Papers in this volume of Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations discuss what an organization provides to society and explains the ethical aspects of that contribution. The volume also explores the ethics of the customer's response in society to what an organization provides, including product boycotts and social approval or condemnation.

In giving an account of what is ethical, we can begin by describing the community that accommodates the good life; to be ethical, then, is to be a contributor to that sort of community. We live in political communities as well as in communities built around families, neighborhoods, churches, and other associations. But for many of us the community that will afford the good life that is the purpose of morality is the organization that employs us. Aristotle claimed tht the greatest ethical questions are political ones; today we have reason to believe that the greatest ethical questions are organizational ones. In Organizational Ethics and the Good Life, Edwin Hartman contends that, as ethics is about the good community, a great part of business ethics is about the good organization. He argues that a large and complex organization has the characteristic of the "commons" studied by game theorists, and that it is the task of management to preserve the commons in the long-term interests of all its members, principally by creating an appropriate corporate culture. A good corporate culture not only serves the interests of the participants but makes the organization a place in which they can develop interests that are compatible with both autonomy and good corporate citizenship: that is, they can develop a sense of the good life that is appropriate to the moral person. Hartman opposes the standard view that the study of organizational ethics is a matter of considering how certain foundational ethical principles apply in organizational settings; instead, he argues, business ethicists should consider how free and rational people arrive at a consensus on practical ethical principles in a morally good organization that leaves room for moral progress. And what makes an organization morally good? In discussing justice, loyalty, and other features of a morally good organization, Hartman draws largely on the work of Rawls and Hirschman. In describing the good life as one in which well-being and morality overlap, Hartman proposes a new version of an idea as old as Aristotle, who taught that human beings are rational but also irreducibly communal creatures.

The latest volume of Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations examines a range of contemporary issues in applied and professional ethics and explores the unique role of organizational ethics in creating and sustaining a pluralistic, free enterprise economy.

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.

Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations

This encyclopedia spans the relationships among business, ethics and society, with an emphasis on business ethics and the role of business in society.

Stories are essential to any organization. They help organizations define who they are, what they do, and how they do it. In this issue we consider how fiction has questioned the moral rules, and examined such situations, and in doing so how it has contributed to our understanding of organizational ethics.