Applying Care Ethics to Business is a multidisciplinary collection of original essays that explores the intersection between the burgeoning field of care ethics and business. Care ethics is an approach to morality that emphasizes relational, particularist, and affective dimensions of morality that evolved from feminist theory and today enjoys robust intellectual exploration. Care ethics emerged out of feminist theory in the 1980's and the greatest contribution to moral analysis among Women' Studies scholars. Today, feminists and non-feminist scholars are increasingly taking care ethics seriously. Applying care to the marketplace is a natural step in its maturity. Applying Care Ethics to Business is the first book-length analysis of business and economic cases and theories from the perspective of care theory. Furthermore, given economic turbulence and the resulting scrutiny of market practices, care ethics provides fresh and timely insight into ideal business values and commitments. In many ways, care ethics’ emphasis upon connection and cooperation as well as the growth and well-being of the other make it appear to be the antithesis of the corporate character. Nevertheless, many contemporary theorists question if traditional moral approaches based on autonomous agents is adequate to address a shrinking and interconnected world—particularly one that is marked by global markets. Applying Care Ethics to Business offers a unique opportunity to rethink corporate responsibility and business ethics.

This book investigates how businesses can adapt their executive and fiscal practices to adopt an ethical, equal-opportunity approach. The authors demonstrate how corporations can create sustainable work environments that embrace feminist care ethics and ground their research in a strong theoretical discussion of this relatively new framework. The discussion has a multidisciplinary outlook and explores how the concept of care ethics might be successfully applied to various professional contexts. Later chapters present findings from an empirical case study conducted in Australia and use both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse the potential power of a feminist care of ethics approach within commercial and corporate management.

The ethic of care has developed to become a body of theory that has expanded from its roots in social psychology to many other disciplines in the social sciences as well as the humanities. This work on care has informed both theory and practice by generating complex accounts of care ethics for multiple and intersecting kinds of relationships, and for a variety of domains and contexts. Its application now extends from the moral to the political realm, from personal to public relationships, from the local to the global, from feminine to feminist virtues and values, and from issues of gender to issues of power and oppression. The developments in the theories and applications of care ethics over the past few decades make this book an appropriate and timely publication. It includes chapters by authors who are developing or expanding theories of care ethics and also by those who work on applying and extending insights from care ethics to practices and policies in personal and institutional settings. Care Ethics provides readers from different disciplines and professional groups with a substantial number of new theories and applications from both new and established authors. This book was originally published as two special issues of Ethics and Social Welfare.

Care is a human ability we all need for growing and flourishing. It implies considering the needs and interests of others, and the quality of how we relate to each other is often defined by care. While the value of care in private life is widely recognized, its role in the public sphere is contested and subject to political debates. In work organizations, instrumentality frequently overrides considerations for colleagues’ and co-workers’ well-being, while relationships are often sacrificed in the service of performance and meeting organizational targets. The questions this volume attempts to address concerns the organizational conditions that make care flourish and how a caring organization functions in practice. Specifically, we examine what it means to care for each other and what enhances caring behaviours in organizations. The volume ultimately focuses on how caring relations can contribute to making organizations better places. In this perspective, care involves the recognition of, and the limitations of, work as a key aspect of personal and social identity. Because care exceeds the sphere of individual intimacy, the book will also centre on the necessity for building caring institutions through a political process that considers the needs, contributions, and prospects of many different actors. This book aims to contribute to academic discussions on care in organizations, care work, business and organizational ethics, diversity, caring leadership, well-being in organizations, and research ethics. Managers, consultants, policy-makers, and students will find reflections about the goodness of care in organizations, and guidance about the ethical and practical difficulties of pursuing the project of building caring organizations.

This book explores the relationship between philosophy and business ethics. Academics and practitioners often muse about the ethical and moral aspect of management and business actions, but these studies can lack a deeper philosophical grounding. Contributors to this volume challenge this gap by applying different philosophical paradigms and theories to business management issues. The territory covered by the contributions collected in this book spans from the foundations of business management literature itself, to the role of philosophy in new business models and technology; from the way philosophical theory can explain – and encourage – ethical firm behaviour, to the political stance that an organization takes. Contributors take a holistic approach to business and management, bringing together real-world examples and rich academic theory, creating an interdisciplinary volume, with international authors. Covering important topics such as corporate social responsibility, sustainability, leadership, and stakeholder relations, this book will be of interest to academics working in the field of business ethics, philosophy and management studies.

Care Ethics and Poetry is the first book to address the relationship between poetry and feminist care ethics. The authors argue that morality, and more specifically, moral progress, is a product of inquiry, imagination, and confronting new experiences. Engaging poetry, therefore, can contribute to the habits necessary for a robust moral life—specifically, caring. Each chapter offers poems that can provoke considerations of moral relations without explicitly moralizing. The book contributes to valorizing poetry and aesthetic experience as much as it does to reassessing how we think about care ethics.

The excellent list of themes and chapters in this volume reflects the maturity reached by feminist economics in its different dimensions. Based on the notion of social provisioning for all as the basic objective of economics, they represent a challenge to conventional economic thought and they show the importance of understanding theory, institutions, empirical work, and policy from a gender perspective. The global perspective provided through themes and authors is a very useful contribution to the literature. Lourdes Bener'a, Cornell University, US Standard economics has a narrow and distorted vision of what the economy is, and how it works. Gender scholars are on the forefront of developing better, more encompassing models of human provisioning for well-being. This volume presents a wonderful sampling of these new theoretical and empirical developments. Paula England, New York University, US This is an impressive collection that delves deeply and broadly into the myriad ways that gender shapes and alters economic lives and illuminates complex facets of the economic and social provisioning process across the globe. The chapters, by an exciting variety of researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners from numerous fields, present a consistent and persuasive vision of economic well-being as critical to the flourishing of all people. Myra H. Strober, Stanford University, US In the aftermath of global economic downturn, it has never been more important to understand how gender relates to economic life and well-being. This interdisciplinary collection of original research details key areas of intersection, provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of research and proposes avenues for further investigation. The Handbook illuminates complex facets of the economic and social provisioning process across the globe. The contributors academics, policy analysts and practitioners from wide-ranging areas of expertise discuss the methodological approaches to, and analytical tools for, conducting research on the gender dimension of economic life. They also provide analyses of major issues facing both developed and developing countries. Topics explored include civil society, discrimination, informal work, working time, central bank policy, health, education, food security, poverty, migration, environmental activism and the financial crisis. Economists, sociologists and political scientists will find this book to be an invaluable research tool, as will academics, researchers and students with an interest in economics particularly feminist economics gender studies and global studies.