the U.S. and Taiwan samples rated Bond’s behavior unfair or very unfair while most students in the China rated Bond’s behavior completely fair or acceptable. Perceptions of fairness are part of the culture of a country and culture affects business practices. I discuss culture, perceptions of fairness, and business practices in China, Taiwan, and the U.S.

This article examines the proposition that a major cause of the major financial accounting scandals that received much publicity around the world was unethical leadership in the companies and compares the role of unethical leaders in a variety of scenarios. Through the use of computer simulation models, it shows how a combination of CEO's narcissism, financial incentive, shareholders' expectations and subordinate silence as well as CEO's dishonesty can do much to explain some of the findings highlighted in recent high profile financial accounting scandals. Furthermore, it shows that the nature and impact of ethical leadership depends greatly on the institutional setting and can be expected to vary greatly by country and culture. In certain circumstances ethical leadership can have either a negligible or even opposite effect to that expected.

This paper explores the intersection between three processes associated with globalisation. First, the rise of emerging economies like China, Brazil and India, the so-called ‘Rising Powers’, and their potential to define the contours of globalisation, global production arrangements and global governance in the twenty-first century. Second, the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals in the shaping of global trade rules and industrial practices. Third, the significance of small firm clusters as critical sites of industrial competitiveness. Some of the most significant examples of successful, innovative and internationally competitive small firm clusters from the developing world are located in the ‘Rising Powers’ and cluster promotion is a core element of national industrial policy in some of these countries. There is also evidence of engagement by clustered actors with corporate social responsibility goals around labour and environmental impacts. While these three processes have been separately studied there has been no attempt to explore their intersections. This paper addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of secondary data, and a detailed reading of the literature, on CSR and clusters in Brazil, China and India. It assesses the evidence on small firm clusters in the Rising Power economies and considers how these Rising Power clusters engage with CSR goals pertaining to labour, social and environmental standards. It argues for a greater focus on the formal and informal institutional context, termed the ‘social contract’, in explaining divergent experiences and practices observed across these countries. This raises important questions for future academic and policy research on clusters, CSR and the Rising Powers. The paper concludes by outlining a research agenda to explore the local and global consequences of the relationship between Rising Power clusters and international labour and environmental standards.

This article reports the results of research aimed at developing and validating a multi-item scale to measure consumers’ agreement with three main justifications for not engaging in socially responsible consumption (SRC) behaviours, namely the ‘economic rationalist argument’ founded on the idea that the costs of SRC are greater than its benefits, the ‘economic development reality argument’ based on the idea that ethical and moral aspirations are less important than the economic development of countries, and the ‘government dependency argument’ grounded in the premise that government inaction demonstrates the legal character and the banality of unethical consumption behaviours. The scale items were generated on the basis of a multi-country qualitative study of consumers (Eckhardt et al., 2006, ‘Why Don’t Consumers Behave Ethically’. DVD Document, AGSM). The content validity of the scale was assessed in the first study. The second study was a survey of 157 Canadian adult consumers in which the three-dimensional scale and other scales measuring relevant concepts were administered. The survey results showed that the 28-item resulting scale is reliable and generally behaves as one would theoretically expect. Implications for consumption ethics researchers and policy makers are proposed.

This paper looks at the impact of the Business & Society Course on student's attitude towards and awareness of both ethical and illegal behavior. Business students were surveyed on the first and last day of the semesters on 11 ethical and legal scenarios. The population included three sections of the Business and Society course and three sections of other business courses as a control group. Though generalizability is limited, the courses show some potential to positively impact student's attitudes. Currently, ethics is of great concern at business schools in this country. Accreditation standards of both the AACSB and ACBSP both require an ethical component to a business curriculum as a condition of accreditation. A majority of business schools at both the undergraduate and graduate level have required or at least elective courses in ethics. But how does this concern and use of resources translate into results? Do ethics courses change student attitudes? More specifically, do such courses have and impact on not only students' attitudes towards ethics but what impact, if any, do they have on students' awareness of both ethics and legality as well as their attitude towards violating the law?

Western attempts to obtain Chinese compliance with intellectual property rights have a long history of failure. Most discussions of the problem focus on either legal comparisons or explanations arising from levels of economic development (based primarily on the example of U.S. disregard for such rights during the 18th and 19th centuries). After decades of heated negotiation, intellectual property rights is still one of the major issues of misunderstanding between the West and the various Chinese political entities. This paper examines the sources of this problem from the standpoint of traditional Chinese social and political philosophy (specifically Neo-Confucianism). It points out that the basic assumptions about the nature of intellectual property, which arose during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, are fundamentally at odds with the traditional Chinese view of the role of intellectuals in society. It suggests that policies which do not take these differences into account, but which attempt to transfer Western legal concepts without the underlying social constructs are responsible for much of the lack of success in the area of intellectual property rights.

This study aims to map out the relationships that make up green innovation initiatives in Brazilian industry. The sample comprised 100 managers at manufacturing companies, most of them operating in the business of farm machinery and equipment (45 managers) and steel structures (14 managers). To develop this study, Medeiros et al. (J Clean Prod 65:76–86, 2014) study, mapping critical factors that drive the success of green product innovation and the paradigm of complexity, was used as a reference study. Based on the results, it was possible to identify that the operational dynamic of the factors and variables that affect market success do not happen in an isolated or fragmented way; they occur systematically with different contingencies and structured basic and intermediate skills in order to meet the expectations of consumers, laws, and environmental legislation. Initially, the technological expertise factor was noted as very important for sustaining green product innovation. Furthermore, since proactive leaders are an important factor for successfully developing environmentally sustainable products, it must be added to technological expertise as the foundation for developing green innovation. After defining the basis for green product innovation, the intermediary conditions necessary for using the available technology appropriately were mapped out. In this sense, variables such as “elimination of cultural barriers,” “capacity for critical reflective analysis,” and “experimentation” are also very important. In addition, some of the variables of the cross-functional collaboration and market knowledge factors were a part of the structure that organizations need to transform potential into developing green products, which is the basis for the third level of the model. The fourth level of the model has the “meeting consumer expectations” and “following law and legislation” factors, which make up the main goals for developing environmentally sustainable products according to a number of surveys that were conducted.

This paper addresses the theoretical and methodological issues in women in management research, as the field emerges out of its adulthood and steps into the age of maturity. The four fundamental issues addressed are (i) the need to conduct extensive research in this area; (ii) the need for synthesizing previous research findings and establishing a solid theory base on which further work can progress; (iii) the appropriate methodologies for generating further knowledge in the area; and (iv) future directions for research on women in management, taking both a “basic” and “applied” research perspective.