Business Ethics

Content

This course focuses on Business Ethics beyond ethical issues in business and organizational life. According to Anthony Giddens, Life politics is a politics of life decisions that are conceptualized. The discourse of Business Ethics has conceptualized many decisions that influenced corporate behaviour. Social responsibility and sustainable development have become key terms as the result of those conceptualized decisions. In this light Business Ethics is more than just applied ethics to business practice. Today it is life politics, but not without its historical background of Protestantism. The course attempts to show a relation between Protestant American mind-set and contemporary life politics of business ethics.

Books

• Himmelfarb, Gertrude. (2001) One Nation, Two Cultures. New York: Vintage Books.
• Weber, Max. (2002) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles: California: Roxbury Publishing Company (available at Philosophica for reading, ask the librarian)

Articles

• Grant, Colin. (2002) Whistle Blowers: Saints of Secular Culture. Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 39, pp. 391–399, http://www.springerlink.com/content/tp20172872585623/fulltext.pdf
• Michalos, Alex C. (2001) Ethics Counselors as a New Priesthood. In: Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 29, pp. 3–17, http://www.springerlink.com/content/u5368084551458wt/fulltext.pdf
• Orwig, Sarah Forbes. (2002) Business Ethics and the Protestant Spirit: How Norman Vincent Peale Shaped the Religious Values of American Business Leaders. In: Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 38, pp. 81–89, http://www.springerlink.com/content/b3hatkmwqxxkfga4/fulltext.pdf
• Wilmot, Stephen. (2001) Corporate Moral Responsibility: What Can We Infer from Our Understanding of Organizations? In: Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 30, pp. 161–169, http://www.springerlink.com/content/u28660q0181t7030/fulltext.pdf
• Frey, Donald E. (1998) Individualist Economic Values and Self-Interest: The Problem in the Puritan Ethic. In: Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 17, pp. 1573–1580, http://www.springerlink.com/content/v0446285w7155546/fulltext.pdf
• Friedman, Milton. (1983) The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits. In: Snoeyenbos, Milton & Almeder, Robert & Humber, James (eds.) Business Ethics: Corporate Values and Society. New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 73–79.
• Henderson, David. (2001) Misguided Virtue: False Notions of Corporate Social Responsibility. New Zealand Business Roudtable. Available at: http://www.nzbr.org.nz/documents/publications/publications-2001/misguided_virtue.pdf
• Solomon, Robert C. (2004) Aristotle, Ethics and Business Organizations. In: Organization Studies, Vol. 25, pp. 1021–1043, http://oss.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/25/6/1021
• Norman, Wayne & MacDonald, Chris. (2003) Getting to the Bottom of 'Triple Bottom Line'. In: Business Ethics Quarterly, Vol. 14/2, pp. 243–262.