Business Ethics in Theory and Practice: Contributions from Asia and New Zealand

245 Pages·1999·6.689 MB·English

by  Patricia H. Werhane, Alan E. Singer (auth.), Patricia H. Werhane, Alan E. Singer (eds.)

BUSINESS ETHICS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
Issues in Business Ethics
VOLUME 13
Series Editors
Henk van Luijk, Nijenrode, Netherlands of Business, Breukelen,
The Netherlands
Patricia Werhane, University of Virginia, U.S.A.
Editorial Board
Brenda Almond, University of Hull, Hull, U.K.
Antonio Argandofia, /ESE, Barcelona, Spain
William C. Frederick, University of Pittsburgh, U.S.A.
Georges Enderle, University of Notre Dame, U.S.A.
Norman E. Bowie, University of Minnesota, U.S.A.
Brian Harvey, Manchester Business School, U.K.
Horst Steinmann, University of Erlangen-Nurnberg, Nurnberg, Germany
Business Ethics in
Theory and Practice
Contributions from Asia
and New Zealand
Edited by
PATRICIA H. WERHANE
Darden Graduate School of Business Administration,
University of Virginia, U.S.A.
and
ALAN E. SINGER
Department of Management,
University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5273-5 ISBN 978-94-015-9287-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9287-1
Printed an acid~free paper
AII Rights Reserved
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1999
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
The Ethics of the New Managerialism
1. Managerialism and the economics of the firm 13
PETER E. EARL
2. New organizational cultures and ethical employment practice: a critical
discussion 27
CATHERINE CASEY
Strategic Discourses and Narratives
3. Environmentally sustainable business and the Rashomon effect 41
PATRICIA H. WERHANE
4. Strategic discourse as a technology of power 51
KATE KEARINS, KEITH HOOPER & DAVID COY
Empirical Psychology and Business Ethics
5. Property ethics and starvation 63
MATTHEW HIRSHBERG
6. The contributions of empirical research towards normative business ethics 79
MINGSINGER
7. Ethics, aesthetics and empiricism: the case of steroids and sports 87
GLYNN OWENS
vi
The New Zealand Context
8. Business ethics: is amoral good enough? 101
IAN GRANT
9. Perceptions of empowerment: insights from New Zealand organisations 113
V. SUCHITRA MOUL Y, AMELIA C. SMITH
& JAY ARAM SANKARAN
10. Ethics in action: the management of intangibles 131
V. NILAKANT & RAMZI ADDISON
The Asian Context
11. Business and culture in the Philippines: a story of gradual progress 145
ALEJO JOSE G. SISON
12. Japanese philosophical traditions and contemporary business practices 167
KEIICHIRO SHIOJI & CHIAKI NAKANO
13. Rethinking the presuppositions of business ethics-from an Aristotelian approach
to Confucian ethics 177
WONG WAI-YING
14. The traditions of the people of Hong Kong and their relationships to contemporary
business practices 189
PO-KEUNGIP
Moral Progress in Business and Society
15. Varieties of progress: commercial, moral and otherwise 205
STAN GODLOVITCH
16. Synergy-orientation and the "Third Way" 221
ALAN E. SINGER
17. Afterword 241
ALAN E. SINGER
Notes on the contributors 243
vii
PREFACE
This book originated in a symposium on business ethics that took place in the Faculty of
Commerce at the University of Canterbury in September of 1997. Professor Werhane,
who was a visiting Erskine Fellow, provided the keynote address, and many of the
papers in this collection were originally presented at this symposium.
We are grateful to Kluwer Publishers for the opportunity to publish these essays in
their series on International Business Ethics. We want to thank the Olsson Center for
Applied Ethics at the Darden School, University of Virginia, and the Erskine Trust and
the Department of Management at the University of Canterbury for their support of
Professor Werhane's fellowship, research for this text, and funding for its production.
We especially want to thank Lisa Spiro, who copy-edited and prepared the manuscript
for publication.
