Damian Grace

Errant corporations, diffuse responsibilities, and the environment : Ethical issues in the Orica case study

The papers in this volume deal with various aspects of the HCB legacy at the Orica plant at Botany. Whether explicitly or implicitly, they are concerned with questions of ethics; with the just distribution of burdens and benefits; with just processes for disposing of dangerous industrial waste; and with a just custodianship of the Botany environment. These ethical issues illustrate the difficulty of securing corporate accountability, and the elusiveness of responsibility within organisations. This paper reflects on some of the issues for ethics raised by the Orica case and their significance for corporate ethics.

Machiavelli's echo in management

The purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate the way in which Niccolò Machiavelli has been incorporated in the management literature. The process of incorporation dates from the publication in 1967 of Management and Machiavelli by Antony Jay, and so this paper concentrates on that book, while reviewing many of the others that followed it. We also note that specialists in history and political science with proprietary rights to Machiavelli seldom notice this incorporation. The approach of this study is to assemble and examine a long list of books and journal articles that proclaim themselves to be about management and that refer to Machiavelli. We look closely at how the writers in this secondary literature explain their purpose and what they say about Machiavelli. We offer a number of criticisms on each aspect. The principal finding is that two master narratives underlie the incorporation of Machiavelli. Together they equate his Florence to the contemporary world and politics to business. We dispute both propositions. We show that these two narratives are faulty. Renaissance Florence is far different from our world, and politics is not business, nor vice versa. While there is much to learn from Machiavelli we suggest that it is learned through reflection, and not taken as a guide to action.

For Business Ethics

th pu disp E ics has always had a somewhat uneasy place in business education. Is its rpose to inform and enlighten; to impart a moral turn to technical skills; to el vice and inculcate virtue? The history of business ethics provides few answers to these questions. Early opponents claimed that ethics was not teachable or should have been learned elsewhere and earlier. Since the 1980s, the subject has gained an increasing, if sometimes grudging, acceptance but its rationale has remained hazy. One hope was that ethics courses would lessen the incidence of corporate failure and reduce public pressures for stronger regulation and tougher policing of business. Unfortunately, the corporate crashes and ethical failures of the past two decades—Enron, HIH, WorldCom, Tyco, OneTel—have disappointed such hopes and confirmed the suspicions of those who opposed ceding valuable curriculum space to ethics. For Business Ethics by Jones, Parker and ten Bos, is one kind of response to these disappointments. While conventional business ethics continues to try to rein in aberrant business practices, this book argues that such efforts are based on mistaken beliefs about business and ethics. The authors declare their hand on the first page: