Society for Business Ethics 2024 Annual Meeting

Paper Abstracts: Session 8

 

Session 8A: Gender and Love

  • Repoliticizing Rights: Gender, Development, And Impact Investing
    • A proliferation of human rights discourse in business policy, practice, and academia has sought to establish human rights as an undeniable tool for claiming social justice within capitalism. Yet, claiming justice for women through the logic of rights poses a paradox. In this manuscript, we explore this paradox through analysis of gender lens investing (GLI), a tool of for-profit capital to address gender inequality. We interrogate, rather than assume, that the evocation of women’s human rights—within an industry seeking to fulfill women’s “right to credit”—is the most appropriate tool for claiming gender justice in the context of development finance. When seen through the lens of Butlerian grievable life, claiming equality through rights discourse can be seen as a method of reifying Western hegemony. This project seeks to contribute to and advance the feminist business ethics scholarship on gender in the context of economic development.
  • Why The Way We Love Matters: A Comparative Examination Of Sufi And Western Love Ideals In Shaping The Economy, Power, And Autonomy
    • This paper explores the profound influence of cultural narratives of love on economic structures, power dynamics, and autonomy. Drawing from the mystic transcendence of Sufi love and the transactional relationships in Western literature, it examines how these contrasting ideologies shape gender roles, financial independence, and economic inequalities. The thesis posits that the way societies conceptualize love has significant implications for economic optimization and the distribution of power, particularly highlighting the gendered impact on economic disadvantage. By analyzing the normative importance of the way we love, the paper contends that reassessing our philosophies of love is crucial for fostering a more equitable economic landscape.
  • Women Entrepreneurship In Sub-Saharan Africa From The New Institutional Economics Perspective: Leave Them Alone!
    • This paper calls into question the appropriateness of formal market-based institutions for communal and gendered societies in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on women entrepreneurs in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, and Lagos State, Nigeria. Utilizing semi-structured interviews, observations, and netnography, the research uncovers a pronounced preference for informal systems, such as community financing or support groups, over formal institutional frameworks. This preference is driven by a desire for a culturally congruent approach to entrepreneurship, reflecting a broader aspiration for emancipation and empowerment without reliance on Western and international institutional influences. Importantly, this quest for empowerment operates within existing societal norms without challenging gendered constructs. The findings suggest that policymakers and researchers should avoid imposing a Western paradigm of formal institutions without considering the sociocultural contexts unique to these regions. The study advocates for allowing women entrepreneurs in these environments to autonomously access forms of empowerment they find most appropriate, emphasizing the need to respect and leverage the institutional fabric that best suits their cultural and societal contexts.

