The Rise of Business Ethics

201 Pages·2019·1.453 MB·English

by  Bernard Mees

The Rise of Business Ethics
In 1973, Daniel Bell argued that corporations in post-industrial societies
increasingly needed to behave in accord with widely accepted social
norms, particularly in terms of ethical behaviour and social responsibility.
Yet widespread criticism of business behaviour was not an invention of
the 1960s and 1970s or a product of changing commercial norms. The
key feature historically has been business scandal. Understandings of
how the field of business ethics has emerged are undeveloped, however.
This book is the first attempt to explain the conditions which saw a
focus develop on business ethics, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, and
how the broader field developed to encompass related notions such as
corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, ethical leadership,
sustainable business and responsible management education.
The Rise of Business Ethics provides an introduction and analysis of the
key developments in contemporary business ethics by examining them in
terms of their diachronic development—the key thinkers, the key issues,
the key institutions and how they each contributed to contemporary
understandings of business ethics, governance and practice. Addressing
the topic from a European as well as a North American perspective, T he
Rise of Business Ethics will be of interest to researchers, academics and
students in the fields of business ethics, business and society, business
history, organization studies and political economy.
Bernard Mees is an Associate Professor of Management at the University
of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia.
Routledge Studies in Business Ethics
Business ethics is a site of contestation, both in theory and practice. For
some it serves as a salve for the worst effects of capitalism, giving busi-
nesses the means to self-regulate away from entrenched tendencies of mal-
feasance and exploitation. For others business ethics is a more personal
matter, concerning the way that individuals can effectively wade through
the moral quagmires that characterise so many dimensions of business
life. Business ethics has also been conceived of as a fig leaf designed to
allow business-as-usual to continue while covering over the less savoury
practices so as to create an appearance of righteousness.
Across these and other approaches, what remains critical is to ensure
that the ethics of business is the subject of incisive questioning, critical
research, and diverse theoretical development. It is through such scholarly
inquiry that the increasingly powerful purview of corporations and busi-
ness activity can be interrogated, understood and, ultimately, reformu-
lated. This series contributes to that goal by publishing the latest research
and thinking across the broad terrain that characterised business ethics.
The series welcomes contributions in areas including: corporate social
responsibility; critical approaches to business ethics; ethics and corporate
governance; ethics and diversity; feminist ethics; globalization and busi-
ness ethics; philosophical traditions of business ethics; postcolonialism
and the ethics of business; production and supply chain ethics; resistance,
political activism and ethics; sustainability, environmentalism and cli-
mate change; the ethics of corporate misconduct; the politics of business
ethics; and worker’s rights.
Disturbing Business Ethics
Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Organization
Carl Rhodes
The Rise of Business Ethics
Bernard Mees
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Studies-in-Business-Ethics/book-series/SE0900
The Rise of Business Ethics
Bernard Mees
First published 2020
by Routledge
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© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Bernard Mees to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-61407-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-46422-5 (ebk)
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Preface vii
1 Introduction 1
2 The Corporate Revolution 12
3 Religion and Philanthropy 29
4 The Social Responsibilities of Business 49
5 Business Philosophy 66
6 Corporate Governance 83
7 Ethical Leadership 98
8 Sustainability 114
9 Responsible Management 129
10 Conclusion 143
References 145
Index 177
Acknowledgments
The ideas presented in this book reflect a long intellectual process. Upon
becoming responsible for teaching a course on business ethics in 2008, it
quickly became apparent to me that the field lacked a proper history. As
a historian of ideas who had somehow ended up in a business school, this
struck me as representing a considerable opportunity. But I had never been
very comfortable with ethics as it was taught in philosophy departments.
My first teachers in ethics at university were Robin Jackson and Chris
Mackie, who introduced me to Socrates and Plato while I was an under-
graduate student at the University of Melbourne. I also took courses with
Tim Mehigan and Gerhard Schultz, which first exposed me to the Ger-
man tradition. Brian Scarlett provided my first insight into Aquinas dur-
ing my honours year and I know most of what I remember about Martin
Luther and John Calvin from Charles Zika’s subjects on the Reformation.
I may have been the only person in the School of Management who had
formally studied ethics as an undergraduate at the time I started fulltime
as a lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
At RMIT, Eva Tsahuridu introduced me to the ethical decision-making
literature and George Cairns revived my interest in prudence. Ben Reyn-
olds helped me put together my thoughts on ethical leadership, and any
number of colleagues gave me useful advice as I presented some of my
preliminary ideas at conferences. Many of the students, tutors and other
colleagues I have taught with at RMIT and the University of Tasma-
nia have also influenced the development of this book. David Varley at
Routledge approached me to write a monograph on the topic after I had
contributed two chapters to Routledge Companions on the history of
business ethics—the Routledge Companion to Business History and the
Routledge Companion to Business Ethics ( Mees 2017a , 2018 ).
Outside the confines of university life, my late brother Paul was the first
person to introduce me to Jacques Maritain and Catholic social thought.
I still use my father Tom’s old copy of Plato’s Republic , and I owe most
of what I know about 1950s Catholicism to my mother Roma. It is the
