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This paper considers whether professional codes of ethics are enforceable, legitimate, and just. In analyzing codes of ethics in this way, one must consider whether they exist to benefit members of the profession, or society as a whole. The analysis shifts dramatically based on this question, as codes of ethics are typically created by members of the profession, not by representatives of the larger population, and where they are enforced, they are only enforced among members of the profession. However, professional codes of ethics have an impact on those outside the profession, or the larger society outside the smaller community that created them.

The scope of this undertaking is to categorize that sector of the environment affecting managerial decision making that makes up the “legal environment.” The term legal environment encompasses the federal and state legislative and regulatory powers, plus the common law or court‐developed law that impacts an organization's domain. I have set out to divide the project into three chapters with each chapter emphasizing a major regulatory impact on corporate direction; some predictable, some unpredictable. Moreover, predictability will be dealt with as to controlling the legal environment. Historically, the legal environment crosses over two of the sectors: the government sector, city, state, federal laws and regulations, the court system, and political processes; the sociocultural sector, affirmative action, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, values, beliefs, etc. Certain regulatory powers were anticipated by the frames of the Constitution in order to maintain a system of prosperity and strength. However, many of our regulatory agencies have come into being at the behest of the very industries that are regulated, such as antitrust. Furthermore, many of the regulatory laws came about due to the negligence of the business community in not self‐regulating and thereby permitting intolerable conditions for the sociocultural sector.

This chapter aims to help redirect Business and Society (BAS) scholarship to embrace the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene era including climate collapse and ecological breakdown. The existential risk presented by the new reality of the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of the purpose of business and its dominating working models. This chapter discusses the main problems of efficiency and growth and shows that business efficiency often results in aggregate ecological overshot. It is argued with Herman Daly that frugality, that is, substantial reduction of the material throughput, should precede business efficiency for achieving ecological sustainability. This chapter suggests new directions for BAS scholarship by highlighting three major issues, namely the scale of business activities relative to the ecosystem of the planet, short termism that is the discrepancy between the time horizon of business decisions and that of ecological processes, and inequality which is the result of current business models that are all about accumulation of wealth and not paying enough attention to distribution of wealth. The chapter concludes that the Anthropocene era represents a clear disjuncture and discontinuity from the past and business needs to find a new realignment to achieve a sustainable world. That realignment requires a drastic modification of business-nature relations.

This chapter addresses one of the most crucial areas for critical thinking: the morality of turbulent markets around the world. All of us are overwhelmed by such turbulent markets. Following Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2004, 2010), we distinguish between nonscalable industries (ordinary professions where income grows linearly, piecemeal or by marginal jumps) and scalable industries (extraordinary risk-prone professions where income grows in a nonlinear fashion, and by exponential jumps and fractures). Nonscalable industries generate tame and predictable markets of goods and services, while scalable industries regularly explode into behemoth virulent markets where rewards are disproportionately large compared to effort, and they are the major causes of turbulent financial markets that rock our world causing ever-widening inequities and inequalities. Part I describes both scalable and nonscalable markets in sufficient detail, including propensity of scalable industries to randomness, and the turbulent markets they create. Part II seeks understanding of moral responsibility of turbulent markets and discusses who should appropriate moral responsibility for turbulent markets and under what conditions. Part III synthesizes various theories of necessary and sufficient conditions for accepting or assigning moral responsibility. We also analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for attribution of moral responsibility such as rationality, intentionality, autonomy or freedom, causality, accountability, and avoidability of various actors as moral agents or as moral persons. By grouping these conditions, we then derive some useful models for assigning moral responsibility to various entities such as individual executives, corporations, or joint bodies. We discuss the challenges and limitations of such models.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the risks to a company that fails to understand and respect its social contract.

The paper provides a viewpoint on the “ethical blowback”.

The paper argues that two forces that are now influencing corporate governance reform can provoke ethical blowback, namely: Sarbanes‐Oxley style regulatory initiatives; and internal corporate compliance and ethics programs.

The paper provides a viewpoint on the “ethical blowback”.

Businesses are rapidly automating workplaces with new technologies (e.g., driverless cargo trucks, artificially intelligent mortgage approvals, machine-learning-based paralegals, algorithmic managers). Such technological advancement raises a host of questions for business and society. As Thomas Donaldson recently remarked, “It’s instance of a problem that more sophisticated engineering cannot solve, and that requires a more sophisticated approach to values” (Ufberg, 2017). In this chapter, we explore the value questions as follows: What is the purpose of business in the machine age? What model for business will best serve society in coming decades: profit maximization, stakeholder theory, or another conception entirely? Is it time for a new social contract between business and society? Do firms have a natural duty to offer employment? Are existing concepts of responsibility/liability adequate for an age in which companies use autonomous robots as scapegoats? How can we protect our humanity and dignity in an algorithm-based society? Do we need to teach ethics to robots?

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical model for systematizing human rights norms to facilitate their integration into global business decision making.

The paper relates a natural law conception of human rights to global corporate governance.

The paper shows that natural law theory gives a basis for integrating human rights into global governance while also making a business case for taking human rights seriously.

The paper offers a theoretical framework related to jurisprudence and introduces the concept of reputational capital as an intangible asset that is built up by a firm's proactive advancement of human rights.

Fingerhut, based in Minnetonka, Minnesota, is a direct-marketing company that sells a smorgasbord of consumer goods through an array of specially targeted catalogs. In November 1996, an article in the Star Tribune, a major Minneapolis newspaper, drew attention to a class-action lawsuit pending against Fingerhut that suggests the firm made its profits by exploiting the poor. Several civil rights groups rallied around the suit and submitted amicus curiae in favor of the litigation. The case illustrates issues in ethics and management communication. Discussions focus on the constituencies. Is Fingerhut exploiting its customers or providing them with an affordable method of obtaining valued consumer goods on credit? Do retailers have a duty to offer products at reasonable prices? Are the high interest rates reasonable given the risk? What are the options: pawn shops, rent-to-own? What is the profile of the typical Fingerhut customer? Discussions also focus on the issues communicating to the constituencies. How much damage will the lawsuit do to Fingerhut's image as an ethical, socially conscious company? What communication strategies can the firm employ? Should it react to the lawsuit? What should it tell its employees?

This article discusses the appeal of human rights as a normative basis for stakeholder claims in the context of international business. This appeal to human rights has proven to be an effective way to legitimize (in the sociological sense) the claims of stakeholders due to their proclaimed universal validity and the media interest in stories about human right violations. A problem for corporations that have to deal with claims based on human rights is that there seems to be little room to weigh these claims against the corporation’s interest and other stakeholder claims, since human rights are believed to override self‐interest. Furthermore, stakeholder theory as it stands, does not provide for a criterion to weigh human rights claims against the claims of (other) stakeholders. Following recent versions of stakeholder theory, claims based solely on human rights do not even qualify some person or group as a stakeholder. So the position of human rights‐based claims within organizational ethics remains unclear in stakeholder theory. The question this article tries to answer, is whether a corporation has a moral obligation to fulfil claims that are based solely on human rights and how this relates to the obligations a firm has to its stakeholders.