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
This book originated in a symposium on business ethics that took place in the faculty of
commerce, at the University of Canterbury, in September 1997. Professor Werhane,
who was a visiting Erskine Fellow, provided the keynote address. Contributions to the
proceedings were. inter-disciplinary, spanning theory and practice. Subsequent
contributions were obtained from within New Zealand and from Asia. The book starts
off on rather a pessimistic note: the new managerialism (the kind of thing Scott Adams
jokes about in the world-famous Dilbert cartoons) is economically suspect and
psychologically damaging. In contrast, the ending section sounds a more optimistic
note: the trend is one of moral progress, with morality slowly but surely constraining
commercial practices and the new technologies of design enabling us to overcome many
conflicts between ethics and economics. In the intervening territory, we encounter
many insights. We consider the role of managerial narratives and discourse, we engage
in the meta-theoretical dialogue between empiricism and normative ethics and we
examine the cultural contexts of business practices, in New Zealand, the Philippines,
Hong Kong and Japan. An overview of each chapter is set out below.
1. Managerialism and the economics ofthe firm.
Peter Earl. Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand.
Professor Earl's authoritative and distinctive accounts of the managerial implications of
economic theory date back almost 20 years, to his books The Corporate Imagination
and the Economic Imagination. In this important contribution, he traces the relationship
between contemporary managerialism and several influential (but misinterpreted)
economic theories. Earl's message is highly pertinent to New Zealand, but its
significance knows few geographical bounds. Managerial practices such as the
tightening of employment contracts, with policies such as deregulation and tariff
removal, can only be justified by a selective and blinkered reading of the associated
economic theories. By re-interpreting or simply re-reading these theories, the gap
between managerial economics and business ethics can quickly be bridged; perhaps
even closed.
Starting with the seminal contributions of Coase on transaction costs and their
implications for the role of managers in a market economy, Earl moves on to review the
works of Hayek (on the limitations of planning systems) and of Baulmol, Williamson,
Cyert and March, on the importance of constraining delinquent, self-serving managers
rather than their employees (a very evident need in New Zealand, according to Ian
Grant's account in chapter 8). He also points to the innovative work of Downie (which
was not even available in published form New Zealand at the time of writing!) to the
effect that organisational slack (i.e. vague or implicit contracts, etc.) actually confers
competitive benefits because it creates conditions for creativity and promotes intra
industry diversity.
2 INTRODUCTION
Earl notes correctly that "many newly-promoted managers (tend) to operate without
much of a humanistic perspective". Furthermore, lacking any historical perspective,
they naively assume that fear, not trust, is the way to maximise productivity (see chapter
10 by Nilakant and Addison). From an ethical vantage point, it is no trivial observation
that the only undisputed net beneficiaries of these policies are the independently
wealthy members of society and-or management consultants, the "change-masters". In
conclusion, it seems that the currently-in-vogue rationalistic and technocratic style of
management "may well have already served the short run interest of those running the
reforms (but) their prospect for long-term success are highly debatable."
2. New organizational cultures and ethical employment practice: a critical
discussion.
Catherine Casey. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Programmes of corporate cultural change are a rather prominent feature of the new
managerialism. Like the other changes, these come at a very high cost. In this chapter,
Catherine Casey explains how such "culture" programmes damage an employee's
essential sense of self. Whilst programmes such as Value-based-management (i.e.
shareholder value) and re-engineering of the corporation rhetorically employ the
language of participatory team work, in reality they impose a subtle, divisive and
damaging political (i.e. power-related) agenda.
Casey shows her true colours when she notes that the fashionable term "human
resources" is one that "flagrantly extols the treatment of persons solely as the object of
another's utility". Tragically, our sensibilities have been so dulled by the relentless
advance of new-speak that even in the universities, the name change from "staffing" to
"human resources" went almost unnoticed. The new-speak is powerfully reinforced by
a popular but "infantile" management literature; it is seldom challenged, but it amounts
to a surprising and deeply depressing ideological victory.
