Society for Business Ethics 2024 Annual Meeting

Paper Abstracts: Session 11

 

Session 11A: The Is-Ought Distinction, Continental Philosophy, And The Polycrisis

  • Beyond The Is And Ought: Approaching Ethics Through Phenomenological Insights
    • This paper explores the intrinsic link between descriptive and normative dimensions in (business-) ethics, challenging traditional separations between “what is” and “what ought to be.” Utilizing philosophical insights from Wittgenstein and Heidegger, it argues that our understanding, descriptions, and evaluations of the world are inherently normative, shaped by the grammar of our lifeform respectively the existential relation between Dasein and das Man. The paper argues for a more nuanced approach to ethics and outlines ways to integrate descriptive work into normative discussions and business ethics discourse through highlighting the co-constitutive nature of the descriptive and the normative.
  • Business, Life, and an Ethics of Commitment
    • In this paper, we want to recalibrate the work of Jacque Derrida to help us think about time, the life and the death. In particular, we want to revisit the implications of deconstruction for business ethics whilst to avoiding conflation of the description of an unconditional hospitality and the prescription of a conditional ethics to be responsible to the other. Martin Hägglund’s reading and application of Derrida’s work guides us throughout and helps us rediscover a positive recognition and confirmation of the finitude and the fragility of life. A recognition of our mutual finitude, our shared vulnerability, opens the way for the intelligibility of an ethical requirement of mutual care and justice. It forces us to take responsibility of the life we choose and live on, and thus to reflect upon how and what we should do with our time.
  • Universal Ownership: A Paradigm for the Polycrisis
    • “Universal owners” are diversified asset owners whose fortunes rise and fall with those of the market as a whole. These universal owners—pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and the like—have an interest in the health of the entire economy, because a large majority of their returns come from overall market returns. The health of the financial system, however, is increasingly threatened by systemic risks such as climate change and biodiversity loss, the costs of which to the system as a whole are likely to far outweigh any outperformance universal owners could secure through clever stock selection. Accordingly, the only way for universal owners to preserve the health of their portfolios in the long-term—and to meet liabilities some decades from now—is to protect the source of the vast majority of their returns: a well-functioning market underpinned by robust environmental and social substrates. This paper explains the concept of universal ownership while both confining and expanding its definition in light of the pressures of the 21st Century; explores the implications of the theory in terms of the practices of universal owners; examines the evolution of the concept of fiduciary duty as it relates to environmental and social systemic risks; expresses universal ownership in mathematical terms to illustrate its bounds relative to material social and environmental issues of our age; and concludes with a call for further research on the topic.

Session 11B: Narcissism, Illegal Demographic Questions, And Ethical Followership

  • I Am My Venture, My Venture Is Me: How Venture-Founder Entanglement Leads To Entrepreneurial Misconduct
    • Entrepreneurial misconduct in firms with large valuations has spurred research into what causes entrepreneurs to engage in such behavior. That research thus far has primarily focused on external factors such as the hype and pressure of entrepreneurship, in addition to entrepreneurs’ moral disengagement, to explain entrepreneurial misconduct. Despite the advances of those explanations, we argue that there are fundamental differences related to how entrepreneurs approach the entrepreneurial process and specifically their degree of identification with their venture that shape entrepreneurs’ response to the external factors previously studied and application of moral disengagement. We develop the concept of venture-founder entanglement and a model of how it emerges and its consequences to further understand why entrepreneurs engage in entrepreneurial misconduct. In doing so, we contribute to the literature on entrepreneurship, identity, and misconduct.
  • Are Narcissists Sensitive To Bullying Norms? The Interactive Effects Of Narcissism And Injunctive Norm Perceptions On Workplace Bullying Perpetration
    • This study examines the extent to which injunctive norm perceptions moderate the effects of narcissism on workplace bullying perpetration. Data were obtained from 399 full-time workers, employed across a range of organizations and industry types. Participants completed two survey sessions, separated in time by two weeks to reduce the possibility of common method bias in the relationships between predictor variables and the primary dependent variable. Results indicate that narcissism, descriptive norm perceptions, and injunctive norm perceptions predict workplace bullying above and beyond previously demonstrated predictors like gender, social desirability, and Big Five traits. Additionally, as predicted, narcissism interacted with injunctive norm perceptions to influence bullying: the positive effect of narcissism on bullying became stronger when injunctive norms were permissive toward bullying. This is the first study to demonstrate effects of descriptive and injunctive norms on bullying and the first to demonstrate an interaction between narcissism and injunctive norms on this behavior. Results support theoretical accounts of narcissists’ use of the social environment to support grandiose, but fragile self-images as well as supporting propositions of the focus theory of normative conduct. An important implication for practitioners is that ‘social norms marketing’ methods may be useful in changing norm perceptions to reduce bullying perpetration.
  • Just Don’t Ask: Different Perceptions Between Recruiters And Candidates For Asking Illegal Demographic Questions In Job Interviews
    • Job candidates often encounter illegal questions about their personal life during interviews. Through five multi-method studies, we delve into the reasons behind interviewers asking such questions and the motivations driving candidates to answer them. Our findings illuminate a stark contrast in perceived motivations between interviewers and interviewees for why illegal questions are asked: while interviewers deem their queries as well-intentioned, job candidates, especially women, interpret them as veiled attempts at discrimination. We also identify two factors—insinuation anxiety and mistrust—that arise when candidates face such questions. Insinuation anxiety pressures candidates to comply with interviewers’ requests to disclose personal information that they would rather not reveal to avoid insinuating that the interviewer may be biased for asking such questions. Mistrust reduces the job candidates’ desire for the job. Our studies highlight how the presence of illegal demographic questions can alienate women and marginalized groups from the workforce.

