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Difference between WORK ETHIC and BUSINESS ETHICS

keywords: work ethic
Source: Wikipedia
Work ethic is a set of values based on hard work and diligence. It is also a belief in the moral benefit of work and its ability to enhance character. An example would be the Protestant work ethic. A work ethic may include being reliable, having initiative, or maintaining social skills.

Workers exhibiting a good work ethic in theory (and ideally in practice) should be selected for better positions, more responsibility and ultimately promotion. Workers who fail to exhibit a good work ethic may be regarded as failing to provide fair value for the wage the employer is paying them and should not be promoted or placed in positions of greater responsibility.

Promotion of work ethic concept


Steven Malanga refers to "what was once understood as the work ethic—not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.

Max Weber quotes the ethical writings of Benjamin Franklin:

    Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. ... Remember, that money is the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again is seven and threepence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds.(Italics in the original)

Weber notes that this is not a philosophy of mere greed, but a statement laden with moral language. Indeed, Franklin claims that God revealed to him the usefulness of virtue.

Many conservatives believe that laziness is morally wrong, even reprehensible, because one is not doing their share of the work and living off of the hard work of others, and for this reason oppose welfare programs.

Criticism of Work Ethic concept

Slacker and hippie cultures have challenged these values in recent times, characterizing them as submissive to authority and convention, and not valuable in and of themselves, but only if it brings a positive result. Others have said that it is more important to work smart than to work hard.

In the 19th century, the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris in the UK and Elbert Hubbard in the US noted how "alienation" of workers from ownership of the tools of production and their work product was destructive of the work ethic because in the expanding firms of that era, the workers saw no point in doing more than the minimum.

The industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor revised the notion of work ethic to include giving up control over the work process to management so that the latter could study and "rationalize" the work process, and the notion of work ethic thereafter included acknowledgment of management control.

Marxists, and most non-Marxist sociologists, think "work ethic" is not a useful sociological concept. They argue having a "work ethic" in excess of management's control doesn't appear rational in any mature industry where the employee can't rationally hope to become more than a manager whose fate still depends on the owner's decisions. The French Leftist philosopher André Gorz wrote:

"The work ethic has become obsolete. It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will lead to a better way of life. The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact.

Neither is it true any longer that the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. In a post-industrial society, not everyone has to work hard in order to survive, though may be forced to anyway due to the economic system. The present crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed: `the micro-chip revolution'. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of production no longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The work ethic ceases to be viable in such a situation and workbased society is thrown into crisis." André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason,Gallilé,1989
Others believe that the concept of "hard work" is meant to delude the working class into being loyal servants to the elite, and that working hard, in itself, is not automatically an honorable thing, but only a means to creating more wealth for the people at the top of the economic pyramid.

Business ethics
Business ethics (also known as corporate ethics) is a form of applied ethics or professional ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that arise in a business environment. It applies to all aspects of business conduct and is relevant to the conduct of individuals and business organizations as a whole. Applied ethics is a field of ethics that deals with ethical questions in many fields such as medical, technical, legal and business ethics.
Business ethics can be both a normative and a descriptive discipline. As a corporate practice and a career specialization, the field is primarily normative. In academia descriptive approaches are also taken. The range and quantity of business ethical issues reflects the degree to which business is perceived to be at odds with non-economic social values. Historically, interest in business ethics accelerated dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, both within major corporations and within academia. For example, today most major corporate websites lay emphasis on commitment to promoting non-economic social values under a variety of headings such as ethics codes and social responsibility charters. In some cases, corporations have redefined their core values in the light of business ethical considerations, for example, BP's "beyond petroleum" environmental tilt.

Why business ethics?

Discussion on ethics in business is necessary because business can become unethical, and there are plenty of evidences today on unethical corporate practices. Even Adam Smith opined that "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."[1] Firms and corporations operate in the social and natural environment. By virtue of existing in such environments, business is duty bound to be accountable to the natural and social environment in which it survives.[2] Irrespective of the demands and pressures upon it, business by virtue of its existence is bound to be ethical,[Is this a fact or an opinion?] for at least two reasons: one, because whatever the business does affects its stakeholders[3][4][5] and two, because every juncture of action has trajectories of ethical as well as unethical paths, wherein the existence of the business is justified by ethical alternatives it responsibly chooses.[please rephrase] [6] One of the conditions that brought business ethics to the forefront is the demise of small scale, high trust and face-to-face enterprises, and emergence of huge multinational corporate structures capable of drastically affecting everyday lives of the masses.[7]

Individual Ethical Decision-Making Styles

Stanley Krolick identifies four individual ethical decision-making styles.[8] The first is the individualist and this decision maker is driven by natural reason, personal survival, and preservation. The self is the only criteria involved in decisions for this style while ignoring other stakeholders. The second style is altruists who are primarily concerned for others. This approach is almost opposite to that of the individualist. Altruists will disregard their own personal security for the benefit of others. The primary mission of altruists is to generate the greatest amount of good for the largest number of people. The third style is pragmatists, who are concerned with current situations and not with the self or others. It is facts and the current situation that guide this decision maker's decision. The fourth and final style is the idealist who is driven by principles and rules. It is values and rules of conduct that determine the behaviors exhibited by idealists. Idealists display high moral standards and tend to be rigid in their approach to ethical situations.
When communicating with an individualist, one should emphasize the benefits to the other person's self-interest.[8] When communicating with an altruist, one should emphasize the benefits to all stakeholders involved. When communicating with a pragmatist, one should highlight the facts and possible effects of actions. When communicating with an idealist, one should focus on the duties and principles involved.

History of ethics in business

Business ethics, being part of the larger social ethics, has always been affected by the ethics of the epoch. At different epochs of the world, people, especially the elites of the world, were blind to ethics and morality which were obviously unethical to the succeeding epoch. History of business, thus, is tainted by and through the history of slavery,[9][10][11] history of colonialism,[12][13] and later by the history of the cold war.[14][15] The current discourse of business ethics is the ethical discourse of the post-colonialism and post-world wars.[16] The need for business ethics in the current epoch began gaining attention since the 1970s.[17][18] Historically, firms started highlighting their ethical stature since the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the world witnessed serious economic and natural disasters because of unethical business practices. The Bhopal disaster and the fall of Enron are instances of major disasters triggered by bad corporate ethics. It should be noted that the idea of business ethics caught the attention of academics, media and business firms by the end of the overt[19] Cold War.[17][20][21] Cold wars, seen through pages of history, were fought through and fought for American business firms abroad.[22][23] Ideologically, promotion of firms owned by American nationals were presented as if they represented freedom, and local resistance against the excess of American firms were labeled as communist upraising sponsored by the Soviet Block.[24][25][26][27][28][29] Further, even legitimate criticism against unethical practice of firms was presented as if it were infringement into the "freedom" of the entrepreneurs by activists backed by communist totalitarians[26][30][31][32] This scuttled the discourse of business ethics both in media and academia.[33] Overt violence by business firms has decreased to a great extent in the democratic and media affluent world of the day, though it has not ceased to exist. The war in Iraq is one recent examples of overt violence by corporations.

Overview of issues in business ethics

General business ethics

This part of business ethics overlaps with the philosophy of business, one of the aims of which is to determine the fundamental purposes of a company. If a company's main purpose is to maximize the returns to its shareholders, then it should be seen as unethical for a company to consider the interests and rights of anyone else.[38] Corporate social responsibility or CSR: an umbrella term under which the ethical rights and duties existing between companies and society is debated. Issues regarding the moral rights and duties between a company and its shareholders: fiduciary responsibility, stakeholder concept v. shareholder concept. Ethical issues concerning relations between different companies include issues such as such as hostile take-overs and industrial espionage; leadership issues such as corporate governance; Corporate Social Entrepreneurship; political contributions made by corporations; law reform, such as the ethical debate over introducing a crime of corporate manslaughter; and the misuse of corporate ethics policies as marketing instruments.

Ethics of finance

Fundamentally, finance is a social science discipline.[39] The discipline shares its border with behavioural science, sociology,[40] economics, accounting and management. It is concerned with technical issues such as the optimal mix of debt and equity financing, dividend policy, and the evaluation of alternative investment projects, and more recently the valuation of options, futures, swaps, and other derivative securities, portfolio diversification and so on. It is often mistaken to be a discipline free from ethical burdens.[39] However, frequent economic meltdowns that could not be explained by theories of business cycles alone have brought ethics of finance to the forefront.[41] Finance ethics is overlooked for another reason–issues in finance are often addressed as matters of law rather than ethics.[42] Looking closer into literature concerning finance ethics, one can be convinced that as the case with other operational areas of business, the ethics in finance too is being called into question.
Ethics of the finance paradigm
Conventionally, economics is seen as a moral science and philosophy directed at a shared "good life",[43] which Adam Smith characterized in terms of a set of external material goods and internal intellectual and moral excellences of character.[44] Smith in his Wealth of the Nations commented, "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."[45] However, a section of economists influenced by the ideology of neoliberalism, interpreted the objective of economics to be maximization of financial growth through accelerated consumption and production of goods and services.[46] Under the influence of the neoliberal ideology, business finance which was a component of economics is promoted to constitute the core of the neoliberal economics. Proponents of the ideology hold that financial flow, if redeemed from the shackles of "financial repressions",[47] it can be put into service of impoverished nations. It is held that the liberation financial systems would ensure economic growth through competitive capital market system ensuring promotion of high levels of savings, investment, employment, productivity, foreign capital inflows and thereby welfare,[48][49][50] along with containing corruption.[51] In other words, it was recommended that governments of impoverished nations should open up their financial systems to the global market with the least regulation over the flow of capital.[52][53][54][55][56] The recommendations however, met with serious criticisms from various schools of ethical philosophy. For the pragmatically oriented ethicists, blind submission to the a priori claims, such as the claim of an "invisible hand" which are merely ideological, could be ethically counterproductive.[57][58][59] The welfare claim of the laissez-faire finance is disputed because, welfare would be overridden given a conflict with liberty.[60] Further, history of finance does not suggest that firms always maintain principles of honesty and fairness under unregulated environments.[28][61][62] The prudence and ethics of recommendations to the countries which were impoverished by the ravages of centuries of colonial exploitation, subsequent cold wars and subjection to imperial hegemony to unconditionally open up their economies to transnational finance corporations is fiercely contested by ethicists from various quarters.[63][64][65][66][67] Further, the claim that deregulation and the opening up of economies would bring down corruption too is contested.[68][69][70]
The firm, within the finance paradigm, is seen as a complex network of contractual relations, mostly implicit, between various interest groups. "Within this finance paradigm," Dobson observes, "a rational agent is simply one who pursues personal material advantage ad infinitum. In essence, to be rational in finance is to be individualistic, materialistic, and competitive. Business is a game played by individuals, as with all games the object is to win, and winning is measured in terms solely of material wealth. Within the discipline this rationality concept is never questioned, and has indeed become the theory-of-the-firm's sine qua non".[71][72] Ethics of finance is narrowly reduced to the mathematical function of shareholder wealth maximization. Such simplifying assumptions are necessary in the field of finance for the construction of mathematically robust models.[73] Such a mathematical chimera, it is observed, lets the experts in the field of finance into the vice of greed justification. However, the signalling theory and agency theory within the domain of finance reveal clearly the normative undesirability of wealth maximization.[74] Ethics seen from the stakeholder perspective is the privilege of the immediate and remote stakeholders as much as it is the obligation of the firms towards them.
Operational areas of financial ethics
In the sections devoted to 'Financial Ethics' in 'Business Ethics' text books ethics of financial markets, financial services and financial management are discussed [42][75] Fairness in trading practices, trading conditions, financial contracting, sales practices, consultancy services, tax payments, internal audit, external audit are discussed in them.