100th anniversary this year of when my grandfathers Ben Mees and Reg
Kelly returned home from the First World War after serving in the Royal
Navy and the Australian Imperial Force respectively. But the person who
has most influenced the writing of this book is my partner Katy.
Preface
Among the photographs I have inherited from my grandmother Dail is
one of her Irish cousin, Mother Kevin O’Donnell. Mother Kevin’s main
accomplishment, if I remember correctly, was that she nursed Pope Pius
XII when he was ill in Rome. Pius XII was one of the most popular of
the popes, a key figure in that 1950s world, now long gone, that I have
only experienced second hand. It was a time of “thick Catholicism” that
I know especially through photos and memories of stories I learned from
older generations of my family.
I did not expect to come across P ius XII while researching this book,
but his 1949 address to Catholic employers occurred at a key moment
in the history of business ethics. Despite coming from an Irish Catholic
family, Catholic social teaching was not something I remembered from
school. Liberation theology was all the rage when I was growing up, but
I only knew what “subsidiarity” was because my eldest brother was a
political Catholic of the Dorothy Day variety.
The Catholic tradition of business ethics was missing from most of the
accounts I read while preparing to write this book, however. A range of
studies of business ethics had been published in Europe in the 1920s and
1930s, but they were never referred to in English-language sources. French
academics were teaching courses in business ethics well before their Brit-
ish counterparts were, and German-language considerations of the interest
groups affected by business seemed to predate the American fascination
with “stakeholder theory”. Was this just another anti-Catholic thing, or
was it most readily explained as due to the language barrier?
American business ethics also turned out to be substantially Catholic,
however. The first textbook published on the topic in the 1950s was full
of references to Jacques Maritain and St Thomas Aquinas, and a famous
survey of Harvard Business Review readers in 1961 had been undertaken
by a Jesuit doctoral student. P ius XII’s 1949 address to Catholic employ-
ers was published in the French Canadian journal R elations industrielles ,
and many of the key Protestant expressions of social responsibility and
business ethics seemed to reflect responses to Catholic initiatives. The
intellectual genealogy of business ethics looked less and less like that
explained in the standard accounts.
viii Preface
At university I had been taught the usual secular narrative: that the
French Revolution had thrown off Catholic superstition and that Anglo-
Saxon Protestantism was the only progressive force in world history
other than Marxism. But where had the Society of St Vincent de Paul
come from, the largest charity in Australia? I increasingly found that
secular and Protestant scholarship was often blinkered. It reacted against
Catholic tradition and did not understand it. As in many other Western
countries, Catholics dominated the more conservative wing of the trade
union movement in Australia, but this was a matter for sneering among
most of my colleagues—unionists of this type were social conservatives
who weren’t really part of the Left. Yet not only did Catholic social doc-
trine support trade unionism, but in some countries trade unions had
been established by Catholic priests in accord with papal doctrine.
The Protestant tradition of business ethics was harder to discern. There
was much talk of Protestant notions of “stewardship”, but this focus
seemed to stem from the writings of John Wesley, and the Protestant
work ethic extolled by Max Weber didn’t really seem very Christian to
me at all. At any rate, most of the early leaders of Protestantism seemed
to loathe one another. There is a park in Switzerland I’ve visited that has
statues of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli in it, three figures who no doubt
would have tried to throttle each other if they had been given the chance.
With such disagreement among key Protestant denominations, was it
actually possible to talk about a “Protestant business ethics”?
The best intellectual history, however, is one that tries to found itself
in a strong sense of biography. Kant’s notion of moral imagination was
borrowed into history by German scholars in the late nineteenth century
and into the English tradition by R.G. Collingwood (1946 ). Trying to
navigate the history of ideas through a closer understanding of the lives
of figures who made key contributions to intellectual production is typi-
cally a more rewarding manner in which to understand its course. Get-
ting to know all that you can about a figure such as Edgar Heermance
is more useful than wondering about how other Congregationalist pas-
tors (or other alumnae of the Yale Divinity School) viewed business eth-
ics. In keeping with the common practice of intellectual history, I have
attempted to remain as faithful to actual texts and the influences these
texts actually cite than by allowing broader assumptions to dictate my
narrative.
My previous book in intellectual history, The Science of the Swastika
(2008), focuses mostly on Germany. But this time I have tried to bring in
other European traditions whenever I can. I would have liked to spend
more time reading about Scandinavian responses to unethical business
practice and South American debates over social justice. The business
world is increasingly monolingual, and witnessing so many European
business ethicists claim that the history of the field in their country began
Preface ix
in the 1980s when the first American-style conference was held reminds
me how much each of these communities has forgotten about their own
traditions. More should also be written about the development of busi-
ness ethics in Asia and Africa as well as South America. But both business
history and business ethics are often neglected in business schools. Deans
want more staff who can teach entrepreneurship, leadership and strat-
egy, not the history of business or business ethics, less so (presumably)
an amalgam of the two. An academic field without much of a sense of
its own history, however, is not much of a discipline at all—it is difficult
to be critical and reflective if you lack historical perspective. We cannot
know the future, but we can learn about the past, and most of us recog-
nise that we receive our sense of ethics predominately from our parents,
not in a manner ignorant of our intellectual upbringing.