Whistleblowing protection is typically examined as a governance mechanism for detecting organisational misconduct, financial fraud, and regulatory violations. Its broader ethical function in enabling employee voice and preventing operational harm remains less fully theorised. Drawing on institutional theory, this study conceptualises whistleblowing protection as an ethical infrastructure through which regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutions shape employees’ willingness to raise concerns about organisational risk. We argue that effective whistleblowing protection converts ethical awareness into organisational action by reducing the personal costs of speaking up, strengthening the credibility of internal escalation, and enabling firms to identify and correct unsafe practices before harm materialises. Using a global panel of 18,303 firm-year observations from 60 countries between 2003 and 2023, we examine the association between whistleblowing protection and workplace safety outcomes. The analysis combines firm fixed-effects models with Lewbel instrumental-variable estimation, entropy balancing, coefficient stability tests, and a difference-in-differences design exploiting the regulatory shock of the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act. The results show that stronger whistleblowing protection is associated with significantly lower workplace injury rates, equivalent to an approximately 23
Fostering gender equality is a fundamental pillar of ethical business conduct and corporate social responsibility. Yet, the structural architecture of production in global supply chains, and the institutional contexts in which factories are embedded, can create moral distance between “lead” firms and female workers, constrain the exercise of moral agency across network nodes, and impede distributive justice regarding women’s access to employment. In this work, we investigate gender diversity at over 800 production units of Nike’s supply base by leveraging factory-level data published by Nike, and uncover organizational and institutional drivers of female participation in the workforce. We apply a multilevel lens and theoretically motivate the relevance of six factors spanning three levels (i.e., factory, supplier and country) in increasing female employment. We construct a longitudinal dataset of complex structure by merging Nike’s published data with data from secondary sources. Our analysis reveals that factories producing relatively less complex products and belonging to suppliers with a strong network presence but limited geographical dispersion, employ a higher proportion of females. The same holds for factories in countries characterized by a more individualistic and long-term-oriented culture. Theoretically, this study contributes to business ethics by demonstrating how supply chains influence ethical outcomes, illustrating how factory, supplier, and country-level conditions jointly shape female labor participation. Practically, the findings identify actionable interventions to enhance ethical governance and gender diversity across the supply base.
Businesses increasingly engage in global development work. However, recent studies highlight the lingering risk of companies adopting Eurocentric approaches in their projects, even when collaborating with local stakeholders. While this risk has been identified, it remains unclear how such Eurocentric approaches manifest and prevail in often well-intended projects. Through an in-depth case study of a European company’s partnership aimed at improving water access for an “underserved” community in South Asia, we illustrate how Eurocentric patterns manifested and persisted through a complex interplay of discourse and material practices across different project stages. The corporate actors became deeply entrenched in this approach, with diverse shields in the partnership design preventing exposure to alternative perspectives and hindering critical reflection. By grounding our findings in postcolonial and decolonial perspectives as connected sociologies, we introduce the concept of colonial fingerprints. We use it as an analytical tool to uncover Eurocentric approaches and how they may materialize through a tight interplay of discourse, practice, organizational shields, and adverse development effects. Making such interplay visible marks a first step toward rethinking development approaches, while also acknowledging that the structural entrenchment of Eurocentric patterns can make them difficult to disrupt. We discuss the ethical implications of our work, emphasizing the need to view corporate development efforts in a historical context and to rethink partnership engagement in the context of global development.
This paper examines the conditions under which the use of wasta, a form of intermediation and informal networking widely practiced in Arab societies, is perceived as ethical by leaders in Lebanon’s pharmaceutical, food and beverage, and construction sectors. While wasta is often criticized for undermining meritocracy, we draw on postcolonial theory to analyze it as a culturally embedded practice shaped by Lebanon’s colonial history, sectarian governance, and weak formal institutions. We employ an interpretive qualitative methodology based on 18 semi-structured interviews with Lebanese sector leaders. Our findings identify three aggregate dimensions: the contextuality of ethical leadership, the contextual ethicality of wasta, and wasta as a tool for inclusive opportunity. Leaders consistently differentiate ethical wasta, legitimized when it promotes fairness, inclusion, and social solidarity, from unethical wasta, which serves narrow self-interest or bypasses competence. We contribute to the business ethics literature by showing, through a postcolonial lens, that ethical leadership in the postcolonial Global South is enacted as the situated reconciliation of two value systems whose coexistence is itself a colonial inheritance: relational obligations of reciprocity and loyalty and externally derived norms of meritocracy and impartiality. Practically, the study shows that leaders in postcolonial settings can act ethically by coupling relational obligation with competence thresholds, offering a culturally grounded logic of ethical leadership that does not measure non-Western practice against a universalized Western standard.