Ethics of human resource management

'Human resource management' occupies the sphere of activity of recruitment selection, orientation, performance appraisal, training and development, industrial relations and health and safety issues where ethics really matters. The field since operate surrounded by market interests that commodify and instrumentalize everything for the sake of profit claimed in the name of shareholders, it should be predictable that there will be contesting claims of HR ethics.[76] Predictably, ethics of human resource management is a contested terrain like other sub-fields of business ethics. Business Ethicists differ in their orientation towards labour ethics. One group of ethicists influenced by the logic of neoliberalism propose that there can be no ethics beyond utilizing human resources towards earning higher profits for the shareholders.[77][78][79] The neoliberal orientation is challenged by the argument that labour well being is not second to the goal of shareholder profiteering.[80][81][82] Some others look at human resources management ethics as a discourse towards egalitarian workplace and dignity of labour.[83][84][85]
The discussions on ethical issues that may arise in the employment relationship, including the ethics of discrimination, and employees' rights and duties are commonly seen in the business ethics texts.[86] While some argue that there are certain inalienable rights of workplace such as a right to work, a right to privacy, a right to be paid in accordance with comparable worth, a right not to be the victim of discrimination,[87] others claim that these rights are negotiable.[88] Ethical discourse in HRM often reduced the ethical behaviour of firms as if they were charity from the firms rather than rights of employees.[89] Except in the occupations, where market conditions overwhelmingly favour employees, employees are treated disposable and expendable and thus they are defencelessly cornered to extreme vulnerability [90] The expendability of employees, however, is justified in the texts of 'business morality' on the ground the ethical position against such an expendability should be sacrificed for 'greater merit in a free market system' (Machan, p. 68).[91] Further, it is argued since because 'both employees and employers do in fact possess economic power' in the free market, it would be unethical if governments or labour unions 'impose employment terms on the labor relationship' (Machan, p. 67).[92] There are discussions of ethics in employment management individual practices, issues like policies and practices of human resource management, the roles of human resource (HR) practitioners, the decline of trade unionism, issues of globalizing the labour etc., in the recent HRM literature, though they do not occupy the central stage in the HR academics.[86] It is observed that with the decline of labour unions [93] world over,[94][95][96][97] employees are potentially more vulnerable to opportunistic and unethical behaviour.[98][99][100][101][102] It is criticized that HRM has become a strategic arm of shareholder profiteering through making workers into 'willing slaves'.[103][104][105][106] A well cited article points out that there are 'soft' and a 'hard' versions of HRMs, where in the soft-approach regard employees as a source of creative energy and participants in workplace decision making and hard version is more explicitly focused on organizational rationality, control, and profitability.[107] In response, it is argued that the stereotypes of hard and soft HRM are both inimical to ethics because they instrumentally attend to the profit motive without giving enough consideration to other morally relevant concerns such as social justice and human wellbeing.[108] However, there are studies indicating, long term sustainable success of organizations can be ensured only with humanely treated satisfied workforce [109][110][111]
Market, obviously, is not inherently ethical institution that could be led by the mythical 'invisible hand' alone; neither, it can be alluded that market is inherently unethical.[76] Also, ethics is not something that could be achieved through establishment of procedures, drawing codes of ethics, or enactment of law or any other heteronomous means, though their necessity could remain unquestioned.[112][113] However, though market need not be the cause of moral or ethical hazards it may serve an occasion for such hazards. The moral hazards of HRM would be on increase so much as human relations and the resources embedded within humans are treated merely as commodities.[114]
All of the above are also related to the hiring and firing of employees. In many developed nations, an employee or future employee usually can not be hired or fired based on race, age, gender, religion, or any other discriminatory act.

Ethics of sales and marketing

Main article: marketing ethics
Marketing Ethics is a subset of business ethics. Ethics in marketing deals with the principles, values and/or ideals by which marketers (and marketing institutions) ought to act.[116] Marketing ethics too, like its parent discipline, is a contested terrain. Discussions of marketing ethics are focused around two major concerns: one is the concern from political philosophy[117] and the other is from the transaction-focused business practice.[118] On the one side, following ideologists like Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, it is argued that the only ethics in marketing is maximizing profit for the shareholder. On the other side it is argued that market is responsible to the consumers and other proximate as well as remote stakeholders as much as, if not less, it is responsible to its shareholders. The ethical prudence of targeting vulnerable sections for consumption of redundant or dangerous products/services,[119] being transparent about the source of labour (child labour, sweatshop labour, fair labour remuneration), declaration regarding fair treatment and fair pay to the employees,[120] being fair and transparent about the environmental risks, the ethical issues of product or service transparency (being transparent about the ingredients used in the product/service – use of genetically modified organisms, content, 'source code' in the case of software),[121][122] appropriate labelling,[123][124] the ethics of declaration of the risks in using the product/service (health risks, financial risks, security risks, etc.),[125] product/service safety and liability, respect for stakeholder privacy and autonomy, the issues of outsmarting rival business through unethical business tactics etc.,[126] advertising truthfulness and honesty, fairness in pricing & distribution, and forthrightness in selling, etc., are few among the issues debated among people concerned about ethics of marketing practice.[127]
Ethical discussion in marketing is still in its nascent stage. Marketing Ethics came of age only as late as 1990s.[128] As it is the case with business ethics in general, marketing ethics too is approached from ethical perspectives of virtue, deontology, consequentialism, pragmatism and also from relativist positions. However, there are extremely few articles published from the perspective of 20th or 21st century philosophy of ethics.[129][130]
One impediment in defining marketing ethics is the difficulty of pointing out the agency responsible for the practice of ethics.[131] Competition, rivalry among the firms, lack of autonomy of the persons at different levels of marketing hierarchy, nature of the products marketed, nature of the persons to whom products are marketed, the profit margin claimed, and everything relating the marketing field does make the agency of a marketing person just a cog in the wheel. Deprived of agency, the hierarchy of marketing hardly lets one with an opportunity to autonomously decide to be ethical. Without one having agency, one is deprived of the ethical choices.
Marketing ethics is not restricted to the field of marketing alone, rather its influence spread across all fields of life and most importantly construction of 'socially salient identities for people' and "affect some people's morally significant perceptions of and interactions with other people, and if they can contribute to those perceptions or interactions going seriously wrong, these activities have bearing on fundamental ethical questions".[132] Marketing, especially its visual communication, it is observed, serve as an instrument of epistemic closure.[133] restricting worldviews within stereotypes of gender, class and race relationships.
Cases: Benetton.

Ethics of production

This area of business ethics usually deals with the duties of a company to ensure that products and production processes do not cause harm. Some of the more acute dilemmas in this area arise out of the fact that there is usually a degree of danger in any product or production process and it is difficult to define a degree of permissibility, or the degree of permissibility may depend on the changing state of preventative technologies or changing social perceptions of acceptable risk.

Ethics of property, property rights and intellectual property rights

The ethics of property, property rights and intellectual property rights are assiduously contested throughout the history of the concept. Discourse on property gained its momentum by the turn of 17th century within the theological discussion of that time. For instance, Locke justified property right from theological point of view that God has given Land 'and all inferior creatures' 'to men [134] in common'.[135][136][137][138] The idea of property is intrigued with the notion of self as individual. Property ownership is said to enhance individual liberty by extending the line of non-interference by the state or others around the person.[139] Seen from this perspective, property right is absolute and property has special and distinctive character that precedes its legal protection. However, The isolated, self-contained and often competitive and materialistic individual, responsible essentially for his/her own existence is a cultural construct moulded by the unique historical matrix certain cultures went under rather than the truth about human condition. At this era, immersed deep into the cultural construct of atomous [140] individuals, the idea of property right was conceptualized as "sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe".[141] It is during the same time, as the number of black slaves grew, American legislatures enacted comprehensive slave codes that defined the legal status of slaves as a form of property [142] Moreover, it is the time in which the natives of America were dispossessed of millions of acres of land.[143] Ironically, the native Indians were dispossessed of their property of about 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) of land under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson, who is a champion of property rights.[144][145][146]
The notion of property has its etymological root in 'proprius' [147] which refers to 'nature', 'quality', 'one's own', 'special characteristic', 'proper', 'intrinsic', 'inherent', 'regular', 'normal', 'genuine', 'thorough, complete, perfect' etc. The word property is value loaded and associated with the personal qualities of propriety and respectability, also implies questions relating to ownership. The 'proper' person is the one who owns and is true to herself or himself, and is thus genuine, perfect, pure.[148] Combined with theological justification, property is taken to be essentially natural ordained by God.[149] Property, which later gained meaning as ownership and appeared natural to Locke, Jefferson and to many of the 18th and 19th century intellectuals[150] as land, labour or idea[151] and property right over slaves had the same theological and essentialized justification [152][153][154][155][156][157] It was even held that the property in slaves was a sacred right [158][159] till recently as aptly pointed out by a historian, "slavery was more clearly and explicitly established under the Constitution as it had been under the Articles"[160] Accordingly, American Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in his 1857 judgment stated, "The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution". Similarly, neoliberal ideologists too often hold that private property right is "sacred" and thus non-negotiable natural right.[161][162] Those who contest the ideology argue that "property is no different from other legal categories in that it is simply a consequence of the significance attached by law to the relationships between legal persons."[163] The sacred natural right view is contested with the argument that property rights are mediated by historically situated negotiable.[164] Scholars point out that property right is more of a politically negotiated[165][166] and legally regulated right than a natural or sacred right endowed to individuals and firms. Jeremy Bentam succinctly put this, "property and law are born together and die together" [167][168] "'Property it is observed "is only an effect, a construction, of relationships between people, meaning that its objective character is contestable. Persons and things, are 'constituted' or 'fabricated' by legal and other normative techniques.".[169][170] In fact, private property cannot exist without regulation.[171] After centuries of battles of scholarship, common law theory generally tend to favour the view that "property is not essentially a 'right to a thing', but rather a separable bundle of rights subsisting between persons which may vary according to the context and the object which is at stake"(Davies, p. 20).
Property right, referred to as 'bundle of rights'[172] implying a group of rights such as occupancy, use and enjoyment, and the right to sell, devise, give, or lease all or part of these rights,[173][174][175][176] often obscure the responsibility associated with such a right: custodians of property have obligations as well as rights.[177][178] Property claims, it is observed, is fragile and cannot exist without trust of others.[179][180] Property, it is observed, 'is an illusion' –'normative phantasm,' however not a meaningless figment of the imagination, but rather an object of desire through which we are 'seduced into believing that we have found an objective reality which embodies our intuitions and needs' [181][182][183]
In the neoliberal literature, property is seen in the public/private dichotomy and private property rights is presented as a counterweight to state power.[184] The private/public dichotomy of the neoliberal ideologists too is contested on the ground that "any space may be subject to plural meanings or appropriations which do not necessarily come into conflict" [185]
Often, what is claimed as property right later could originally be a forced appropriation rather than negotiation passed on to the heirs of the appropriators.[186][187] However, the rights paradigm tends to stabilize the current distribution of property holdings by securing extant property holdings on the assumption that they are lawfully acquired, socially important and politically and morally legitimate".[188]
Property does not exist in isolation, and so property rights too.[189] Property rights describe relations among people and not just relations between people and things[190][191][192][193][194] for the fundamental truth about human condition is its plurality [195] Some scholars argue that the idea that owners have no legal obligations to others wrongly supposes that property rights hardly ever conflict with other legally protected interests.[196] Further, it is argued, rights impose duties on others and that liberties impose vulnerabilities on those affected by the exercise of those liberties. Ethics of property rights begins with recognizing the vacuous nature of the notion of property.[197]
Intellectual property right is a special kind of monopoly property right. The phrase 'intellectual property rights' [IPR] indicate treating ideas, thoughts, codes and information as monopoly. Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine argue that "[t]he government does not ordinarily enforce monopolies for producers of other goods. This is because it is widely recognized that monopoly creates many social costs. Intellectual monopoly is no different in this respect. The question we address is whether it also creates social benefits commensurate with these social costs."[198] The standards of Intellectual Property Rights are enforced through Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) globally.[199]
Neoliberal ideologists justify the monopoly intellectual property right on the ground that such a monopoly is an 'incentive to invent and develop goods'.[200] The neoliberal claim of 'innovative monopoly' is seen as oxymoron by some scholars.[201][202] Further they comment, 'intellectual property' "is not like ordinary property at all, but constitutes a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity, and liberty" .[200] In defence of intellectual property right it is said that life saving drugs were invented on the hope of profits drawn out of monopoly right over the idea for a stipulated period of time.[203] However, the same case is quoted by those who challenge the patent monopoly. The stiff opposition and court cases from 39 multinational pharmaceutical industry giants against the Medicines and Related Substances Control Amendment Act, 1997 of the Government of South Africa which intended to provide affordable medicine support to individuals with AIDS is often cited as the instance of bad ethics of patent monopoly.[204][205][206]
The ethics of monopoly intellectual property rights, is questioned from various points of views. A basic contention against IPRs in the context of natural rights and moral rationales is that inventions are mostly a social creation of collective, cumulative, path dependent,[207] and interrelated work to which we all contribute, and, therefore, no one person or firm should be able to claim the property. It is argued that innovations happen in a matrix of historically emergent social arrangement letting individuals in the matrix hitting with the new idea and hence rewarding the lucky individuals with monopoly rights is contested. Further, it is not the individual hit with the new idea, but mostly the corporate firm appropriated the idea is awarded with monopoly rights [208] Roderick Long, a libertarian philosopher, observes, "Ethically, property rights of any kind have to be justified as extensions of the right of individuals to control their own lives. Thus any alleged property rights that conflict with this moral basis—like the "right" to own slaves—are invalidated. In my judgment, intellectual property rights also fail to pass this test. To enforce copyright laws and the like is to prevent people from making peaceful use of the information they possess. If you have acquired the information legitimately (say, by buying a book), then on what grounds can you be prevented from using it, reproducing it, trading it? Is this not a violation of the freedom of speech and press? It may be objected that the person who originated the information deserves ownership rights over it. But information is not a concrete thing an individual can control; it is a universal, existing in other people's minds and other people's property, and over these the originator has no legitimate sovereignty. You cannot own information without owning other people".[209] IPR is primarily justified with the a priory notion of 'innovative monopoly' according to which intellectual monopoly believed to be increasing creativity. Enacting laws based on a priori considerations is unethical seen from perspective of pragmatic ethics.[210] Further, monopoly is held as anti-competitive in the current and age old wisdom of political economy and economics.[211][212]

It is commonly held that knowledge economy unlike the conventional economy of scarcity, is an economy of abundance [213] because knowledge economy is sourced on the infinite potential of knowledge and idea rather than on limited resources like land, labour or machinery alone. The basic concept of an economics of abundance should have been egalitarian distribution of goods and services and optimization of production.[214] It is argued that the IPR regime creates artificial scarcity while abundance is otherwise possible and makes the economy more inegalitarian than before.[215][216][217] Boudewijn Bouckaert, questioning IP Law created artificial scarcity writes, "Natural scarcity is that which follows from the relationship between man and nature. Scarcity is natural when it is possible to conceive of it before any human, institutional, contractual arrangement. Artificial scarcity, on the other hand, is the outcome of such arrangements. Artificial scarcity can hardly serve as a justification for the legal framework that causes that scarcity. Such an argument would be completely circular. On the contrary, artificial scarcity itself needs a justification" [218]
The IPR causes concern because intellectual property unlike other forms of material property is unlimited, and unconstrained by limitations of space and time[219] Further, intellect, which was conventionally considered unalienable from its beholding person, is made legitimately alienable and ownable by others. The others who alienate and own the intellectual property is usually corporate houses with portfolios of intellectual property [220] The ethics of a legal system that lets relatively small number of corporate players amassing huge intellectual property portfolios and colonizing the future [221] is contested.[222] Ideas when owned and monopolized it would dispossess the present [223] the generations yet to be born.


Cases: private versus public interests in the Human Genome Project

Ethics and technology

The computer and the World Wide Web are two of the most significant inventions of the twentieth century. There are many ethical issues that arise from this technology. It is easy to gain access to information. This leads to data mining, workplace monitoring, and privacy invasion.[224]
Medical technology has improved as well. Pharmaceutical companies have the technology to produce life saving drugs. These drugs are protected by patents and there are no generic drugs available. This raises many ethical questions.

[edit] International business ethics and ethics of economic systems

The issues here are grouped together because they involve a much wider, global view on business ethical matters.

International business ethics

While business ethics emerged as a field in the 1970s, international business ethics did not emerge until the late 1990s, looking back on the international developments of that decade.[225] Many new practical issues arose out of the international context of business. Theoretical issues such as cultural relativity of ethical values receive more emphasis in this field. Other, older issues can be grouped here as well. Issues and subfields include:
  • The search for universal values as a basis for international commercial behaviour.
  • Comparison of business ethical traditions in different countries. Also on the basis of their respective GDP and [Corruption rankings].
  • Comparison of business ethical traditions from various religious perspectives.
  • Ethical issues arising out of international business transactions; e.g., bioprospecting and biopiracy in the pharmaceutical industry; the fair trade movement; transfer pricing.
  • Issues such as globalization and cultural imperialism.
  • Varying global standards – e.g., the use of child labor.
  • The way in which multinationals take advantage of international differences, such as outsourcing production (e.g. clothes) and services (e.g. call centres) to low-wage countries.
  • The permissibility of international commerce with pariah states.
The success of any business depends on its financial performance. Financial accounting helps the management to report and also control the business performance.
The information regarding the financial performance of the company plays an important role in enabling people to take right decision about the company. Therefore, it becomes necessary to understand how to record based on accounting conventions and concepts ensure unambling and accurate records.
Foreign countries often use dumping as a competitive threat, selling products at prices lower than their normal value. This can lead to problems in domestic markets. It becomes difficult for these markets to compete with the pricing set by foreign markets. In 2009, the International Trade Commission has been researching anti-dumping laws. Dumping is often seen as an ethical issue, as larger companies are taking advantage of other less economically advanced companies.

Ethics of economic systems

This vaguely defined area, perhaps not part of but only related to business ethics,[226] is where business ethicists venture into the fields of political economy and political philosophy, focusing on the rights and wrongs of various systems for the distribution of economic benefits. John Rawls and Robert Nozick are both notable contributors.

Law and business ethics

Very often it is held that business is not bound by any ethics other than abiding by the law. Milton Friedman is the pioneer of the view. He held that corporations have the obligation to make a profit within the framework of the legal system, nothing more.[227] Friedman made it explicit that the duty of the business leaders is, "to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in the law and those embodied in ethical custom".[79] Ethics for Friedman is nothing more than abiding by 'customs' and 'laws'. The reduction of ethics to abidance to laws and customs however have drawn serious criticisms.
Counter to Friedman's logic it is observed that legal procedures are technocratic, bureaucratic, rigid and obligatory where as ethical act is conscientious, voluntary choice beyond normativity.[228] Law is retroactive. Crime precedes law. Law against a crime, to be passed, the crime must have happened. Laws are blind to the crimes undefined in it.[229] Further, as per law, "conduct is not criminal unless forbidden by law which gives advance warning that such conduct is criminal.[230] Also, law presumes the accused is innocent until proven guilty and that the state must establish the guilt of the accused beyond reasonable doubt. As per liberal laws followed in most of the democracies, until the government prosecutor proves the firm guilty with the limited resources available to her, the accused is considered to be innocent. Though the liberal premises of law is necessary to protect individuals from being persecuted by Government, it is not a sufficient mechanism to make firms morally accountable.[231][232][233][234]

Business ethics in the field

Corporate ethics policies

As part of more comprehensive compliance and ethics programs, many companies have formulated internal policies pertaining to the ethical conduct of employees. These policies can be simple exhortations in broad, highly generalized language (typically called a corporate ethics statement), or they can be more detailed policies, containing specific behavioural requirements (typically called corporate ethics codes). They are generally meant to identify the company's expectations of workers and to offer guidance on handling some of the more common ethical problems that might arise in the course of doing business. It is hoped that having such a policy will lead to greater ethical awareness, consistency in application, and the avoidance of ethical disasters.
An increasing number of companies also require employees to attend seminars regarding business conduct, which often include discussion of the company's policies, specific case studies, and legal requirements. Some companies even require their employees to sign agreements stating that they will abide by the company's rules of conduct.
Many companies are assessing the environmental factors that can lead employees to engage in unethical conduct. A competitive business environment may call for unethical behaviour. Lying has become expected in fields such as trading. An example of this are the issues surrounding the unethical actions of the Saloman Brothers.
Not everyone supports corporate policies that govern ethical conduct. Some claim that ethical problems are better dealt with by depending upon employees to use their own judgment.
Others believe that corporate ethics policies are primarily rooted in utilitarian concerns, and that they are mainly to limit the company's legal liability, or to curry public favour by giving the appearance of being a good corporate citizen. Ideally, the company will avoid a lawsuit because its employees will follow the rules. Should a lawsuit occur, the company can claim that the problem would not have arisen if the employee had only followed the code properly.
Sometimes there is disconnection between the company's code of ethics and the company's actual practices. Thus, whether or not such conduct is explicitly sanctioned by management, at worst, this makes the policy duplicitous, and, at best, it is merely a marketing tool.
To be successful, most ethicists would suggest that an ethics policy should be:
  • Given the unequivocal support of top management, by both word and example.
  • Explained in writing and orally, with periodic reinforcement.
  • Doable....something employees can both understand and perform.
  • Monitored by top management, with routine inspections for compliance and improvement.
  • Backed up by clearly stated consequences in the case of disobedience.
  • Remain neutral and nonsexist.

Ethics officers

Ethics officers (sometimes called "compliance" or "business conduct officers") have been appointed formally by organizations since the mid-1980s. One of the catalysts for the creation of this new role was a series of fraud, corruption, and abuse scandals that afflicted the U.S. defense industry at that time. This led to the creation of the Defense Industry Initiative (DII), a pan-industry initiative to promote and ensure ethical business practices. The DII set an early benchmark for ethics management in corporations. In 1991, the Ethics & Compliance Officer Association (ECOA) – originally the Ethics Officer Association (EOA) – was founded at the Center for Business Ethics (at Bentley College, Waltham, MA) as a professional association for those responsible for managing organizations' efforts to achieve ethical best practices. The membership grew rapidly (the ECOA now has over 1,200 members) and was soon established as an independent organization.
Another critical factor in the decisions of companies to appoint ethics/compliance officers was the passing of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations in 1991, which set standards that organizations (large or small, commercial and non-commercial) had to follow to obtain a reduction in sentence if they should be convicted of a federal offense. Although intended to assist judges with sentencing, the influence in helping to establish best practices has been far-reaching.
In the wake of numerous corporate scandals between 2001–04 (affecting large corporations like Enron, WorldCom and Tyco), even small and medium-sized companies have begun to appoint ethics officers. They often report to the Chief Executive Officer and are responsible for assessing the ethical implications of the company's activities, making recommendations regarding the company's ethical policies, and disseminating information to employees. They are particularly interested in uncovering or preventing unethical and illegal actions. This trend is partly due to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States, which was enacted in reaction to the above scandals. A related trend is the introduction of risk assessment officers that monitor how shareholders' investments might be affected by the company's decisions.
The effectiveness of ethics officers in the marketplace is not clear. If the appointment is made primarily as a reaction to legislative requirements, one might expect the efficacy to be minimal, at least, over the short term. In part, this is because ethical business practices result from a corporate culture that consistently places value on ethical behaviour, a culture and climate that usually emanates from the top of the organization. The mere establishment of a position to oversee ethics will most likely be insufficient to inculcate ethical behaviour: a more systemic programme with consistent support from general management will be necessary.
The foundation for ethical behaviour goes well beyond corporate culture and the policies of any given company, for it also depends greatly upon an individual's early moral training, the other institutions that affect an individual, the competitive business environment the company is in and, indeed, society as a whole.

Business ethics as an academic discipline

As an academic discipline, business ethics emerged in the 1970s. Since no academic business ethics journals or conferences existed, researchers published their papers in general management outlets, and attended general conferences, such as the Academy of Management. Over time, several peer-reviewed journals appeared, and more researchers entered the field. Especially, higher interest in business topics among academics was observed after several corporate scandals in the earlier 2000s. As of 2009, sixteen academic journals devoted to various business ethics issues existed, with Journal of Business Ethics and Business Ethics Quarterly being considered the leading A+ outlets.[235]
The International Business Development Institute, a global non-profit organization, is a self-regulated organization that represents 217 nations and all 50 United States offering a Charter in Business Development (CBD) that focuses on ethical business practices and standards. The Charter is administered and directed by top Harvard, MIT, and Fulbright Scholars, and it includes graduate-level coursework in economics, politics, marketing, management, technology, and legal aspects of business development as it pertains to business ethics. [2] IBDI also oversees the International Business Development Institute of Asia [3] which provides individuals living in 20 Asian nations the opportunity to earn his or her CBD or CIBD Charter.

Religious views on business ethics

The historical and global importance of religious views on business ethics is sometimes underestimated in standard introductions to business ethics according to Dr. Todd Albertson author of The Gods of Business book. Particularly in Asia and the Middle East, religious and cultural perspectives have a strong influence on the conduct of business and the creation of business values.
Examples include:

Related disciplines

Business ethics should be distinguished from the philosophy of business, the branch of philosophy that deals with the philosophical, political, and ethical underpinnings of business and economics. Business ethics operates on the premise, for example, that the ethical operation of a private business is possible—those who dispute that premise, such as libertarian socialists, (who contend that "business ethics" is an oxymoron) do so by definition outside of the domain of business ethics proper.
The philosophy of business also deals with questions such as what, if any, are the social responsibilities of a business; business management theory; theories of individualism vs. collectivism; free will among participants in the marketplace; the role of self interest; invisible hand theories; the requirements of social justice; and natural rights, especially property rights, in relation to the business enterprise.
Business ethics is also related to political economy, which is economic analysis from political and historical perspectives. Political economy deals with the distributive consequences of economic actions. It asks who gains and who loses from economic activity, and is the resultant distribution fair or just, which are central ethical issues.

