William C. Frederick

From CSR1 to CSR2 The Maturing of Business-and-Society Thought

This 1978 paper outlines a conceptual transition in business and society scholarship, from the philosophical-ethical concept of corporate social responsibility (corporations obligation to work for social betterment) to the action-oriented managerial concept of corporate social responsiveness (the capacity of a corporation to respond to social pressure). Implications of this shift include a reduction in business defensiveness, an increased emphasis on techniques for managing social responsiveness, more empirical research on business and society relationships and constraints on corporate responsiveness, a continued need to clarify business responsibilities, and a need to work toward more dynamic theories of values and social change.

Moving to CSR What to Packfor the Trip

The study of Social Issues in Management (SIM) has exhausted its primary analytic framework based on corporate social performance (social science), business ethics (philosophy), and stakeholder theory (organizational science), and needs to move to a new paradigmatic level based on the natural sciences. Doing so would expand research horizons to include cosmological perspectives (astrophysics), evolutionary theory (biology, genetics, ecology), and non-sectarian spirituality concepts (theological naturalism, cognitive neuroscience). Absent this shift, SIM studies risk increasing irrelevance for scholars and business practitioners.

The moral authority of transnational corporate codes

Ethical guidelines for multinational corporations are included in several international accords adopted during the past four decades. These guidelines attempt to influence the practices of multinational enterprises in such areas as employment relations, consumer protection, environmental pollution, political participation, and basic human rights. Their moral authority rests upon the competing principles of national sovereignty, social equity, market integrity, and human rights. Both deontological principles and experience-based value systems undergird and justify the primacy of human rights as the fundamental moral authority of these transnational and transcultural compacts. Although difficulties and obstacles abound in gaining operational acceptance of such codes of conduct, it is possible to argue that their guidelines betoken the emergence of a transcultural corporate ethic.

Creatures, Corporations, Communities, Chaos, Complexity: A Naturological View of the Corporate Social Role

The corporations social role is usually presented as a cultural phenomenon in which the corporation learns socially acceptable behaviors through voluntary social responsibility, government regulations/public policies, and/or acceptance of ethics principles. This article presents an alternative view of corporationcommunity relations as a natural phenomenon based on complexity-chaos theory and a biological-physical conception of corporate values. Corporation and community are depicted as interacting nonlinear adaptive systems having unpredictable futures, the corporate social role is depicted as largely indeterminate, and competing values are depicted as key factors driving change in corporationcommunity linkages. Normative duties of corporate and community leaders are described.

ANCHORING VALUES IN NATURE: TOWARD A THEORY OF BUSINESS VALUES

A6stract: The dominant values of the business system- economizing and power-aggrandizing are manifestations of natural evolutionary forces to which sociocultural meaning has been assigned. Economizing tends to slow life-negating entropic processes, while power-aggrandizement enhances them. Both economizing and power-aggrandizing work against a third (non-business) value cluster ecologizing which sustains community integrity. The contradictory tensions and conflicts generated among these three value clusters define the central normative issues posed by business operations. While both economizing and ecologizing are antientropic and therefore lifeSsupporting, power augmentation, which negates the other two value clusters, is proentropic and therefore life-defeating. Business ethicists, by focusing on the contradictions between personal values, on the one hand, and both economizing and power-aggrandizing, on the other hand, have tended to overlook the normative significance of nature-based value systems. Learning to reconcile economizing and ecologizing values is the most important theoretical task for business ethicists. IN his 1990 presidential address to the Society for Business Ethics, Michael Hoffman argued that ethical analysis of environmental problems and issues should proceed from a biocentric, rather than a homocentric, base. Only by placing biological knowledge at the center of environmental understanding, Hoffman argued, can we expect to make sense of what is happening and how or whether we might affect the outcome. To see only from a human-centered perspective produces distortion.2 Hoffmans language and theoretical thrust capture much of what is important in the study of business values. A theory of business values that draws heavily on knowledge produced by the physical and social sciences is likely, borrowing a phrase from Mike Hoffman, to provide a deeper, richer, and more ethically compelling view of the nature of things-or, it could also be said, a deeper, richer, and more ethically compelling view of the nature of business values. Just outside the disciplinary boundaries where business ethicists do their work lies a veritable treasure house of exciting ideas and dramatic new perspectives. This part of the scientific community is alive with new discoveries and vigorous controversies. It includes the ethologists who study ani