Session 8B: Market Failure Approaches

  • Heath And Kant On Navigating Ethical Straits
    • Joseph Heath’s Ethics for Capitalists presents the market failures approach to business ethics as a safe route between the “Scylla” of overly demanding moral views and the “Charybdis” of thinking that legality is the only relevant moral standard in the business world. Heath identifies Kantian ethics as an overly demanding “Scylla” and argues that the Kantian formula of universal law is incompatible with market competition. The formula of universal law is in fact compatible with market competition. Moreover, on some issues, notably including the issue of deception, the market failures account is more demanding than contemporary interpretations of Kantian ethics. If we are looking for a safe route between Scylla and Charybdis, the Kantian tradition is more likely than the market failures approach to provide that route.
  • Discrimination As A Market Failure
    • I compare two alternative versions of the Market Failures Approach (MFA) and consider whether they can confirm our ordinary judgments about discrimination in the labor market. The MFA grounds the principles of business ethics in a conception of the function of the market. The orthodox version due to Heath identifies the function of the market with achieving Pareto optimal outcomes, and characterizes the implicit morality of the market as a set of principles that prohibit taking advantage of market failures. This Paretian conception of the MFA cannot vindicate some of our basic judgments about discrimination. This is largely due to the fact that the various economic theories of discrimination do not identify discrimination as a market failure. An alternative egalitarian version of the MFA identifies the function of the market with establishing relations of equality between participants, where the relevant ideal of equality is implicit in the conditions that make a market perfectly competitive. This egalitarian MFA can vindicate our settled judgments about discrimination, as well as providing guidance for settling open questions, largely because the egalitarian MFA views the principles of market morality as continuous with our moral thinking in other contexts. Reconciling the ideal of the market with our judgments is an important step toward conceiving of a capitalism that is not inherently racist or sexist.
  • The Generalized Market Failure Approach
    • The market failures approach to business ethics has recently garnered substantial critical attention (see, e.g., Cohen and Peterson 2019; Moriarty 2020; Steinberg 2017; Hsieh 2017; von Kriegstein 2016; Smith 2018; Endorfer and Larue 2022; Singer 2018). Though precursors of this view can be found in the literature (e.g., McMahon 1981; Friedman 1970), it was Joseph Heath (2004, 2006, 2014, 2023) who developed the approach and gave it its name. In this paper, I will argue that the MFA is more general than even Heath himself claims. The MFA describes the professional obligations of managers, but the view I develop, the generalized market failures approach, describes the obligations of all market participants. Since efficiency is the implicit morality of the market, it binds not just managers, but all market participants, including consumers, investors and workers. Market participants are permitted to maximize the benefit they gain from market interactions, as long as they do so in a way that does not take advantage of any market failures. Generalizing the MFA in this way has three benefits: first, we gain a unified understanding of the ethics of non-managerial market roles; second, we will develop an even better understanding of the duties of managers; finally, it gives us the resources to respond to some familiar objections to the MFA found in the literature.

Session 8C: Political Spending And The CEO Influences

  • Do Politicians On Boards Increase Political Spending Disclosure? An Examination Of The Relationship Between Former U.S. Political Officials On S&P 500 Firms And Corporate Political Spending Disclosure
    • In this empirical study I examine the relationship of “government experienced directors”, former elected or appointed U.S. government workers who went on to serve on S&P 500 corporate boards, to political spending disclosure. Previous research on this relationship covering 2011 to 2016 used an OLS regression approach to provide support for a positive relationship between directors with government experience and lobbying spending, political connections, investor activism, social and governance performance, and industry competition. I examine this relationship for firms based on the political party affiliations of corporate boards. Furthermore, I argue a quantile regression ought to be used instead. First, disclosure levels do not follow a normal distribution, instead it is weighted towards the lower and higher ends of the distribution, as required for an OLS regression. Using a quantile regression produces a more comprehensive understanding of the link between dependent and independent variables by examining the effect of government experienced directors at distinct parts of the distribution of political spending disclosure levels. Consistent with agency and resource dependency theory arguments, I find that firms with government experienced directors are more likely to have higher levels of political spending disclosure than firms without them. There is also a significant positive relationship for firms with multiple government experienced directors compared to those with one or none. These findings provide valuable insight for investors and business practitioners, and contributes to the corporate political activity and corporate governance literatures by illustrating the impact of director characteristics on S&P 500 company political strategy decisions.
  • Beneath The Surface – How Dark Personality Traits Of Ceos Influence Top Management Team (TMT) Formation
    • Top management team (TMT) characteristics have a significant impact on firm-level outcomes. Given the critical role of TMTs, understanding the factors that influence the composition of the TMT is highly relevant. However, there has been little research on the role of CEO personality as a determining factor of TMT composition. We aim to address this gap by examining the impact of the CEOs’ dark triad personality traits – narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy – on the composition of TMTs. By leveraging a choice-based conjoint experiment with a distinctive sample of 998 CEOs from the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), conducted in 2023, our approach moves beyond previous research by utilizing direct personality measurements while introducing a novel set of characteristics to assess TMT composition. This method enables a more nuanced understanding of how specific CEO personality traits impact the prioritization of different TMT characteristics. We found that CEOs with dark personality tendencies place significantly less emphasis on interpersonal factors such as trustworthiness, cultural fit, and team diversity while prioritizing industry/functional knowledge and entrepreneurial thinking. We contribute to the strategic leadership literature by offering insights into the factors that influence the composition of the TMT and add empirical insights on the influence of CEO personality traits. Implications for theory, practice and future research are discussed.
  • Faith, Morality, And Money: Assessing CEO Religiosity’s Role In Pay Dispersion And Disparity
    • The growing difference in compensation between CEOs and their employees has become a source of increasing societal concern, leading scholars to investigate its underlying causes. Amidst the mixed results surrounding the determinants of pay gaps, this research introduces CEO religiosity as a novel factor, anchored in upper echelons theory, to shed light on this issue. Leveraging insights from prior studies on how CEO attributes, including political ideologies, influence pay dispersion and disparity, we adopt a values-based framework to understand the variations in pay gaps across organizations. We posit that religiosity, a trait closely associated with moral principles and risk avoidance, is a more comprehensive explaining factor of pay gaps than other personality characteristics that have been studied before. By analyzing data from S&P 500 companies spanning 2000 to 2022, we validate our hypotheses that CEO religiosity is linked to narrower pay gaps between top executives and lower-level employees, lesser vertical pay disparity from CEOs to their top management teams (TMT), as well as lower horizontal pay disparity within the TMT itself. This research enhances our comprehension of the moral and ethical values influencing compensation policies and underscores the significance of CEO religiosity as a pivotal personality trait affecting executive decision-making.