Differing opinions regarding business ethics

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Business ethics is a contested terrain. There are economists and business gurus [237] who claim ethics is irrelevant to the field of business. For instance, the neo-liberal Chicago school economist Milton Friedman held that corporations are amoral and CEOs have only one duty: to maximize the profits of a company.
He also said in an interview that business cannot have social responsibilities[238][239][240] Similarly Peter Drucker, a business guru, also observed, "There is neither a separate ethics of business nor is one needed".[241] However, Peter Drucker in another instance observed that ultimate responsibility of the directors of the companies is above all not to harm – primum non nocere [242] The ideological position of excluding firms from ethical obligations is contested.[243][244]
Business ethics is a contested terrain not just because celebrated persons in the field of economics and business questioned the relevance of ethics in business, observe editors of respected business ethics textbook, but also because what is presented in the name of ethics is either sentimental common sense, or a set of excuses for being unpleasant.[245] What is presented as ethics in many of the Business Ethics manuals and books are just premature responses to questions that look like answers or mere procedural form filling exercises unconcerned about the real ethical dilemmas. For instance, a manual of business ethics published by good governance program of US Department of Commerce treats business ethics as nothing more than set of instructions and procedures to be followed by 'ethics officers' and downward in the hierarchy of business.[78] Campbell Jones et al., in their text book, "For Business Ethics" point out six foreclosures, something has been closed down before it should have been, by the proponents of business ethics: foreclosure of philosophy, society, the ethical, meaning of ethics, politics, and the goal of ethics. Ethics, hotly debated throughout the twentieth century, has been one of the major sources of philosophical reflection up to the close of the millennium. The field of business ethics, it is contested, has insulated itself from the new developments in ethical debate, either ignoring them altogether or misrepresenting. Arguments in Business Ethics often downplay the role of social context, social arrangements, social processes, history, politics and structural aspects constituting individuals and individual actions. Issues taken as ethical dilemma by business ethicists are often narrow in scope, such as behaving politely with customers, following office etiquettes, protecting privacy of employees, avoiding discriminations, bribery, kickbacks etc., while issues like inequality among global labour, ethics of lobbying, intellectual property alienation, biopiracy etc., are broadly neglected. The term ethics connotes different thing to people oriented differently. There are arguments from virtue, deontological, utilitarian and pragmatic schools of thought about ethics. The differences are not just a matter of talking about the same thing in different ways. Rather, these different ways of talking about ethics seem to be talking about different things, about different ways of imagining ethics itself. Like discussions of ethics in any other fields, business ethics too should be treated along the percepts of various established, neglected and emergent schools of ethical thought. Business ethics is assumed to be something that does not really trouble basic assumptions about the normal practices of business. Instead of looking at the politics the corporate firms play in modifying rules of accounting practices, diluting labour laws, weakening regulatory mechanisms etc., and it tends to look at the ethical collapse of firms like Enron and Arthur Andersen as if it were isolated instances of individuals slipping away from their ethical responsibilities. Further, Business ethicists often foreclose the goal of being ethical. They attempt to convince that being ethical serves a strategy of image management or sustained profit making. Others hold being ethical and making profit are equally valid goals of firms, some others claim being ethical is just for the sake of being ethical.[246] Further, Ethics, when remodelled as business ethics it suffers the fate of business expediency thus business ethicists prepare themselves for unambiguous quick and standard answers while ethics is not a matter of stable solutions but one of endless openness and difficulty and beyond the limits of normativity.[228][247][248][249]