The competitive imperative for artificial intelligence (AI) intensifies a core tension: reconciling firms’ moral responsibility toward employees with the growing demands driving technological innovation. This study examines the impact of employee CSR (eCSR) on firm-level AI innovation. Drawing on social exchange theory and psychological contract framework, we posit that morally attentive employment practices enhance employees’ sense of trust and shared purpose, thereby reducing resistance to technological change. Leveraging a novel, text-based measure of eCSR and a dataset of AI patents from Chinese listed firms, we provide robust evidence that eCSR significantly enhances AI innovation. Mechanism analyses further reveal that eCSR attracts AI talent, strengthens internal control quality, and improves productivity. Moreover, this effect is amplified in firms with highly educated workforces and in regions prioritizing digitalization and public safety. Collectively, our findings challenge the presumed trade-off between technological progress and employee welfare, highlighting ethical employee treatment as a lever for AI innovation and underscoring the role of human-centric governance in sustainable digital transformation.
Employees are a special category of stakeholders. They expect the firm to behave in a particular way, which forms the basis of a psychological contract (Rousseau, 1995). If the firm engages in irresponsible behavior, known as Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSI), this may be seen as a violation of such expectations. Through the theoretical lenses of psychological contract and expectancy disconfirmation theory, we argue that there is a negative association between employees’ evaluations of management and CSI incidents that violate employees’ expectations of a firm’s integrity than in the case of other types of CSI incidents. We further investigate how a firm’s CSR performance and the media coverage of the CSI incident moderate the relationship between integrity violations and employees’ evaluations. Analyzing employee responses to 1596 CSI incidents involving 104 US public firms from 2016 to 2021, we find a negative association between integrity violations and employees’ evaluations of management. Moreover, media coverage serves a critical role in intensifying this relationship, whereas our post hoc analyses suggest that employee-related CSR may attenuate these negative responses. Our study contributes to the literature on CSI, psychological contract, and the media, exploring the responses of employees to integrity violations.
What is happening when we encounter moral ambiguity—an experience where habitual norms, rules, or values do not seem to guide action—and engage with that ambiguity in ways that allow us to realize our moral responsibility more expansively in some way? While there is a growing interest in this phenomenon exhibited in studies of moral imagination, moral insight, and moral leadership in organizations, the existing scholarship has focused on phenomena external to the experience itself. This paper provides an account of moral expansion that draws on the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Simone de Beauvoir. Their existential philosophy suggests that an expansion of morals is predicated on the inner orientation with which individuals encounter ambiguity, rather than on any specific externally visible behavior or solution. They emphasize how that inner orientation involves an embrace of ambiguity in relation to the self, to the world, and to others. The paper develops this existentialist account in detail, illustrates it in reference to a narrative example, and discusses how it reframes the study of moral expansion in organizations, with implications for future research and practice.
As virtual influencers become increasingly prevalent in marketing communications, their influence on consumers’ pro-environmental perceptions remains understudied. This challenge is exacerbated by the diverse range of virtual influencer designs that firms can utilize in their green campaigns. Drawing on prototype category theory, we conceptualize virtual influencers into two categories—nature prototypes and consumption prototypes—and propose that these prototypes motivate pro-environmental behaviors through distinct pathways. Building on regulatory focus theory, we further argue that the extent to which virtual influencers enhance consumers’ pro-environmental behavioral intentions depends on the fit between the virtual influencer prototype and the framing of the green message. We suggest that this fit strengthens consumers’ sense of feeling right, which in turn promotes pro-environmental intentions. A series of cross-cultural experiments conducted in China and the United States reveals that prototype-framing fit enhances pro-environmental intentions in both public and private domains, although the patterns differ across cultural contexts. Among Chinese participants, both the nature-gain and consumption-loss combinations produce the expected fit effects by fostering a sense of feeling right. Among U.S. participants, however, the effect of prototype-framing fit becomes asymmetric: the nature-gain combination consistently drives pro-environmental intentions, whereas the consumption-loss combination exerts an influence only indirectly, through the sense of feeling right. Our findings offer practical insights for deploying virtual influencers in green marketing campaigns across cultural contexts.