Session 8D: Misinformation, Commodification, And Financial Domination

  • Kindly Monetary Masters: How Central Banks Dominate
    • Central banks are unique institutions in that they are the product of the nationalization and therefore state-monopolization of the production of legal tender. And, while fully part of the state apparatus, they are nonetheless intentionally kept at arm’s length from the democratic process. I argue that these two conditions, that central banks are 1) monopoly producers of legal tender and 2) not subject to ordinary democratic mechanisms, make it such that they dominate currency-users in the republican sense. The tradition of republicanism in political philosophy suggests that freedom should be understood as non-domination instead of non-interferences. One party dominates another when they have arbitrary power over the other, even if they never exercise this power. Phillip Pettit (1997) famously gives the example of a kindly slave master who does not interfere in the life of his slave, though at any time her could. Nonetheless, Pettit contends, the slave is unfree, even though he is not interfered with. I argue that central banks are our kindly monetary masters. While they tend towards less interference in the lives of currency-users, they have the power to do so at any time by the use of heterodox monetary policy mechanisms. And, since their power to do so is explicitly and intentionally made undemocratic, their power is arbitrary. Thus, central banks dominate currency-users. I then point to two solutions to make banking non-dominating; one historically left-wing, the other historically right-wing.
  • Deception Through Misinformation And Decoupling
    • Deception intentionally provides untrue information through words or deeds or by decoupling organizational structures to create the false impression of adhering to institutional norms. Its objective is to gain an advantage or avoid a loss. Using resource dependency and institutional theory we develop a typology that analyzes corporate deception in terms of employing misinformation and decoupling to gain or prevent the loss of resources or legitimacy. We explore the conditions under which organizations may routinely use deception.
  • Commodification Revisited: Toward A Production-Centered View
    • In discussions about the limits of markets, many theorists rely on ‘anti-commodification’ arguments, according to which some markets should not be allowed because they would lead to the commodification of things that should not be commodified. Current approaches focus primarily on the transactional nature of markets and attempt to locate the source of commodification tendencies in the very concept of a market exchange. The current debate’s focus on transactions, however, is largely misguided. Markets are not only systems of exchange, but more importantly systems of production. For that reason, I propose that the commodification debate would be enriched by analysis of how commodification happens in relation to producers (but not to buyers). Contributing to that debate, I present a processual model of how the introduction of a good in the market leads to its commodification among producers. Key to this argument is the claim that commodifying a good represents a competitive advantage for commodifying producers over producers who do not commodify. I support the claim by pointing to a fundamental asymmetry between commodifying producers and non-commodifying producers: all behaviors available to the latter are also available to the former, but not the inverse. That asymmetry is particularly consequential when it comes to the production processes. I conclude by suggesting paths for future research on the development of a production-centered account of commodification.

Session 8E: Panel 5

  • Algorithmic Fairness And Business Ethics