See also

References

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  2. ^ Berle, A. A., & Means, G. C. ([1932]2003). The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. In this book, originally published in 1932 it is observed, "Corporations have ceased to be merely legal devices through which the private business transactions of individuals may be carried on. Though still much used for this purpose, the corporate form has acquired a much larger significance. The corporation has, in fact, become both a method of property tenure and a means of organizing economic life. Grown to tremendous proportions, there may be said to have evolved a 'corporate system' – as there once was a feudal system, – which has attracted to itself a combination of attributes and powers, and has attained a degree of prominence entitling it to be dealt with as a major social institution. […] We are examining this institution probably before it has attained its zenith. Spectacular as its rise has been, every indication seems to be that the system will move forward to proportions which stagger imagination today […] they management] have placed the community in a position to demand that the modern corporation serve not only the owners […] but all society. p. 1.
  3. ^ Collier, Jane; Esteban, Rafael (2007). "Corporate social responsibility and employee commitment". Business Ethics: A European Review 16: 19. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8608.2006.00466.x. . The management neologism 'stakeholder' euphemizes the term 'externality' used by economists Economists use the term externality to represent the spillover cost of an economic transaction on a party that is not directly involved in the transaction. The stakeholder represents the victims of spillover effect of the shareholder profiteering. The stakeholder of a firm could be its employees, neighbourhood, eco-system affected, biodiversity, the society at large and the very basis of life on the planet
  4. ^ Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press: 195–196. Emmanuel Levinas succinctly points out 'ethics is the responsibility for the other person'. The 'moral summons' that emanates from 'the face of the other' calls the 'self's power' into question'. He writes, "The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp." p. 197
  5. ^ this statement is also justified from the perspective of "social contract theory"
  6. ^ Badiou, A. (2001). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London, Verso, pp. 28, 53.
  7. ^ Jones, p. 17
  8. ^ a b Weiss, J. W. (2009). Business Ethics: A Stakeholder and Issues Management Approach With Cases. (5th ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.
  9. ^ Slavery and the Making of America – Episode 1. Video.google.com. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  10. ^ Kingsolver, A. (2008). Capitalism. Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. J. H. Moore. Detroit, Macmillan reference ISBN 0028660218 pp. 268–271.
  11. ^ Williams, E. (1994 [1944]). Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press. "Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan"
  12. ^ King Leopold II King of Belgium – King of the Congo. Video.google.com. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  13. ^ Robotham, D. (2005). Political Economy. A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. J. G. Carrier. Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar ISBN 1843761750 pp. 41–58
  14. ^ Berger D., Easterly W, et al. (2010) Commercial Imperialism? Political Influence and Trade During the Cold War. NBER Working Paper No. 15981.
  15. ^ The article A History of Business Ethics by Richard T. De George of Santa Clara University (web page version of DeGeorge, Richard. 2005, "History of Business Ethics", paper delivered at "The Accountable Corporation", the third biennial global business conference sponsored by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University) as availed on March 30, 2010– observes, on the origin of business ethics discourse, " The Second World War was over, the Cold War was ever present, and the War in Viet Nam fostered a good deal of opposition to official public policy and to the so-called military-industrial complex, which came in for increasing scrutiny and criticism. The Civil Rights movement had caught the public imagination. The United States was becoming more and more of a dominant economic force. American-based multinational corporations were growing in size and importance. Big business was coming into its own, replacing small and medium-sized businesses in the societal image of business. The chemical industry was booming with innovation, and in its wake came environmental damage on a scale that had not previously been possible. The spirit of protest led to the environmental movement, to the rise of consumerism, and to criticism of multinational corporations....Corporations, finding themselves under public attack and criticism, responded by developing the notion of social responsibility. They started social responsibility programs and spent a good deal of money advertising their programs and how they were promoting the social good. Exactly what "social responsibility" meant varied according to the industry and company
  16. ^ Richard T. De George tracing history of business ethics draws our attention to origin of Business Ethics. He observes, "roughly the early 1970s, when the term 'business ethics' came into common use in the United States", however, the idea was still nascent. He also states, "In 1982 the first single-authored books in the field appeared: Richard De George, Business Ethics; and Manuel G. Velasquez, Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases. The books found a ready market, and courses in business ethics both in philosophy departments and in schools of business developed rapidly. As they did, the number of textbooks increased exponentially". Business ethics, emerged into a university paper only after 1982–83.De George writes, "by the mid-1980s there were at least 500 courses in business ethics taught across the country to 40,000 students. Not only were there at least twenty textbooks in the area and at least ten casebooks, but there were also societies, centers and journals of business ethics". The Society for Business Ethics was started in 1980. The discipline of business ethics got established as a discipline in late 1980s and early 1990s. European Business schools adopted business ethics as a course after 1987 commencing with establishment of European Business Ethics Network (EBEN), which held its first meeting in 1987.
  17. ^ a b A History of Business Ethics. Scu.edu (2005-02-19). Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  18. ^ Madsen, Essentials of Business Ethics, Velasquez, Corporate Ethics: Losing it, Having it, Getting it, p. 229 as it is quoted in Cory, J. (2005). Activist Business Ethics. Boston, Springer, p. 11 ISBN 0387228489. The passage quoted is: "Between 1970 and 1980, 11 percent of the largest American firms were convicted of lawlessness, including bribery, criminal fraud, illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, or price-fixing. Well-known companies with four or more convictions included Braniff International, Gulf Oil, and Ashland Oil. Firms with at least two convictions included Allied, American Airlines, Bethlehem Steel, Diamond International, Firestone, Goodyear, International Paper, National Distillers, Northrop, Occidental Petroleum, Pepsico, Phillips Petroleum, R.J. Reynolds, Schlitz, Seagram, Tenneco, and United Brands. The recent Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal is well-known, as is the E.F. Hutton fiasco, the General Dynamics fraud, and of course, the Wall Street scandals involving Ivan Boesky, David Levine, and Michael Milken... Unethical behaviour in business more often than not is a systematic matter. To a large degree it is the behaviour of generally decent people who normally would not think of doing anything illegal or immoral. But they get backed into doing something unethical by the systems and practices of their own firms and industries. Unethical behaviour in business generally arises when business firms fail to pay explicitly attention to the ethical risks that are created by their own systems and practices."
  19. ^ Ayoob, M. and M. Zierler (2006). The unipolar concert: Unipolarity and multilateralism in the age of globalization. The Iraq crisis and world order: Structural, institutional and normative challenges. R. Thakur and W. P. S. Sidhu. New York, United Nations University Press: 37–56. The authors write, "We argue that there are remarkable continuities in crucial areas between the Cold War and post–Cold War epochs, especially the contradictions inherent in the political and economic relations between the global North and the global South that are a function of the position in which they find themselves in terms of stages of state-making and phases of economic development. It is no coincidence, therefore, that North–South relations are increasingly taking centre-stage in contemporary international affairs. This is demonstrated by the division of opinions visible in several important areas, including the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Israel–Palestine conflict, and humanitarian intervention, as well as major economic issues relating to tariff and non-tariff trade barriers, terms determining foreign investment, and questions of equity in relation to intellectual copyright and patents. Neatly dividing the history of international relations into distinct phases often obscures the enduring elements of international politics. The end of the Cold War did mean the end to bipolarity and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in the strategic arena. However, this by itself did not lead to a fundamental restructuring of international politics that would require a completely brand-new set of tools to explain and understand it. Analysts of the post–Cold War era who argued that systemic change had occurred with the end of superpower competition ignored the fact that today's key concepts, such as globalization, multilateralism and fundamentalism, have their roots in the Cold War period and indeed in earlier epochs. We need to acknowledge the historical roots of such phenomena to explicate the current structure of international society. It is only by examining both the changes and the continuities in the international system that we can assess what has fundamentally changed and what has not in the politics and economics of international relations…. The continuity of behaviour is evident not only in the case of the mutual relationships among the states of the global North but also in the case of North–South relations. Indeed, the ending of the Cold War has made issues of North–South asymmetry more salient. Although the new vocabulary of post–Cold War analysis developed in US and European academia, emphasizing as it does terms such as globalization, unipolarity and multilateralism and the apparent tensions among them, may succeed in hiding these continuities both among the states of the North and between the North and the South for some time, analysts of international affairs with a keen sense of history and sociology, not to mention economics, are bound to realize that in many spheres the post–Cold War era is the linear descendant of the Cold War period." pp. 39, 41.
  20. ^ Moon, Chris Et al.(2001) Business Ethics. London: The Economist:119–132
  21. ^ MBA Institutes & Business school networks: IIMA, IIMB, IIMC, IIML, IIMK, IIMI, ISB, Great lakes, XLRI, JBIMS, FMS. Coolavenues.com. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  22. ^ The War Against The Third World. Video.google.com. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  23. ^ [1][dead link]
  24. ^ Cullather, pp. ix–xv, 10, 16
  25. ^ Wagnleitner, R. (1994). Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War North Carolina, UNC Press ISBN 0807844551.
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  29. ^ Galbraith, J. K. (1996). The Good Society: The Humane Agenda. Boston, Houghton-Mifflin Company ISBN 0395859980.
  30. ^ Capaldi, Nicholas (Ed.).(2005). Business and Religion A Clash of Civilizations?. Salem, MA 01970: M & M Scrivener Press: 315–317
  31. ^ Cullather, pp. 16–37. The entire book discusses the turn of the events of unethical business practices and CIA collaborating with each other with appropriate documentary evidences
  32. ^ Confessions of An Economic Hit Man – What Really Goes on Behind Global Affairs. Video.google.com. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  33. ^ Chomsky, N. (1989). Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies London, Pluto Press ISBN 0896083667.
  34. ^ Ayoob, M. and M. Zierler (2006). The unipolar concert: Unipolarity and multilateralism in the age of globalization. The Iraq crisis and world order: Structural, institutional and normative challenges. R. Thakur and W. P. S. Sidhu. New York, United Nations University Press, pp. 37–56.
  35. ^ Gol, A. (2006). Iraq and world order: A Turkish perspective in The Iraq crisis and world order: Structural, institutional and normative challenges. R. Thakur and W. P. S. Sidhu. New York, United Nations University Press, pp. 114–133 ISBN 8131708489
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  38. ^ Friedman, Milton (1970-09-13). "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits". The New York Times Magazine. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/dunnweb/rprnts.friedman.html. 
  39. ^ a b Dobson, p. xvii
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  43. ^ Aristotle 1948 Politics E. Barker, trans. Oxford: Clarendon, p. 38. For Aristotle, 'the end and purpose of the polis is the good life'
  44. ^ Smith, A. The Theory of Moral Sentiments Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, p. VI.i.15.
  45. ^ Smith, A. 1982 The Theory of Moral Sentiments Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, p. III.vi
  46. ^ Jevons, W.S. 1970 The Theory of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Javons observes, "The theory…is entirely based on a calculus of pleasure and pain: the object of economics is to maximize happiness by purchasing pleasure, as it were, at the lowest cost of pain" (Javon, 1970:91). Javon also noted, "The strength of preferences for a good, measured by individuals' willingness to pay for their satisfaction at the margin, is an indirect measure of subjective states: it is from the quantitative effects of the feelings that we must estimate their comparative amounts" (Javon, 1970:83). O'Neil on the other hand points out that the ideologists of neoliberalism "do not claim to prove that markets maximize well-being. Rather they claim to show that in certain 'ideal' conditions the market will issue in a state of equilibrium, defined as a state in which, so long as individuals' preferences and productive resources remain the same, any departure from that state will involve a welfare change for the worse for some party, in the sense that a previously satisfied preference will no longer be satisfied. O'Neill, p. 54
  47. ^ Montiel, P. J. (2003). Macroeconomics in Emerging Markets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp. 214–238) ISBN 0521785510. By the phrase 'financial repression', Monitiel refers to the monitoring and regulations on capital inflows and outflows, regulations on free entry and exit of national and international financial institutions, the presence of state run financial institutions, stipulations on cash reserve ratio or liquidity ratio, interest rate ceilings, guidelines regarding priority sector financing, and other measures of monitory regulations.
  48. ^ welfare in terms of preference satisfaction (O'Neill, p. 56)
  49. ^ Hayek F.A. 1976 Law, Legislation and Liberty: Volume 2 London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 15–30.
  50. ^ O'Neill challenges the welfare claim based on the 'preference satisfaction' in the following words: The empirical problem is this—that with all the increase in the variety of goods and services that consumers are able to buy, there is no corresponding reported increase in perceived satisfaction. The total amount of welfare understood as preference satisfaction over dissatisfaction appears to be remarkably static in modern market societies. There appears to be little evidence of any growth in the gap between preference satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Quoting from Lane, he points out, "The assumed positive relationship between markets and wellbeing understood as preference satisfaction is not confirmed by empirical evidence… Indeed, the fact that there is no increase in preference satisfaction over dissatisfaction no longer entails immediately that there is no increase in welfare. Not all dissatisfaction is a sign of a life that has taken a turn for the worse. Indeed, it can indicate the opposite, that a person is exercising capacities that are part of what it is for a life to be improving. Consider a pianist, who starts being greatly satisfied with her initial developments, but who, as she continues to develop technically and artistically, becomes ever more critical of her performance. Her increasing dissatisfaction is a symptom of increasing accomplishment. Or again consider the contented slave, wage earner or housewife who become discontented with their lot: it is better for them that this is so and not just in virtue of other possible improvements this might bring. This is an old point." (O'Neill, pp. 56–60)