Business–humanitarian partnerships are increasingly mobilised to respond to acute crises, yet in these extreme contexts even well-intentioned collaborations can harm crisis-affected populations and distort humanitarian action. In such settings, generic, outcome-focussed notions of impact fall short as tools for assessing cross-sector collaboration. This conceptual paper develops a normative framework—the Humanitarian Impact Value Chain (HIVC)—to assess the moral permissibility of business—humanitarian partnerships in acute crises. Building on the Impact Value Chain, we embed the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence as explicit ethical constraints at each stage, from issue framing and mission design to inputs, throughputs, outputs, outcomes, and impact. The HIVC distinguishes principle-consistent positive impact paths from principle-violating negative impact paths and shows how specific partnership configurations generate predictable patterns of benefit, harm, and institutional effects for crisis-affected populations and humanitarian actors. The paper contributes to business ethics by developing a role-based account of corporate responsibility in humanitarian CSPs. It contributes to CSP scholarship by recasting recurrent implementation failures as patterned value-chain configurations, and introduces institutional harm to humanitarian space as a morally significant consequence of principle-violating partnerships.
Unethical consumer behavior, such as deceptive product returns, digital piracy, shoplifting, and falsifying online reviews, is a growing concern with significant economic and ethical implications. However, its psychological antecedents remain underexplored. This research investigates the role of stress as a key driver of unethical consumer behavior, offering a novel perspective on why consumers engage in such conduct. Grounded in conservation of resources theory, we propose that stress heightens perceived threats to personal resources, triggering rumination—repetitive, negative thoughts about potential resource losses—which, in turn, fosters unethical behaviors. Across a field study and five experiments (one reported in the Online Appendix), we provide empirical evidence supporting this mechanism. Moreover, our findings reveal that the effect of stress on unethical consumer behavior is particularly pronounced among individuals with high levels of narcissism. These insights contribute to the broader understanding of consumer ethics and have important implications for marketers, human resource managers, and policymakers seeking to curb unethical consumer practices.
Organizations increasingly publicize commitments to diversity and inclusion (D I), yet inequities persist because inclusion remains excluded from the infrastructures that govern evaluation, mobility, and everyday work. This paper reframes inclusion as an infrastructural problem, one that becomes durable only when encoded into the technologies, routines, and classificatory systems that structure participation, forming what the paper terms moral infrastructure. Integrating institutional work theory with the ethics of care, the paper introduces infrastructural inclusion and develops a six-zone process model that explains how organizations move from the zone of non-aspiration and symbolic signaling toward programmatic action, procedural alignment, systemic redesign, and ultimately, infrastructural care. Central to this shift is Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM), as an institutional actor bearing distinctive ethical responsibility because its jurisdiction over job architectures, appraisal systems, and workflow design gives it the structural authority to translate moral commitments into system-level change. The model illuminates why organizations stall in symbolic or programmatic modes and offers a vocabulary for understanding how moral infrastructure is built, maintained, and sometimes reversed. This is a conceptual theory-building paper that advances a process model explaining how inclusion becomes materially embedded in organizational infrastructures.
This study investigates the micro-foundational process of board ethical decision-making in the Chinese banking sector. Departing from static governance models, we develop a behavioral framework in which directors’ distinct ethical frames are cultivated by their professional and values-based backgrounds; these frames are then filtered through the board’s culturally embedded social dynamics, such as deference to authority and harmony-seeking in the Chinese context, to shape collective ethical decisions. Drawing on a sample of all listed banks in China from 2010 to 2024, our results reveal a clear hierarchy of director influence. Directors with communist party of China (CPC) membership exert a robust and immediate negative effect on green lending. This effect reflects their prudential ethical frame, which prioritizes systemic stability and is amplified by the board’s deference to high-status members. Directors with financial regulatory experience and female directors are associated with greater green lending in the longer term. For female directors, the short-term influence is muted or briefly negative before the stakeholder-oriented frame takes root through institutionalization. The reason is that the strategic frame and the stakeholder-oriented frame they introduce belong to minority voices that require time to permeate the board’s cognitive norms. Moreover, this deliberative process operates primarily under soft regulation, where boards retain discretion and moral agency. By illuminating how diverse ethical frames compete and institutionalize within the boardroom, this study extends foundational governance theories. It also answers the call for contextually embedded frameworks of ethical governance in non-Western settings.
