Rogene A. Buchholz

The Ethics of Consumption Activities: A Future Paradigm?

Concern about the environment and sustainable growth has raised questions related to resource availability and limits regarding the ability of the planet to provide everyone with an improved material standard of living. Such concerns lead to charges that the industrialized world, particularly the United states, is living beyond its means and taking more than its share of resources to produce a life style that is not sustainable. Whether overconsumption is a legitimate problem and changing patterns of consumption are necessary are questions that need discussion. The Protestant Ethic provided moral limits on consumption during the early stages of industrialization in Western Europe and the United States. This ethic weakened during the development of a consumer society, prompting speculation that a new environmental ethic is needed to perform the same function in modern society.

The Empirical-Normative Split in Business Ethics: A Pragmatic Alternative

The empirical-normative split in business ethics is another manifestation of the fact-value problem that has existed between science and philosophy for several centuries. This paper explores classical American pragmatisms understanding of the fact-value distinction, showing how it offers a different way of understanding the empirical business ethics-normative business ethics issue. Unfolding the pragmatic perspective on this issue involves a focus on its understanding of both the nature of empirical inquiry and the nature of normative inquiry.

Power and pay: The politics of CEO compensation

This paper examines CEO compensation, with an emphasis on the power of CEOs to influence their own compensation by managing the compensation process. It analyzes the CEOs power over the board of directors and the political tactics used by the CEO to manage the board and its compensation decisions. An empirical examination of CEO compensation in 203 large American manufacturing firms in 1985 illustrates the effect of CEO power on compensation and the flexibility available to the CEO in establishing the legitimacy of compensation. The implications of this perspective for management control of corporations and for CEO compensation research are considered.

The Protestant Ethic as an ideological justification of capitalism

The Protestant Ethic not only had behavioral implications, as Max Weber and others have pointed out, it also had ideological implications in providing a moral legitimacy for capitalism. The Protestant Ethic provided a moral justification for the pursuit of profit and the distribution of income that are a part of the system. Currently there is a good deal of intellectual concern about the moral legitimacy of the capitalist system. Thus it is important to trace the origins of the Protestant Ethic and recover the ideological functions it performs in a capitalistic society.

Toward a New Understanding of Moral Pluralism

The current literature in business ethics is tending toward an unacknowledged moral pluralism, with all the problems this position entails. An adequate moral pluralism cannot be achieved by a synthesis of existing theoretical alternatives for moral action. Rather, what is needed is a radical reconstruction of the understanding of the moral situation that undercuts some of the traditional dichotomies, provides a solid philosophical grounding which is inherently pluralistic, and offers a new understanding of what it is to think morally. The philosophical position of American pragmatism, as briefly sketched in this paper, offers one such possible reconstruction.

Theoretical Foundations of Public Policy A Pragmatic Perspective

Many theoretical developments in the business and society field do not pay enough attention to the policy environment in which business functions and through which corporate behavior is largely shaped to respond to social problems. Part of this problem may be due to the lack of a firm philosophical foundation for public policy providing legitimacy for the concept in relation to the market system. American pragmatism offers such a foundation and overcomes many of the tensions between the market and public policy by puffing the concept of the individual and community in proper perspective.

THE SPIRITUAL CORPORATION: A PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in a developing school of thought called spirituality in business. While this movement houses a diversity of particular viewpoints and definitions of spirituality, they are all attempting in one way or another to articulate a sacred attitude toward life which can be separated from any theistic beliefs. However, the various characterizations found in the current literature converge in a general understanding of spirituality (distinct from religions beliefs) as informing a sense of right and wrong and permeating one’s mode of existing in the world. Spirituality generally centers upon a desire by individuals to be their best, to help others be their best, and to feel a sense of connectedness with others and a sense of sacredness in their actions and in the world. Thus, spirituality involve a pervasive mode of behavior or mode of action that displays concerns with bettering oneself and others in the context of community and involves a sense of sacredness that extends to the world in general.

Technology and Business: Rethinking the Moral Dilemma

In a market economy, the corporation is the primary institution through which new technologies are introduced. And the corporation, being primarily interested in economic goals, may ask very limited questions about the safety and workability of a particular technology. This viewpoint causes problems which manifest themselves in many cases where the concerns of engineers and technicians in corporations about decisions relating to a particular technology clash with managers prone to overlooking these concerns in favor of organizational interests. The problem can be seen as a structural one that is inherent in the capitalistic system. It can also be seen as an organizational or policy problem that requires changes in the organization to give engineers more authority in decision-making or to facilitate whistle-blowing on the part of engineers or technicians. In this paper, we take the view that problems surrounding the misuse of technology lie in a lack of understanding of technologys inherently social and moral dimensions. Technology creates a moral situation, and this situation should provide the context for decision-making. Technology is also experimental, and everyone involved with introducing a particular technology needs to ask the question as to whether a real life experiment is warranted. Finally, technology demands a moral sensibility which recognizes that business interests and technological interests alike need to be understood in the network of concrete relational contexts in which they are embedded.

Private Management and Public Policy Another Look at Interpenetrating Systems Theory

The book Private Management and Public Policy by Lee E. Preston and James E. Post has had a major impact on the business and society field. The authors introduced the concept of public policy into the field as an alternative way of thinking about social issues that was different from the concept of social responsibility that was so popular in the early years of the field. The concept of interpenetrating systems theory they developed attempted to provide theoretical support for businesss involvement in public policy and to deal with the problem of atomic individualism that has only recently been recognized. The field is indebted to the authors for developing the broad outlines of an alternative theory of the firm in society that offers the possibility of overcoming traditional dichotomies that have plagued the field since its inception.

Ethics, economics, and service: Changing cultural perspectives

Financial services, the media, and health care are each considered to be a service industry, but recently have become more dominated by economic concerns. This change is part of a larger perception concerning the nature of “the economic system”, one which can be viewed from successive conceptual shifts among three major moral perspectives by which economic concerns gradually gained an independent stature. A present emerging moral paradigm can restore the economic system to the rich relational context from which it has been falsely and destructively abstracted, showing that neither “the economic system” nor the institutions embedded within it can be separated from humanistic and service concerns.