  51. ^ Schaler, J. A. Corruption. In Hamowy (2008) pp. 105–107. What the libertarians consider as corruption is interesting. The author concludes abruptly, "if we reduce what the government does, we also will reduce corruption…. It also may offer a way to identify and understand the moral decline that follows (and fosters) the continual expansion of the welfare state.(p. 107). However, the author is reluctant to admit that private individual/ firm corruption. For instance, he writes, "Paying money for goods or services provided by a public official constitutes bribery and often involves punishment for the parties to the transaction. Why bribery is invariably equated with corruption and condemned? It is not obviously inefficient. Indeed, in highly collectivized nations, paying public officials to allow what would otherwise be normal market exchanges may contribute much to human welfare. (p. 105). He continues, "These standard accounts of corruption and bribery involve efficiency and democratic accountability, not liberty"... "In some cases, government actions that are particularly prone to bribery—like the licensing of economic activity—inherently restrict individual liberty"… "It is possible that bribery might liberalize some parts of society"... However, he presents "in the financing of election campaigns" individuals and groups are simply "contributing to the campaigns of chosen candidates" and observes, "Campaign finance regulations, like the corruption they seek to prevent, actually serve the narrow interests of parties and incumbents instead of the interest voters have in open competition for legislative seats. Thus, campaign finance restrictions may be deemed a kind of corruption". He further points out, "However, as Nathaniel Persily discovered, campaign finance appears to have no real relationship one way or the other to trust in government. In any case, public trust in government tends to reduce, rather than protect, individual liberty (p. 106). In his statement on the primacy of liberty he argues, "But libertarians might recognize that corruption may be more than an excuse to limit liberty".
  52. ^ The neoclassical economists of the first generation in the early 70s, while the impoverished world was still struggling to recover from the adverse effects of the second world war and the consequent cold wars, recommended deregulation of financial systems of the impoverished nations which they termed liberating financial systems from the 'financial repression'. Chili, Uruguay and Argentina were chosen to be the labs of financial experiments. Contrary to the claims the countries experienced severe economic and financial setbacks of soaring interest rates, waves of bank failures and other bankruptcies, extreme asset price volatility and extensive loan defaults, the real sector entered deep and prolonged recessions contrary to what had been projected by the ideologues (Grabel, I., 2008). Global finance and development: false starts, dead ends and social economic alternatives. In J. B. Davis & W. Dolfsma (Eds.), The Elgar Companion to Social Economics (pp. 496–519). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 498, 501
  53. ^ Lewis, P. and H. Stein (1997), 'Shifting fortunes: the political economy of financial liberalization in Nigeria', World Development, 25 (1), 5–22
  54. ^ Grabel, Ilene (2003), 'International private capital flows and developing countries', in Ha-Joon Chang (ed.), Rethinking Development Economics, London: Anthem Press, pp. 325–45
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  59. ^ Duska, R. (2007). Contemporary Reflections on Business Ethics. Boston, Springer, pp. 51–62 ISBN 1402049838
  60. ^ O'Neill, p. 55
  61. ^ Dembinski, P. H., Lager, C., Cornford, A., & Bonvin, J.-M. (Eds.). (2006). Enron and World Finance: A Case Study in Ethics. New York: Palgrave.
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  63. ^ Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press ISBN 0691001022.
  64. ^ Ferguson, J. (1997). Anthropology and its Evil Twin: Development in the Constitution of a Discipline. In F. Cooper & R. Packard (Eds.), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (pp. 150–175). Berkeley: University of California Press ISBN 0520209575.
  65. ^ Frank, A. G. (1991). The Underdevelopment of Development. Scandinavian Journal of Development Alternatives(10), 5–72.
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  67. ^ Smith, D. A., Solinger, D. J., & Topik, S. C. (Eds.). (1999). States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy. London: Routledge ISBN 0415201195.
  68. ^ Bribery committed by large companies and multinational corporations – social problems and systematic, pervasive government corruption – Peter Eigen – government, corruption, bribery, social, problems, large, companies – sciencestage.com Political science. Sciencestage.com. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  69. ^ Fisman, R., & Miguel, E. (2008). Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press ISBN 0691134545.
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  71. ^ Dobson, p. ix.; Experts of finance tend to view business firm as, "an abstract engine that uses money today to make money tomorrow"
  72. ^ Miller, M. H. (1986). "Behavioral Rationality in Finance: The Case of Dividends" (p. 452). Journal of Business 59: 451–468. doi:10.1086/296380. 
  73. ^ In this regards Dobson points out, "An apologist for the finance paradigm might defend its conceptual rigidity as follows. Although there are undoubtedly motivations other than wealth maximization that influence, and should influence, behaviour, the assumptions of the finance paradigm provide a reasonable approximation of agents' behaviour over a broad spectrum of business environments. The firm is an economic mechanism and agents act within the firm for fundamentally economic reasons. In addition, the construction of mathematically robust models requires simplifying assumptions. Like perfect-and-frictionless capital markets, wealth maximization is one such simplifying assumption. All disciplines have their conceptual boundaries, and any value-based normative consideration of human behaviour simply lies beyond finance's conceptual boundary. Indeed, if finance were to stretch this boundary in an attempt to encompass such questions, mathematical rigor would be lost. Finance would be set adrift in the scientifically unnavigable sea of moral philosophy. Wealth maximization provides a secure anchorage from which a rigorous theory of financial-market behaviour can be built. Says Norman Bowie, "Like perfect information and zero transaction costs, psychological egoism [i.e., wealth maximization] is one of the simplifying assumptions needed for the mathematics of equilibrium analysis" Dobson, p. xvi
  74. ^ Dobson, pp. xvi, 142
  75. ^ Armstrong, M. B. (2002). Ethical Issues in Accounting. In N. E. Bowie (Ed.), The Blackwell guide to business ethics (pp. 145–157). Oxford: Blackwell ISBN 0631221239
  76. ^ a b Walsh, A. J. HRM and the ethics of commodified work in a market economy. In Pinnington, pp. 102–118
  77. ^ Pinnington, A. H. and Lafferty, G. (2002). Human Resource Management in Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press ISBN 0195514777
  78. ^ a b Good Governance Program. (2004). Business Ethics: A manual for managing a responsible business enterprise in emerging market economies. (pp.93–128) Washington DC: Good Governance Program, US Department of Commerce
  79. ^ a b Friedman, M. (1970). "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profit", The New York Times Magazine.
  80. ^ Hansmann, H., & Kraakman, R.(2000). The End of History for Corporate Law. Georgetown Law Journal(89), 439–468. The article says, "All thoughtful people believe that corporate enterprise should be organized and operated to serve the interests of society as a whole, and that the interests of shareholders deserve no greater weight in this social calculus than do the interests of any other members of society."
  81. ^ Greenfield, K. (2006). The Failure of Corporate Law fundamental flaws & progressive possibilities. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press ISBN 0226306933. Greenfield observes, "what is good for shareholders is good for corporations, and what is good for corporations is good for society....If this connection existed, the shareholder bandwagon would be attractive indeed. The problem is that advocates for shareholder primacy do not purport to say how the connection occurs or test whether the connection is true. p. 22
  82. ^ Jones, et al.' observe, "when a company with shareholders gives some of the profits it has made to investors who have not been involved in producing the value, this is seen as a reward for risk. But why should the surplus generated by workers be given to someone else who almost certainly already has a lot of money in the first place? – Jones, p. 5
  83. ^ Kuchinke, K. P. (2005). The self at work: theories of persons, meaning of work and their implications for HRD. In Elliott, pp. 141–154
  84. ^ Dirkx, J. M. (2005). To develop a firm persuasion: Workplace learning and the problem of meaning. In Elliott, pp. 155–174
  85. ^ Terkel, S. (1974) Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, New York: Ballantine. Terkel introduces the work conditions in the following words: "This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us", p. xii.
  86. ^ a b Pinnington, A. H. et al. Introduction: ethical human resource management. In Pinnington, pp. 1–22
  87. ^ Duska, R. Employee Rights. In Frederic (2002) pp. 257–268
  88. ^ Koehn, D. (2002). Ethical Issues in Human Resources. In N. E. Bowie (Ed.), The Blackwell guide to business ethics (pp. 225–243). Oxford: Blackwell ISBN 0631221239.
  89. ^ Watson, I., Buchanan, J., Campbell, I., and Briggs, C. (2003). Fragmented Futures: New Challenges in Working Life. ACIRRT, University of Sydney, NSW: The Federation Press.
  90. ^ Smith, N. H. (1997). Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity. London: Routledge.
  91. ^ Machan (2007) observes, "It is futile to deny that owners have and exercise considerable economic power. Such power is the ability to make what one wants actually happen. When a worker wants to keep a job but the owner does not want to employ him or her, the worker loses out, usually, although on a larger scale this doesn't hold true. Of course, if the worker wants to quit, he or she will win, but that is often the less visible situation. Just consider the worry about downsizing. It is also often true that employers are able to find replacements for workers more readily than workers can find new jobs on their own terms. Even when this is not the case, the worker's situation is deemed to be more dire because of the often greater wealth of the employer. Whether this imbalance of bargaining power is justified or not is what ultimately must be addressed by those who believe that there is greater merit in a free market system than in one that is regimented by government – say, via a workers' democracy.p.68
  92. ^ So, while government does not have the power to impose employment terms on the labor relationship, it is claimed that the firm largely does. (Actually, if there's a competitive employment market, this is clearly false.) State power is limited in a free country; the power of firms, that is, those who legally own the property that can be improved by hired labor, is plenty extensive. For our purposes, we may ignore here that employee associations, unions and the like, as well as certain kind of employees, do have immense economic power, as well. Consider famous movie actors, baseball or basketball players, even star academics – they are in many cases able to set the terms of their employment, nearly unopposed by their employers. We may ignore this here because all that these cases prove is that both employees and employers do in fact possess economic power in the free market, not that the free markets are immune to power. (They may, of course, be de jure immune to certain types of power, such as outright physical violence.)
  93. ^ Legge, K. The ethics of HRM in dealing with individual employees without collective representation. In Pinnington, pp. 35 ff
  94. ^ Morehead, A., Steele, M., Stephen, K., and Duffin, L. (1997). Changes at Work: The 1995 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey. Melbourne: Longman
  95. ^ Reinhold, R. (2000). 'Union Membership in 2000: Numbers Decline During Record Economic Expansion', Illinois Labor Market Review, 6.
  96. ^ Akyeampong, E. (1997). 'A Statistical Portrait of the Trade Union Movement', Perspectives on Labour and Income, 9: 45–54.
  97. ^ Kuruvilla, S., Das, S., Kwon, H., and Kwon, S. (2002). 'Trade Union Growth and Decline in Asia', British Journal of Industrial Relations, 40(3): 431–61.
  98. ^ Watson T.J (2003). 'Ethical Choice in Managerial Work: The Scope for Managerial Choices in an Ethically Irrational World', Human Relations, 56(2): 167–85.
  99. ^ Woodd, Maureen (1997). "Human resource specialists – guardians of ethical conduct?". Journal of European Industrial Training 21: 110. doi:10.1108/03090599710161810. 
  100. ^ Guest, David E (1999). "Human resource management – the workers' verdict". Human Resource Management Journal 9: 5. doi:10.1111/j.1748-8583.1999.tb00200.x. 
  101. ^ However, weakening of labour unions, what they call 'notorious,' is celebrated as a victory of 'free market' by moralists bent towards neoliberal ideology (Machan, p. 29)
  102. ^ Machan (2007) in his "the morality of business' justifies his displeasure with unions, "So, unions are notorious for promoting featherbedding, making jobs that have no real function any longer. A most recent case reported involved a new urinal that doesn't require flushing. Don't ask me for the details – it's a baffling idea. But, the story goes, when in Philadelphia it was recently introduced, the plumber's union negotiated a deal whereby despite the fact that it wasn't needed, plumbing was supplied so that plumbers wouldn't have to find new employment. This kind of thing used to be routine with the railroads, when locomotives were upgraded and unions secured deals whereby the same number of people would continue to man the engines. p.29.
  103. ^ Scott, A. (1994). Willing Slaves? British Workers Under Human Resource Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  104. ^ Machan (2007), a neoliberal ideologist, argues, "When we consider economic globalization, it's about how all the people around the globe need to play by the same economic rules – free trade. No one gets to enslave workers – they must be hired and bargained with. No one gets to violate contracts – they must be honored and if not, the law steps in to rectify any breaches that have occurred. No one gets to deprive another of his or her property – only voluntary exchanges are kosher. And so it goes, into the minute details of commerce.(Machan, p. 27)
  105. ^ Human resource management, which had its humble beginning as a Social work discipline with special interest in addressing the worker welfare and industrial relation gradually slipped into a discipline of HR strategy and thus, it has thoroughly became a discipline strategizing towards enhanced the instrumental utility of labour. Desai, M. (1991). Issues concerning setting up of social work specializations in India. International Social Work, 34, 83–95
  106. ^ Guest, D. E. HRM and performance: can partnership address the ethical dilemmas? In Pinnington, pp. 52–65
  107. ^ Storey, D.J. (1985). "THE PROBLEMS FACING NEW FIRMS [1]". Journal of Management Studies 22: 327. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.1985.tb00079.x. 
  108. ^ Pinnington, et al. Introduction: ethical human resource management. In Pinnington, p. 3
  109. ^ Schneider, B., Hanges, P., Smith, D., and Salvaggio, A. (2003). 'Which Comes First: Employee Attitudes or Organizational Financial and Market Performance?', Journal of Applied Psychology, 88: 836–51.
  110. ^ Guest, D. E., Michie, J., Conway, N., and Sheehan, M. (2003). 'Human Resource Management and Corporate Performance in the UK', British Journal of Industrial Relations, 41(2): 291–314.
  111. ^ Boxall, P., & Purcell, J. Strategic management and human resources: the pursuit of productivity, flexibility, and legitimacy. In Pinnington, pp. 66–80
  112. ^ Hasnas, p. 39
  113. ^ Lee, M. (2005). Critiquing code of ethics. In Elliott, pp. 105 ff
  114. ^ Walsh, A. J. HRM and the ethics of commodified work in a market economy. In Pinnington, p. 116
  115. ^ Hare, R. M. (1979). "What is wrong with slavery". Philosophy and Public Affairs 8: 103–121. 
  116. ^ Brenkert, G. K. Marketing ethics. in Frederic (2002) p. 179
  117. ^ O'Neill
  118. ^ Marcoux, A. (2009). Business-Focused Business Ethics. in Normative Theory and Business Ethics. J. Smith. Plymouth Rowman & Littlefield: pp. 17–34 ISBN 0742548414
  119. ^ Fisher, B., 2003-05-27 "Ethics of Target Marketing: Process, Product or Target?" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Marriott Hotel, San Diego, CA
  120. ^ Groucutt, J., P. Leadley, et al. (2004). Marketing: essential principles, new realities. London, Kogan p. 75 ISBN 0749441143
  121. ^ Murphey, P. E., G. R. Laczniak, et al. (2007). "An ethical basis for relationship marketing: a virtue ethics perspective". European Journal of Marketing 41: 37–57. doi:10.1108/03090560710718102. http://www.ethicalbusiness.nd.edu/documents/European%20Journal%20of%20Marketing.pdf. 
  122. ^ Free as in Freedom: Table of Contents. Oreilly.com. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  123. ^ Labelling of GMO Products: Freedom of Choice for Consumers. Gmo-compass.org. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  124. ^ EUROPA – Food Safety – Biotechnology – GM Food & Feed – Labelling. Ec.europa.eu (2003-09-22). Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  125. ^ Anand, V.; Rosen, C. C. (2008). "The Ethics of Organizational Secrets". Journal of Management Inquiry 17: 97. doi:10.1177/1056492607312785. 
  126. ^ Brenkert, G. K. Marketing ethics. Frederic (2002) pp. 178–193
  127. ^ Murphy, p. 165
  128. ^ Murphy, pp. 165–185.
  129. ^ Jones, p. 3
  130. ^ Murphy, pp. 168–169.