The new organisation demands not only skill and service, but also consumes a
person's psychic and emotional resources. The cultural programmes "design" the ideal
employee, yet this activity delimits, constrains and ultimately truncates the full psychic
development of each individual. The ethical implications of such programs are
"immense". There is a violation of the right to psychic integrity and to each person's
freedom from excessive interference in the pursuit of self-creation and self
determination.
The new cultures reveal paradox and contradiction at every tum. Despite their
rhetoric of cooperation and flexibility, the reality is competition, aggression and control.
Self-denying team players are committed to long hours of work; yet they are also
required to be self-seeking consumers (this point was not lost on Earl, in chapter l).
Employees thereby experience deep internal conflicts. Of course, such conflict is
inherent in the capitalist (or any other) system; but under contemporary managerialism,
the locus of conflict has shifted away from the arena of class-struggle and towards the
intra-psychic domain. The new processes of exploitation are far more subtle and the
risks of total domination of the person are immense.
3. Environmentally sustainable business and the Rashomon effect.
Patricia H. Werhane. University of Virginia, Virginia, USA.
A. SINGER AND P. WERHANE 3
According to Iris Murdoch, "the ability to see the World as it really is" is the proper
mark of a moral agent. Yet this, like morality, is no trivial accomplishment. Professor
Werhane describes the Rashomon effect, named after a 1950s Japanese movie
Rashomon, whose plot revolves around a single incident. There follow four quite
different narrative accounts, so that what "really" happened remains hard to specify. A
similar situation is found in the diverse narratives on business and the environment.
The "Doomsayer" sees a need to change the "story" of property-rights and consumption.
Cornucopians see that progress and innovation will surely win the day. Others speak of
distributive justice (haves vs. have-nots), or claim that we need to speak of ourselves as
a part of nature, or else its steward, not its dominators.
These are conflicting narrative; but they are also outdated. They do not tell the
story about the design and production of artifacts for the market that actually improve
the environment. One corporation created a fabric for a chair that was not only
beautiful and durable, but also compostable. Another firm has found a way of making
clothing material from plastic containers. These companies are operating with a
framebreaking mental model; they are eliminating tradeoffs by design.
Near the end of Rashomon the narrator laments the lack of trust in society, caused
in part by our inability to see the truth. Yet there is hope. Although we can only see the
world through a cognitive frame, there remains a deeper commonality that makes
communication possible. What actually happened in Rashomon (or what is happening
in nature) is knowable in principle. Moral progress now requires more than the redesign
of artifacts, it calls for re-formulation of narrative accounts so that they also become less
contradictory and more inclusive.
4. Strategic discourse as a technology of power.
Kate Kearins, Keith Hooper and David Coy. The University of Waikato, New
Zealand.
Kearins, Hooper, and Coy report and analyze a narrative account of corporate
performance to which the above prescription applies with force. The documented
activities of a now-bankrupt NZ meat processing company are re-interpreted, with
reference to the Foucauldian concept of discursive power. The authors' account
illustrates the extent to which people can be easily persuaded by impressive
managerialist language (the psychobabble of the 1990s'), especially when it ostensibly
holds the promise of a bright and glorious economic future.
Media accounts of this particular company's activities, which employed the
"language of management and accounting", were highly misleading. The media simply
regurgitated company releases that described the innovative international marketing
practices and the JIT inventory for meat export orders. A more investigative journalism
might have revealed that the company's claims about inventory did not stack up, so to
speak, with the numbers in the company accounts. Put differently, journalists
reproduced and amplified the "strategic discourse" in a largely uncritical fashion that is
described as mere "secretarial work". Being sensitive to discourse rather than facts,
politicians publicly endorsed the company and held it up as an good example. We
heard that "They (the company) were the ones who seized the opportunity, who focused
on the requirement of the market". We read that the CEO was a disciple of