Genealogies of Corporate Morality: Approaching Business Ethics through Intellectual History
Call for Abstracts, deadline – 1st November 2024 | Workshop – 25th-27th June 2025
University of St Andrews Business School, Scotland, UK
Co-organised with the Corporate Subjects: An Intellectual History of the Corporation project, Copenhagen Business School, funded by the Carlsberg-Foundation
Where did ideas about corporate morality come from, and why does it matter? Business ethics, a field which has been expanding in Western scholarship since the 1970s, tends to prioritise a philosophical rather than a historical reading of past ethical thought. Although the works of ‘historical figures’ (Werhane et al, 2017) in philosophy have enriched modern analyses of corporate ethics, they tend to be read instrumentally – for their usefulness in addressing contemporary ethical questions – rather than historically, with the primary aim of reconstructing the past intellectual contexts to which these philosophers responded (Skinner, 2002; Hühn, 2015). Nonetheless, ethical responses to the modern corporation are increasingly informed by emerging research on the corporation’s intellectual history (e.g., Ciepley, 2023; Claassen, 2021; Gindis, 2020a; Harris, 2020; Ireland, 1999; Jessen, 2012; Logan, 2019; Mansell, 2024; Mansell and Sison, 2020; Phillips et al, 2020; Stern, 2023). Situating the history of corporations’ behaviour, purpose, rights and responsibilities in their intellectual contexts can reveal the ethical, economic, political and legal assumptions underpinning contemporary business ethics. This historical turn enables us to explore the frameworks and limitations of a field of scholarship that still privileges certain canons and contexts, often foregrounded in Western ideas.