  131. ^ Machan (2007) observes, "Given the nature of ethics as such, it follows that if one's will is tyrannized, regimented, regulated, etc., in the bulk of one's life, one cannot act ethically, because then one is not making the decisions as to how one will act. To claim that a banker or employer or advertiser ought to do or avoid doing such and such, that individual must be able to choose, and there must be some way of showing that what he or she should or should not do is possible. Barring that, all talk of ethics, including business ethics, is just lamentation, as when one complains about bad or cheers good weather. This, indeed, also explains why such institutions as slavery and serfdom are widely seen to be assaults on human dignity, since they rob people of the capacity to be morally responsible agents"
  132. ^ Borgerson, J. L. and J. E. Schroeder (2008). Building an Ethics of Visual Representation: Contesting Epistemic Closure in Marketing Communication. in Cutting Edge Issues in Business Ethics. M. P. Morland and P. Werhane. Boston, Springer pp. 87–108 ISBN 1402084005.
  133. ^ i.e., "essentializing of being that tends toward creation of a recognizable 'authentic' identity while knowing next to nothing about the typical Other beyond her or his typicality" Borgerson (2008) p. 89.
  134. ^ unowned men also presented as 'self-owned' men
  135. ^ Harris, J.W. (1996), 'Who owns My Body', Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 16: 55–84. Harris finds this argument a 'spectacular non sequitur,' '[f]rom the fact that nobody owns me if I am not a slave, it simply does not follow that I must own myself'(p. 71)
  136. ^ Day Patrick, (2002) The Self-Ownership Thesis: A Critique. Locke founded his notion of property rights on the premise of 'self-ownership' of course excluding the slaves from such ownership. In this short essay Day critiques Locke's ontology in the following words, "The answer to the question is to be found in Locke's ontology. There exist God, Divine Artifacts and Human Artifacts. God owns Himself. All makers own what they have made, so that God also owns Divine Artifacts. There are Direct Divine Artifacts and Indirect Divine Artifacts. The unique Direct Divine Artifact is Land, which God made out of nothing. He made Indirect Divine Artifacts by mingling His Labour with Land. Among these are wild plants, wild animals and Man (Adam and his descendants).God gave Land 'and all inferior creatures' 'to men in common' (Day, 2002:)
  137. ^ Day, P. J. (1966). "Locke on Property". The Philosophical Quarterly 16 (64): 207–220. doi:10.2307/2218464. http://jstor.org/stable/2218464. 
  138. ^ Locke, John (1690), Sec. 25 Of Property (chapter 5), in The Second Treatise on Government: God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience. The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. And tho' all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature; and no body has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: yet being given for the use of men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other, before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular man. The fruit, or venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his life. He further continues in sec.27, "Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
  139. ^ Davies, 2007:27
  140. ^ Madhu, P. M. (2008). Suicide as unfreedom and vice versa. Norderstedt: GRIN Verlag ISBN 3640183347 observes, "Atomy, in short, is selfishness and free fulfillment of sovereign self at the cost of the other. Atomy is reified as if it were autonomy within the social construction of the mythology of individuality". p. 15
  141. ^ Blackstone, W. (1766), Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume II, Of the Rights of Things, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  142. ^ Ely, J. W. (2008). The Guardian of Every Other Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press ISBN 0195323327. Ely notes, 'In 1740 South Carolina declared slaves "to be chattels personal, in the hands of their owners and possessors ' Because slaves were property, they could be purchased, sold, inherited, taxed, or seized to pay the master's debts… The slave codes also minutely governed the slaves' activities, prohibiting them from assembling, running away, owning goods or livestock, or using fi rearms. Moreover, it was unlawful to sell liquor to slaves or to teach them to read and write. Finally, crimes committed by slaves received harsher punishment than did equivalent offenses by free persons (p. 15).
  143. ^ Wishart, D. J. (1994). An Unspeakable Sadness The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press ISBN 0803297955
  144. ^ "Jefferson's Instructions to Lewis, June 20, 1803" Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 17831854, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978) 1: 6166.
  145. ^ Robertson
  146. ^ Michael, J. (2008). Identity and the Failure of America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesta Press. Michael observes that Thomas Jefferson, in spite of all his freedom speeches, was himself a slave owner, owning slaves as his property, p.45
  147. ^ Online Etymology Dictionary. Etymonline.com. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  148. ^ Davies, p. 25
  149. ^ In this regards Ross (1994:14) notes, "within the liberal context the private nature of property is naturalized and universalized, as though other forms are somehow less ethically defensible"
  150. ^ Rose, C. M. (1994). Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Colorado: Westview Press ISBN 0813385547. Rose observes, "What is the purpose of property under this . . . understanding? The purpose is to accord to each person or entity what is 'proper' or 'appropriate' to him or her. Indeed, this understanding of property historically made no strong distinction between 'property' and 'propriety', and one finds the terminology mixed up to a very considerable degree in historical texts. And what is 'proper' or appropriate, on this vision of property, is that which is needed to keep good order in the commonwealth or body politic" p.58
  151. ^ Jefferson wrote, "[W]hile it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property." Jeferrson's Letter to McPherson in, Boyle, J. (2008). The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press ISBN 0300137400.
  152. ^ Daykin, Jeffer B. (2006). ""They Themselves Contribute to Their Misery by Their Sloth": The Justification of Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Travel Narratives". The European Legacy 11: 623. doi:10.1080/10848770600918117. 
  153. ^ Gordon, D. (2009). Gender, Race and Limiting the Constitutional Privilege of Religion as a Haven for Bias: The Bridge Back to the Twentieth Century. Women's Rights Law Reporter, p. 30.
  154. ^ Sandoval, Alonso De. (2008). Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instauranda Aethiopum salute. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. pp. 17, 20
  155. ^ Bay, M. (2008). Polygenesis Versus Monogenesis In Black and White. In J. H. Moore (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (Vol. 1, pp. 90–93). Detroit: Macmillan Reference:91
  156. ^ Baum, B. (2006). The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. New York: New York University Press, ISBN 0814798926 p. 35
  157. ^ Skinner, D (2006). "Racialized Futures: Biologism and the Changing Politics of Identity". Social Studies of Science 36 (3): 459–488. doi:10.1177/0306312706054859. http://www.jstor.org/pss/25474453. 
  158. ^ Jensen, E. M. (1991). The Good Old Cause': The Ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights in South Carolina. In R. J. Haws (Ed.), The South's Role in the Creation of the Bill of Rights. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
  159. ^ Following a bitter debate over the importation of slaves from abroad, Congress was denied the authority to prohibit the slave trade until 1808. The rendition of escaped slaves was also a priority for southerners. Accordingly, the fugitive slave clause declared that persons held to service or labor under state law "shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." (Ely, 2008:46)
  160. ^ Wiecek, W. M. (1977). The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848. New York: Cornell University Press:63
  161. ^ Bethell, T. Private Property. In Hamowy (2008) p. 393
  162. ^ Digital History. Digitalhistory.uh.edu. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  163. ^ Davies, p. 20
  164. ^ "Property is something we must collectively define and construct. It is not given to us whole; it does not emerge fully formed like Athena from Zeus's head. It is closer to a piece of music that unfolds over time. Like music, property gets its sense of stability from the ongoing creation and resolution of various forms of tension. The tensions that inform property are the tensions inherent in social relations. The solutions to the problems of property conflicts lie in understanding the connection between property and human relationships. Relationships sometimes form stable patterns, but they are also ongoing and constantly renegotiated. cultural norms. It is argued that there is no simple definition of property that can be posited without making controversial value judgments about how to choose between conflicting interests" – Singer, p. 13
  165. ^ Singer aptly notes, "Property is a form of power, and the distribution of power is a political problem of the highest order" (Singer, 2000:9)
  166. ^ Cohen, M. R. (1927). Property and Sovereignty. Cornell Law Quarterly, 13, 8–30. Cohen commenting on the power dimension of property noted, "we must not overlook the actual fact that dominion over things is also imperium over our fellow human beings" p. 13
  167. ^ Bentham, J. (1931), Theory of Legislation, London: Kegan Paul, p. 113
  168. ^ Proudhon in his essay on property asked, "If property is a natural, absolute, imprescriptible, and inalienable right, why, in all ages, has there been so much preoccupation with its origin? For this is one of its distinguishing characteristics. The origin of a natural right: Good God, whoever inquired into the origin of the rights of liberty, security, or equality?" Proudhon, P.-J. ([1840] 1969). What is property, p. 69 ISBN 1606802127
  169. ^ Rose, 1994:14
  170. ^ It is pointed out by scholars, "'Property' has no essential character, but is rather a highly flexible set of rights and responsibilities which congeal in different ways in different contexts" (Davies, 2007: 20).
  171. ^ Singer observes, "A private property regime is not, after all, a Hobbesian state of nature; it requires a working legal system that can define, allocate, and enforce property rights." (Singer, p. 8)
  172. ^ Cooter and Ulen (1988) explain bundle of rights as, what a person may or may not do with the resources he owns: the extent to which he may possess, use, transform, bequeath, transfer, or exclude others from his property" and the owner is, "free to exercise his rights over his property, by which we mean that no law forbids or requires him to exercise those rights. […] The legal conception of property is, then, that of a bundle of rights over resources that the owner is free to exercise" Cooter, R. and T. Ulen (1988). Law and Economics. New York, Harper Collins.
  173. ^ Honore, A. M. (1961). Ownership. In A. G. Guest (Ed.), Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence. London: Oxford University Press.; Becker, L. (1980). The Moral Basis of Property Rights In J. Pennock & J. Chapman (Eds.), Property. New York: New York University Press..
  174. ^ However, some scholars often use the terms ownership, property and property rights interchangeably, while others define ownership (or property) as a set of specific rights each attached to the vast array of uses accessible by the owner. Ownership has thus been interpreted as a form of aggregation of such social relations – a bundle of rights over the use of scarce resources . Alchian, A. A. (1965). Some Economics of Property Rights. Il Politico, 30, 816–829
  175. ^ Epstein, R. A. (1997). "A Clear View of the Cathedral: The Dominance of Property Rules". Yale Law Journal 106 (7): 2091–2107. doi:10.2307/797162. http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=M1sW1nylSWKQJzZnVYGGY3ZCLG0shFGz4Bjj8YTLjNjFKRGv92Ym!-1814198305!558324302?docId=5000440763. "Bundle of rights is often interpreted as 'full control' over the property by the owner". 
  176. ^ Merrill, T. W., & Smith, H. E. (2001). "What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?". Yale Law Journal 111 (2): 357–398. doi:10.2307/797592. http://www.yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal/content-pages/what-happened-to-property-in-law-and-economics?/. 
  177. ^ Property is conceptualized as absolute ownership with full control over the owned property without being accountable to anyone else (Singer, p. 29).
  178. ^ Demsetz, H. (1988). A Framework for the Study of Ownership. In H. Demsetz (Ed.), Ownership, Control, and the Firm (Vol. I, pp. 12–27). Oxford: Blackwell. Further, it is held, the ownership goes beyond what is describable. Demsetz (1988:19) out that the notion of "full private ownership" over assets is "vague", and that "[i]n one sense, it must always remain so, for there is an infinity of potential rights of actions that can be owned […]. It is impossible to describe the complete set of rights that are potentially ownable
  179. ^ Rose, C. M. (1996). Property as the Keystone Right? Notre Dame Law Review 71, 329–365.
  180. ^ In this regard Frank I. Michelman (1982) writes, "Property itself is fragile—much more so than one would think from its sheer persistence. A central feature of this fragility is this: property entails the cooperation of others. You cannot have property all alone. Even the rule of First Possession, seemingly so quintessentially individualistic, depends on the recognition and acquiescence of others; they must know what you are claiming, and tacitly agree to let you hold it—even against their own interests. A property regime thus depends on a great deal of cooperation, trustworthiness, and self-restraint among the people who enjoy it…. No trust, no property" Michelman, F. I. (1982). Ethics, Economics, and the Law of Property. In J. R. Pennock & J. W. Chapman (Eds.), Nomos: Ethics, Economics, and the Law (Vol. 24, pp. 3–40). New York: New York University Press.
  181. ^ Gray, Kevin (2009). "Property in Thin Air". The Cambridge Law Journal 50: 252. doi:10.1017/S0008197300080508. 
  182. ^ Penner, J. E. (1997). The Idea of Property in Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press ISBN 0198260296
  183. ^ In explaining the identity crisis of 'property' Penner wrote, "'You see', property will say, 'now I am not even my own idea. I'm just a bundle of other concepts, a mere chimera of an entity. I'm just a quivering, wavering, normative phantasm, without any home, without anything to call my own but an album full of fading and tattered images of vitality and consequence and meaning. I'm depressed" p. 1
  184. ^ Davies, p. 11
  185. ^ Any space may be subject to plural meanings or appropriations which do not necessarily come into conflict: pastoralists and Indigenous people may have quite different understandings of rural landscapes reflected in different types of property interests, which can– ideally – coexist legally. A nominally open public space may have 'private' or limited meanings imposed upon it – for instance religious meanings (Urban spaces such as privately owned but publicly accessible shopping malls are increasingly of a 'quasi'-public nature. At the same time, intrusions of public norms into personal proprietary spaces through, for instance, zoning, heritage, and environmental regulations, militate against seeing 'private' property as entirely private. Social transitions which transgress neat liberal distinctions put the theory under strain in key points: where the owners of a quasi-public space like a shopping mall try to enforce a dress code or standards of behaviour, private proprietorial power intrudes into the public sphere (Davies, p. 11).
  186. ^ Writing on forced appropriation of property by the white minority and the legal protection argued for such a property right, AJ van der Walt notes, "[a]fter centuries of racial discrimination and exploitation and four decades of institutionalized apartheid, white political power and social and economic privilege were largely secured by apartheid politics—the entrenchment of the huge divide, along racially defined lines, between material privilege and disadvantage was a central feature of the apartheid system. Exclusive or privileged access to land and natural resources and the concomitant opportunity for white people to accumulate wealth, combined with the forced removals and the restrictions upon free movement and economic activity that accompanied state-enforced racial segregation, helped to secure white privilege while at the same time politically and economically marginalising millions of black South Africans, inexorably reducing many of them to homelessness and poverty. Walt, AJ. (2009). Property in the Margins. Oxford: Hart Publishing, ISBN 1841139637 p. 2
  187. ^ Fischbach, M. R. (2003). Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press ISBN 0231129785. In this book Fischbach discusses on forceful dispossession of Palestinian property by Israel
  188. ^ Referring dispossession of native land which became property rights the 'discoverer' Europeans Robertson observes, "In this country and, to a great extent, in other former British colonies, the legal rule justifying claims to indigenous lands discovered by Europeans traces to the 1823 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Johnson v. M'Intosh. Johnson contained the "discovery" doctrine, which answered the question: What rights did Europeans acquire, and indigenous peoples lose, upon the discovery of the New World? The answer, according to the Court, was ownership of all discovered lands. Discovery converted the indigenous owners of discovered lands into tenants on those lands. The underlying title belonged to the discovering sovereign. The indigenous occupants were free to sell their "lease," but only to the landlord, and they were subject to eviction at any time. More than 180 years later, the discovery doctrine is still the law"(Robertson, pp. ix–x).
