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In retrospect, it is interesting to consider what the founders of the self-conscious academic business ethics discipline took to be the cornerstones of their field’s subject matter. An outgrowth of the business-and-society literature and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, the emergent business ethics focused almost exclusively on for-profit corporations whose shares are traded on public exchanges. This focus had a variety of consequences for what were taken to be central topics of business ethics. From the for-profit emphasis comes much ethical analysis of the profit motive and whether its effects are pro- or anti-social. From the corporate emphasis comes an identification of the economy with the activities of firms on the S&P 500—and an ethical analysis of business that is often indistinguishable from an ethical analysis of bigness. From the publicly-traded emphasis comes an extended consideration of whether shareholders, who can readily dispose of their shares on public stock exchanges, merit being the objects of corporate directors’ and officers’ fiduciary duties. From all of these together come a sense that the academic discipline of economics is hostile ground on which to find business ethics insight. But what happens to business ethics when different aspects of the for-profit, publicly-traded-corporation focus are relaxed and no longer serve as anchor points for business ethics analysis? What happens when habitual antipathy is jettisoned and business ethicists look at economics with fresh eyes? The chapters in this section may be read as invitations to explore these questions.
This section opens with Chapter 13, What is business? In this chapter, William Kline considers the different senses in which we use the word “business” and how focusing on the idea of business as either organization or activity may shift the ground under our understanding of the subject matter of business ethics. He delineates the conditions for engaging in business and offers a critique of stakeholderism for its failure to appreciate the very activity of doing business. In addressing the nature of business, Kline not only changes the questions we ask but the answers we’re inclined to give to the questions we already ask.
In Chapter 14, The corporation: genesis, identity, agency, Gordon G. Sollars connects business ethics to theories of the corporation with a careful survey of the corporation’s historical antecedents and emergence. He addresses longstanding disagreements about whether the corporate identity is better understood as an entity or as an aggregation of persons, and traces the implications of these alternatives for understanding different normative schemes of corporate governance. Sollars also retraces an important debate over whether the corporation, as distinct from the persons who compose it, may be the locus of moral agency.
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In Chapter 15, Alternative business organizations and social enterprise, Dana Brakman Reiser takes the discussion outside the investor-owned, for-profit firm by considering the varieties of alternative business organizations and social enterprises. Although social enterprises are not wholly unconcerned with profits, each by some device mitigates organizational focus on financial returns in pursuit of some other social or environmental objective. Concomitant with the emergence of social enterprise has been the design and promotion of alternative business organization governance models designed to support bifurcated aims of social enterprises. Contrasting and critiquing both American and European forms, Brakman Reiser provides a historical treatment of the emergence of these alternative business organizations for social enterprise and identifies the peculiar legal implications of each for organizational governance.
In Chapter 16, The ethics of entrepreneurship, Christian Lautermann and Kim Oliver Tokarski counter the narrowly big-corporate tendencies of business ethics by exploring entrepreneurship. Unpacking the term from its French and German roots as a form of “undertaking,” they find entrepreneurship pregnant with normative significance: what should be undertaken, and to what end? Offering an overview of both classic and contemporary conceptions of entrepreneurship, Lautermann and Tokarski identify both narrowly economic and broadly social-cultural conceptions of entrepreneurship. They suggest that an understanding of entrepreneurship as a broadly social endeavor allows an escape from the tendency to view social entrepreneurship as a priori altruistic and ethical but ordinary for-profit entrepreneurship as selfish and unethical. Lautermann and Tokarski close by considering both the ethical implications of empirical work on entrepreneurial decision making and the way entrepreneurship appears through the lenses of normatively pragmatic, virtue-ethical, and value-pluralist perspectives.
In the last chapter of this section, The contribution of economics to business ethics, Joseph Heath discusses the ways in which the discipline of economics relates to business ethics. Locating the source of business ethicists’ distrust of economics in economists’ skepticism about the need for or efficacy of business ethics (in the first instance by way of Adam Smith’s invisible hand), he identifies less and more radical versions of this skepticism and the different theoretical paradigms of economics that generate them. However, of these theoretical paradigms, the one most important to driving some of the common concerns of business ethicists and economists is, according to Heath, rational choice theory. An outgrowth of the twentieth-century development of decision and game theory, rational choice theory (and related developments like experimental economics) effectively forced economics and economists to “get normative” and to see the significance of norms at work in market relations. They also provided the tools so useful for work in political philosophy and in business ethics. Heath closes with a consideration of the sources of a new modesty in the economists’ assessment of the role of ethics in business.
Alexei Marcoux