There has been an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of motivational and playful design, commonly referred to as gamification in improving business performance and its alignment with ethical standards. While gamification strategies and approaches are widely recognized for enhancing consumer engagement, questions remain about how consumers perceive their ethicality, and it is particularly unclear whether and how certain design aspects influence consumers’ ethical judgments. This study addresses this gap by examining how two key design aspects, social dynamics (singleplayer vs. multiplayer (collaboration vs. competition)) and agency (yes/skill-based vs. no/luck-based), shape ethical judgment of gamified marketing campaigns by conducting an online experiment. A total of 871 participants were randomly assigned to one of six conditions featuring a “Spin to Win” game, which provided monetary rewards (final N = 735). Given that individuals’ ethical ideologies influence how they interpret moral issues, idealism and relativism were investigated as key moderators. The findings reveal that ethical judgment was significantly influenced by social dynamics. Consumers rated the singleplayer design more favorably than the multiplayer conditions. Additionally, within multiplayer design, consumers perceive collaboration-based design as more ethical than competition-based design. Surprisingly, no significant differences emerged across agency levels. However, a significant interaction effect between agency and social dynamics was identified, involving levels of idealism and relativism. Grounded in empirical findings, this study addresses the gap in understanding the ethics of gamification within the marketing context and contributes to the literature by offering concrete practical recommendations for marketing managers aiming to enhance the ethicality of their gamified campaigns.
Currently, increasing attention is being given to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance due to the importance of ethical issues in international business and the need for organizations to operate with integrity whilst navigating diverse cultural, legal, and social landscapes. In this context, this work investigated the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, corruption control, accountability, and ESG performance (index) using panel data from 22 Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) countries for the period of 1996–2022 and employing Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, Newey–West standard errors, and the fully modified ordinary least squares estimation techniques. The pollution halo hypothesis (PH), pollution haven hypothesis (PHH), and institutional theory provided the basic theoretical frameworks of the study. The results suggest that FDI inflows positively and significantly correlate with ESG performance. Similarly, corruption control and accountability appear to promote ESG performance, highlighting that effective monitoring processes and corruption control may support sustainability in LAC. The outcomes of this work demonstrate that international trade is significantly and positively related to ESG performance, and correspondingly, foreign portfolio investments (FPIs) and economic size significantly promote ESG performance in LAC. The environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis was not validated for LAC. However, unexpectedly, the interaction effect of FDI inflows and accountability showed a negative relationship with ESG performance. The causal relationship suggests a bidirectional connection between FDI inflows and ESG performance. A unidirectional connection of both accountability and FPIs with ESG performance was also found. As such, the governments of host countries should promote sustainable inflows of FDI, whilst policymakers and corporate managers should integrate ESG norms into international trade and foreign investments to foster a more responsible business environment.
Research on auditing ethics explains ethical recognition, judgment, intention, voice, collective deliberation, audit-firm conditions, and reduced audit quality acts. However, it does not provide a concern-level explanation of how matters become recognized as ethically significant and subsequently progress through external audit practice. Drawing on Traditional Grounded Theory and interviews with 30 South African professionals with external audit experience, including seven working in international offices, this paper develops Ethical Enactment Theory. The theory begins with ethical alertness, through which a matter becomes a recognized ethical concern. The ethical significance spectrum captures variation in how auditors register and weigh that significance, while ethical calibration compares these interpretations against evidence, professional requirements, and shared professional reference points. Governance-conditioned conversion explains how consultation makes a recognized concern jointly assessable, conditional escalation routes it where additional authority, independence, expertise, or protection is required, and documentation preserves the concern, evidence, reasoning, decision, and response for review. Ethical enactment occurs where the concern is incorporated into audit work through an appropriately supported response or reasoned closure. Where progression weakens, the concern may be deferred, diluted, or displaced. These forms describe what happened to the concern. Intentional procedural departure separately qualifies a form only where the evidence establishes that the auditor knew the required professional response and knowingly avoided it or substituted an inadequate response. The theory explains how ethical responsibility is enacted or weakened through distributed professional processes in external auditing.
Following a prominent view business corporations are “private governments” that exercise discretionary authority over the workforce. Assuming that authority requires legitimation and that the predominant mode of legitimation is by democratic procedures, it is commonly argued that corporate authority is legitimate only if the workforce is granted rights of democratic participation in corporate decision-making. This paper take issue with the premise that corporations are necessarily governed by appeal to authority. A major defect in the current literature is that the conditions for the exercise of authority are scarcely defined. Following predominant conceptions of authority in legal and moral theory, this paper argues that there are two necessary and together sufficient conditions for exercises of authority: the intention that others comply with directives and that subjects generally comply or conform with directives (de facto authority). This account is used as a reference point to show that prevalent accounts of the relationship between employees and the management in corporations are unable to substantiate the conclusion that the management is exercising authority. Neither the fact that the management make decisions affecting the workforce; that the management enforce decisions against employees; that corporations are hierarchical organizations; or that corporations are legally entitled to authority, are reasons to conclude that employees are subjected to exercises of corporate authority. Though the conclusion is not that corporations cannot or do not exercise authority, the claim defended is that authority is a contingent rather than necessary feature of business corporations.