  189. ^ Sax, J. L. (1971). "Takings, Private Property and Public Rights" (see pp. 149, 152). Yale Law Journal 81 (2): 149–186. doi:10.2307/795134. http://www.jstor.org/pss/795134. 
  190. ^ Singer, p. 6
  191. ^ Hohfeld, W. (1913). "Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning I". Yale Law Journal 23 (1): 16–59. doi:10.2307/785533. http://www.jstor.org/pss/785533. 
  192. ^ Hohfeld, W. (1917). "Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning II". Yale Law Journal 26 (8): 710–770. doi:10.2307/786270. http://jstor.org/stable/786270. 
  193. ^ Miunzer, S. R. (1990). A theory of property. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 17
  194. ^ Bryan, B. (2000). Property as Ontology: on Aboriginal and English Understandings of Property. Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 13, 3–31. In this article Bradley Bryan pointed out that property is about much more than a set of legal relations: it is 'an expression of social relationships because it organizes people with respect to each other and their material environment' p. 4
  195. ^ Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 7
  196. ^ Singer, p. 16
  197. ^ "The legal realists understood property rights as relationships only in the formal sense. They acknowledged that rights impose duties on others and that liberties impose vulnerabilities on those affected by the exercise of those liberties. In deciding whether those duties and those vulnerabilities were fair, they suggested that lawmakers balance the interests of those harmed by entitlements against those who benefit from them. This balancing solution did not take seriously the idea that legal rules both respond to and shape the contours of social relations. They did not, in other words, take the character and structure of social relations as an important independent factor in choosing the rules that govern market life. Economists may similarly fail to give sufficient attention to the moral and customary underpinnings of market societies. The idea of balancing interests is a useful one, but it does not quite get at what is at stake in constructing property law. What is at stake is a vision of social life" (Singer, p. 11) Singer further states, "Problems emerge when abstract property concepts meet the disputes over property that arise between people in the real world. The ownership model fails to acknowledge the substantial limitations on property rights that are necessary to protect the interests of both owners and nonowners harmed by the exercise of those rights. Conflicts among owners are quite prevalent. In some cases one owner's exercise of her lawful property rights interferes with other owners' rights in their own property. We also need to restrict property rights in situations where they impinge on nonproperty rights we hold as dearly". (p. 31)
  198. ^ Boldrin, p. 10.
  199. ^ It is criticized that TRIPS had become globally enforceable 'agreement' just as an outcome of maneuvering by an elite club of less than 50 individuals. Drahos and Braithwaite write, " When in 1994 we interviewed a former US trade negotiator, he remarked that 'less than 50 individuals' were responsible for TRIPS. Less than 50 individuals had managed to globalize a set of regulatory norms for the conduct of all those doing business or aspiring to do business in the information age" (Drahos, p. 73).
  200. ^ a b Steelman, A. Intellectual Property. In Hamowy (2008) pp. 249–250
  201. ^ Boldrin and Levine write, "In fact, we ordinarily think of innovative monopoly as an oxymoron. We shall see that when monopoly over ideas is absent, competition is fierce – and that, as a result, innovation and creativity thrive. Whatever a world without patents and copyrights would be like, it would not be a world devoid of great new music and beneficial new drugs." They substantiate their argument by showing the instances of key innovation in software industry prior to 1981, without the benefit of patent protection … The best evidence that copyright and patents are not needed and that competition leads to thriving innovation in the software industry is the fact that there is a thriving and innovative portion of the industry that has voluntarily relinquished its intellectual monopoly – both copyright and patent. (Boldrin, pp. 10, 16-17).
  202. ^ Välimäki, M. (2005). The Rise of Open Source Licensing: A Challenge to the Use of Intellectual Property in the Software Industry. Helsinki: Turre Publishing ISBN 9529187696.
  203. ^ Steelman defending patent monopoly writes, "Consider prescription drugs, for instance. Such drugs have benefited millions of people, improving or extending their lives. Patent protection enables drug companies to recoup their development costs because for a specific period of time they have the sole right to manufacture and distribute the products they have invented." (Steelman, In Hamowy (2008) p. 249)
  204. ^ The South African Medicines and Related Substances Control Amendment Bill and TRIPS. Academic.udayton.edu. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  205. ^ Orsi, F., Camara, M., & Coriat, B. (2006). AIDS, TRIPS and 'TRIPS plus': the case for developing and less developed countries. In Andersen (2006) pp. 70–108
  206. ^ In this regard, the authors of the book "Information Fudelism" state: Generally speaking, when a large pharmaceutical company develops a therapeutic compound, it surrounds that compound with a wall of intellectual property protection. Patents are taken out on all aspects of the compound, including the compound itself, dosage methods and processes of making it. Some knowledge is held back and protected under trade-secret law, brand name identity is protected through trade mark law and a lot of written information is protected by copyright. The whole point of building this wall is to ensure that protection lasts well beyond the term of any single patent and keeps cheaper generic manufacturers out of the market for as long as possible. For people in developing countries living on one or two dollars a day, the price of anti-retroviral therapies represented a king's ransom. In some countries such as South Africa, some treatments were in fact more expensive. As an aside we might note that the phenomenon of patented medicines being more expensive in developing countries is not unusual. The logic of patent monopoly is to have a safe and secure distribution system aimed at selling smaller numbers of expensive medicines to a wealthy class, rather than trying to distribute large numbers of cheap medicines at a few cents a day to the many poor. When large pharmaceutical companies speak about 'growing the market' in developing countries, it is the wealthy segment of the market they have in mind" (Drahos, p. 6
  207. ^ in the sense that each innovation along the trajectory relies on its own or others' current or past ideas
  208. ^ Andersen (2006) pp. 109–147
  209. ^ Roderick Long as quoted by Steelman, in Hamowy (2008) pp. 249–250
  210. ^ Machlup, F. (1958). An Economic Review of the Patent System. Washington D.C.: US Government Printing Office, p. 80. Expressing similar concern Fritz Machlup wrote, "It would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting [a patent system]."
  211. ^ From the wisdom of economics it can be understood that monopoly, in whatsoever form, makes market inefficient and uncompetitive. Proudhon, in his 1847 seminal work noted, "Monopoly is the natural opposite of competition," and further continues, "This simple observation suffices, as we have remarked, to overthrow the utopias based upon the idea of abolishing competition, as if its contrary were association and fraternity. Competition is the vital force which animates the collective being: to destroy it, if such a supposition were possible, would be to kill society" Proudhon (1847), Chapter VI in The Philosophy of Poverty.
  212. ^ Historically in several occasions monopolistic tendencies were curtailed in America. Responding to congress appeal to protect consumers from monopolistic trade practices the Sherman Act of 1890, was passed in America against a background of rampant cartelization and monopolization of the American economy. To prevent anticompetitive practices, and monopoly pricing Clayton Act of 1914, Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/usc_sup_01_15_10_2_20_I.html> and Anti-Price Discrimination Act of 1936 were enacted in USA. However, for neoliberal ideologists, "antitrust is anticompetitive" Boudreaux, D.. Antitrust. In Hamowy (2008) p. 16
  213. ^ Mindeli, L. E.; Pipiya, L. K. (2007). "Conceptual aspects of formation of a knowledge-based economy". Studies on Russian Economic Development 18: 314. doi:10.1134/S1075700707030100. 
  214. ^ Allison, R. (2005). The Birth of Spiritual Economics In L. Zsolnai (Ed.), Spirituality and ethics in management (Vol. 19, pp. 61–74). New York: Springer:73
  215. ^ Kinsella, S. (2008). Against Intellectual Property. Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Kinsella writes, "Ideas are not naturally scarce. However, by recognizing a right in an ideal object, one creates scarcity where none existed before" p. 33
  216. ^ Andersen (2006) p. 125
  217. ^ David, P. (2001, 22–23 January). Will Building 'Good Fences' Really Make 'Good Neighbours'. Paper presented at the Science, report to European Commission (DG-Research) STRATA-ETAN workshop on IPR aspects of internal collaborations, Brussels.
  218. ^ Bouckaert, B (1990). "What is Property?" In "Symposium: Intellectual Property." Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 13(3) p. 793
  219. ^ Andersen (2006) "Capturing value from intellectual capital and knowledge-based assets has become the new mantra. The battles are not for control of raw materials, but for the control of the most dynamic strategic asset, namely 'productive knowledge'" p. 109.
  220. ^ Macmillan, F. (2006). Public interest and the public domain in an era of corporate dominance. In Andersen (2006) pp. 46–69
  221. ^ The spatial-distantiation is globalization and the temporal distantiation is futurization. Futurization futurizes the present and globalization globalizes the local. Combined, they drive away politics out of place and time, reducing life into bare life. Moreover, the stretching of time and space as it has brought global to the local it has also brought the future to the present. In the earlier times it was the past that directed the present in the form of tradition and culture. With the shift in spatio-temporality, it is no longer the past, but the future that pulls human destiny, of course in increasing degrees. The social-time, if left in its present course of direction and acceleration it would incessantly outdate not only the people living in the present but also destine those yet to be born. The velocity of movement towards the future through speculative investment by the power elite, if unconstrained, indeed would invert the social time and space into irredeemable black hole and refuse politics for everyone not yet born. Madhu, P. M. (2008). Suicide as unfreedom and vice versa. Norderstedt: GRIN Verlag ISBN 3640183347
  222. ^ Drahos
  223. ^ It is observed that IPR has increasingly become an instrument in eroding public domain (Macmillan, in Andersen (2006) p. 63)
  224. ^ ethical theory and business (Beauchamp)
  225. ^ Enderle, Georges (1999). International Business Ethics. University of Notre Dame Press. p. 1. ISBN 0-268-01214-8. 
  226. ^ George, Richard de (1999). Business Ethics. ISBN 0412460807. 
  227. ^ Machan (2002), T. R. Business ethics in a free society. In R. E. Frederic (Ed.), A Companion To Business Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell p. 88 ISBN 1405101024
  228. ^ a b Agamben, G. (1993) The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 43 ISBN 0816622353
  229. ^ Hasnas, pp. 15–18
  230. ^ United States of America, Plaintiff-appellee, v. Kristine D. Vasarajs, Defendant-appellant – 908 F.2d 443 – Justia US Court of Appeals Cases and Opinions. Cases.justia.com. Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  231. ^ Coleman, J. W. (1987). "Toward an Integrated Theory of White-Collar Crime". American Journal of Sociology 93: 406–439. doi:10.1086/228750. http://www.jstor.org/pss/2779590. 
  232. ^ Shapiro, B. (1995). "Collaring the Crime, not the Criminal: Reconsidering the Concept of White-collar Crime". American Sociological Review 55 (3): 346–65. doi:10.2307/2095761. http://www.jstor.org/pss/2095761. 
  233. ^ Enker, A. N. (1969). "Impossibility in Criminal Attempts—Legality and the Legal Process". Minnesota Law Review 53: 665. http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/mnlr53&div=40&id=&page=. 
  234. ^ Coffee, J. C. J. (1981). ""No Soul to Damn: No Body to Kick": An Unscandalized Inquiry into the Problem of Corporate Punishment". Michigan Law Review 79 (3): 386–459. doi:10.2307/1288201. http://www.jstor.org/pss/1288201. 
  235. ^ Serenko, A. and Bontis, N. (2009). "A citation-based ranking of the business ethics scholarly journals". International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics 4 (4): 390–399. doi:10.1504/IJBGE.2009.023790. http://foba.lakeheadu.ca/serenko/papers/IJBGE040405_PUBLISHED.pdf. Retrieved 2009-10-21. 
  236. ^ Jonathan Chan Confucian Business Ethics and the Nature of Business Decisions
  237. ^ The word guru in the title 'business guru' is borrowed from Sanskrit. The word 'guru' in Sanskrit means a person who could be a source of wisdom and spiritual knowledge, renounced mendicant teacher, or a venerable master. Buddha, Lao tsu, Jesus, for instance, are gurus. In the popular and academic business literature the word 'business guru' means experts capable of advising business wisdom.
  238. ^ Friedman, M. (1984). "'Milton Friedman responds – an interview with Friedman." Business and Society 84(5). Milton Friedman in the interview comments, "the only entities who can have responsibilities are individuals ... A business cannot have responsibilities. So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not". Unlike it is held by Milton Friedman the corporate entities are legally considered as persons in USA and in most of the nations. The 'corporate persons' are legally entitled to the rights and liabilities due to citizens as persons
  239. ^ The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, by Milton Friedman. Colorado.edu (1970-09-13). Retrieved on 2010-09-02.
  240. ^ Bevan, D. (2008). Continental Philosophy: A Grounded Theory Approach and the Emergence of Convenient and Inconvenient Ethics. Cutting Edge Issues in Business Ethics M. Painter-Morland and P. Werhane. Boston, Springer. 24: 131–152.
  241. ^ Drucker, P. (1981). " What is business ethics?" The Public Interest Spring(63): 18–36.
  242. ^ Cory, J. (2005). Activist Business Ethics. Boston, Springer, p. 9 ISBN 0387228489
  243. ^ Duska, R. (2007). Contemporary Reflections on Business Ethics. Boston, Springer, pp. 51–62 ISBN 1402049838. Milton Friedman's argument comes from consequentialism, wherein he argues that an unrestrained corporate freedom would benefit the most in long term. The argument is more a priori than empirical and hence not pragmatic; it neglects that other stakeholders have right to expect a business to be ethical; if corporate can claim its freedom from ethical obligations, the rest of the systems and institutions too can similarly claim the same which would be counterproductive to the corporate itself; its premise that self interest is the only principle that would enhance utility is faulty; a business can earn profit while being ethical
  244. ^ Cory, J. (2005). Activist Business Ethics. Boston, Springer, pp. 7–34 ISBN 0387228489
  245. ^ Jones et al. comment: To be quite honest, we are not particularly fond of 'business ethics'. Most of what we read under the name business ethics is either sentimental common sense, or a set of excuses for being unpleasant. Some of business ethics is easy talk and simple rules – 'nice people do nice things, nasty people do nasty things'. The rest of it is a laughably transparent attempt to make things look a whole lot better than they actually are. For us, and hopefully soon also for you, business ethics in its present form is at best window dressing and at worst a calculated lie.
  246. ^ Jones, pp. 3–8
  247. ^ "In an ethics . . . you do not judge. In a certain manner, you say: whatever you do, you will only ever have what you deserve. Somebody says or does something, you do not relate it to values. You ask yourself how is that possible? How is this possible in an internal way? In other words, you relate the thing or the statement to the mode of existence that it implies, that it envelops in itself. How must it be to say that? Which manner of Being does this imply? You seek the enveloped modes of existence, and not the transcendent values. It is the operation of immanence . . . The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza's: what can a body do? We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we're organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in somebody" – from Deleuze's seminar on Spinoza of 21 December 1980, entitled 'Ontologie-Ethique'
  248. ^ Levinas, E. (2001). Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. J. Robbins. California, Stanford University Press, p. 81 ISBN 0804743096
  249. ^ LaCapra, D. (2001). Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben. Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life. M. Calarco and S. DeCaroli. California, Stanford University Press, pp. 126–162.

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