Session 11C: Self-Esteem And Reputation

  • Self-Esteem And Technological Unemployment: Should We Halt AI To Protect Meaningful Work?
    • Should we insulate humanity from AI development to preserve people’s ability to form self-esteem and find meaning in their occupations? In this article, we take this possibility seriously and argue that technological insulation would ultimately fail in its aim. In doing so, we will consider two different scenarios: one in which we only halt the deployment of technology that would lead to our replacement as workers, and a second one in which we collectively deliberate to halt technological development as a whole. The former, we argue, fails to preserve our ability to form self-esteem, as we become aware that our role is contingent on a policy that artificially preserves our status as contributing members of our communities. The latter seems unfeasible and overly demanding considering the expected benefits of AI. We propose instead the life of play and the life of excellence in the context of collaborative work with machines as alternative sources of self-esteem to the life of work.
  • The Ethics Of Corporate Reputation Management
    • I examine the moral worth of corporate reputations, and I analyze the morality of corporate reputation management. I conceptualize reputation as a set of propositions that make evaluative type claims about an assessed actor and that sit within the common ground of a reputational audience, and I demonstrate that corporations are the sorts of things that can possess reputations. My moral reasoning starts from the fact that individual Selves are important because they drive our actions and underpin our plans; people realize their humanity by authoring their own Selves, and one of the ways that we respect one another is by recognizing the right to Self-authorship. I argue that reputations are morally important because they are bound up in the creation, perception, and authoring of individual Selves. In particular, corporate reputations affect our Self-conception and also our capacity for Self-authorship. Corporate reputation management is morally justifiable provided it enables, rather than undermines, Self-authorship. I distinguish between backward-facing reputation management, which seeks to manage corporate reputation by manipulating information about past corporate behavior, and forward-facing reputation management, which assesses actions today in terms of their future effect on corporate reputation, By my account, backward-facing reputation management is almost always morally wrong; morally correct forward-facing reputation management understands it as a form of collective Self-authorship.
  • How Do Regulators Respond To Reputation Shocks? Evidence From A Professionalism Scandal At The SEC
    • We examine the investigation intensity of SEC regional offices in the aftermath of a professionalism scandal where dozens of SEC employees were sanctioned for repeatedly accessing internet pornography on work devices. We find that when the scandal was made public, the offices implicated in the scandal ramped up investigative intensity, perhaps to repair their reputation. We similarly observe that the SEC headquarters office also instigated more investigations after the scandal was publicized, but only in regions where offices were implicated in the scandal, in line with increased oversight and less confidence in scandal-implicated regional offices. These spikes in investigative intensity were short-lived, but scandal-implicated offices also handed down more AAERs in the scandal’s aftermath, which suggests that the reputation repair efforts of scandal-implicated regional offices were not just window dressing, but actually led to significant increases in enforcement activities.

Session 11D: Corporate Agency

  • Corporate Oppression
    • It is not hard to believe that corporations are instruments in an economically oppressive system. But is there any sense to be made of the question as to whether, along some dimension of oppression, corporations themselves oppress or constitute a privileged class of economic actors? Here, I use direct and indirect methods to argue that firms are indeed a privileged class of agents in an oppressive market system. On extant accounts of oppression and privilege, we are oppressed by firms, and they gain privilege from this. Moreover, our relations with firms bear many of the hallmarks of oppression, including objectification, double binds, and epistemic injustice. After making this case and answering the apparent absurdity of treating firms as agents in this way, I close by gesturing towards several benefits of recognizing the privilege of firms.
  • The Messy Ethics Of Business Organizations
    • Underlying some of the most influential normative theories of business ethics is the assumption that there is an asymmetry between the moral responsibilities of managers and those of subordinates, arising in virtue of the control managers have over organizational decision-making. Empirical research on business organizations casts doubt on this assumption. While organizational decisions are routinely attributed to managers, the decisions themselves are the product of collective action processes over which managers have little control. Managers may be able to influence the outcome of these processes, but so can subordinates. In some cases, subordinates may have more influence than managers. This suggests that the primary domain of business ethics is not managerial decision-making, but instead the various behaviors by which people (managers or otherwise) exert influence on organizations. I end by discussing how a theory of business ethics that focuses on these behaviors would differ from standard theories.
  • Prospects For Plan-Theoretic Corporate Moral Responsibility
    • Michael Bratman provides a compelling account of institutional agency and intentionality (2022). Since corporations are among the primary institutional agents that the planning theory is meant to cover, Bratman’s theory is clearly relevant to the field of business ethics. In this paper, I examine the extent to which Bratman’s account can capture the main criteria for corporate moral responsibility. As I will argue, the planning theory has no difficulty in accounting for corporate intention, rationality, and moral judgment. However, moral emotion may be harder to capture. I conclude by sketching several ways to deal with this criterion on behalf of the planning theory.

Session 11E: Panel 8

  • Restoring Trust In Behavioral Ethics Research