Mining companies have a duty to provide environmental accounts to nature as a stakeholder, yet the quality of these disclosures remains poorly understood. This study examines environmental accountability information quality by analyzing 152,567 environmental sentences from 5238 Annual Information Forms submitted to Canadian regulators between 1998 and 2023. Drawing on Habermasian concepts of ideal speech acts and distorted communication together with an eco-ethical stakeholder lens, we assess disclosure quality through three dimensions: specificity (concrete, verifiable detail), novelty (new information relative to prior filings), and proportionality (“useful” versus “fluffy” content). Our computer-assisted textual analysis reveals a paradox: while absolute disclosure substance has grown substantially over 25 years, proportionate quality has declined. Mining companies now provide more specific and novel sentences in absolute terms, but these are increasingly buried beneath repetitive and boilerplate content; later filings essentially show deteriorating signal-to-noise ratios. In addition, attributes conventionally associated with transparency do not straightforwardly improve proportional quality: large firms produce higher-quality disclosures than smaller ones but still contribute to this overall pattern. While audit oversight and regulatory exposure are associated with less filler content and more useful disclosure, substantive information is nonetheless diluted by disclosure expansion and routinization over time. These findings suggest that environmental disclosures increasingly function as distorted communication—appearing transparent while offering less real accountability to nature.
Corruption affects societies worldwide and takes diverse forms across both the public and private sectors. Existing research highlights the complexity of its antecedents and how they operate across macro, meso, and micro levels. However, while public-sector corruption dynamics have received extensive scholarly attention, the literature on “corporate corruption” remains fragmented with respect to its antecedents. This fragmentation limits understanding of corruption mechanisms in the private sector, despite their critical importance for designing targeted and effective anti-corruption policies. To address this gap, this article conducts a scoping review of 93 quantitative studies, synthesising the antecedents of corporate corruption alongside the theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches used to examine them. Drawing on multilevel theory and a conditional perspective, the study maps these antecedents within a dynamic framework that captures both the levels at which they operate and their influence on the conditions necessary for corporate corruption to materialise. By consolidating existing evidence on the antecedents of corporate corruption, this study advances the corruption literature and provides practical insights for policymakers and business leaders seeking to design targeted anti-corruption strategies and strengthen internal governance policies.
With the increasing societal pressure to view corporate tax as part of corporate social responsibility (CSR), this paper explores the intersection between legal compliance and CSR. It examines the implications for legal tax compliance, drawing on interviews with private-sector tax professionals who consider corporate tax practices an element of CSR. The findings reveal that these professionals perceive legal compliance as a multidimensional concept shaped by business ethics. This perspective marks a shift from the traditional view of corporate tax compliance as a technical, accounting-focused task disconnected from core business values. The paper identifies three critical factors for integrating CSR with legal compliance in corporate tax practices: supportive senior management, an engaged tax director, and a substantive tax policy. These factors are theorized to enable the responsibilization of legal compliance wherein legal compliance is imbued with ethical considerations and embedded within the organization’s CSR framework. By exploring this intersection, the paper broadens the understanding of CSR as a dynamic construct that interacts with legal practice, helping tax professionals navigate evolving challenges in compliance. It contributes to the literature on tax as a social and institutional practice, shedding light on a less-explored development where tax professionals move beyond the traditional priorities of cost minimization and strict adherence to the letter of the law.
With scholars heralding free and open discourses between corporations and their stakeholders as a governance panacea, deliberative democracy has come to the forefront of business ethics research. Critics, however, have called into question whether corporations are, at all, viable entities to engage in such deliberative discourses due to their embeddedness in competition and their subsequent reliance on self-interest. In this paper, I argue that this objection is not only based on a questionable interpretation of the works of Jürgen Habermas that underpin deliberative democracy, particularly an overestimation of the demand for benevolence in his theory; it also overlooks the important similarities between corporate actors and their counterparts in politics and civil society. Building on this idea, I develop more nuanced criteria for assessing the discourse viability of corporations and other governance actors: first, the criterion of whether acting responsibly gives the organization an advantage in its respective competition; and second, the criterion of whether there are credible signs of a benevolent orientation in the organization. Ultimately, the paper contends that the categorical dismissal of corporations from deliberative discourses is not only unjustified on a theoretical level; weakening their role could also lead to their diminished participation in multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), possibly even to their exclusion, creating far-reaching consequences for the numerous initiatives worldwide that are supported or even established by corporations.