Notes for a Third Millennial Manifesto: Renewal and Redefinition in Business Ethics

Business ethics in the new millennium will confront both new and old questions that are being transformed by the changed pace and direction of human evolution. These questions embrace human nature, values, inquiring methods, technological change, geopolitics, natural disasters, and the moral role of business in all of these. The emergence and acceptance of technosymbolic phenomena may signal a slow transition of carbon-based human life toward greater dependence upon silicon-based virtualities across a wide range of human possibilities. The resultant moral issues call for a renewal and redefinition of business ethics theories and methods. If business ethics is to remain a viable inquiring enterprise into and beyond the opening years of the third (Christian) millennium, its scholarly advocates will need to cope with a range of questions that, while familiar in some respects, have begun to take on new meanings and more complex dimensions not envisioned by established theory or philosophy. The driving force of these intellectual transformations is the heightened pace and range of a human evolutionary process that is opening up new behavioral, cognitive, and societal realms only incompletely understood while simultaneously revealing the inadequacies of present answers and of the conventional ways of seeking those answers. Now in its 4,000th millennium (some would say only the 2,500th), human evolution is altering not just the ways in which people behave toward each other but, more importantly, may be removing and replacing the organic limits and constraints previously imposed on thought and action by the traits of a carbonbased organic life. Human attempts to outwit or out-game natural selection, whether successful or not in the far-distant long run, have already gripped the business imagination and spilled a host of ethics dilemmas onto the corporate boardroom table. That business will continue to be drawn into the fierce vortex of managerial qua philosophical controversies ofthe third millennium is of little doubt. That it will be given the guidance it will need, especially by business ethicists, is uncertain. It depends upon the ability and willingness of business ethicists to grasp the nature of the evolutionary transformations taking place and to convey that understanding into the workplace where business managers daily render decisions fraught with personal, societal, and planetary significance. ?2000. Business Ethics Quarterly, Volume 10, Issue 1. ISSN 1052-150X. pp. 159-167 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.58 on Wed, 12 Oct 2016 04:23:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 160 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY The questions featured here are by no means a complete register ofthe normative puzzles newly twisted and transformed by the upsurge of scientific discovery. Some are as old as philosophic inquiry itself, others more recently thrust upon us. But fragmentary as they are, they may serve as symbolic markers of the pathways that business ethicists must tread as they venture into the third millennium.

The Virtual Reality of Fact vs. Value: A Symposium Commentary

READING these papers?each one a straightforward declaration of a pre? ferred position?has the odd (and I trust, unintended) effect of projecting the reader into a world of virtual reality. The words, the concepts, the theories, the divisions and dualisms, the premises, the arguments themselves all seem to be real. They seem to make sense. Yes, we can say to ourselves, I see and understand what each one is saying. Fact, value, empirical, normative, science, philoso? phy, naturalistic fallacy, and similar terms all invoke meanings that seem to be clear and that help to clarify the issues being debated. But do they? To what extent is this particular discussion about business ethics only virtually real, a product of an imagined or invented dialogue that may rest on little more than the assumed and inherited meanings assigned to the phrases we toss around so freely? By raising the question, it should be obvious that I am inclined to believe that the debaters have convinced themselves that they are engaged in a dialogue about something real but which actually exists only in the invented forms and phrases that they have brought to the debate. The issues are only virtually real. If that is so, then one needs to ask where did those inventions?the virtual realities of the debate?come from. Why are they so appealing? Why do they seem to make so much sense to us? Why are they defended so vigorously by both sides or, perhaps more aptly, by all sides? When Linda Trevino and Gary Weaver assert so confidently that normative (i.e., prescriptive) and empirical (i.e., explanatory, descriptive, and/or predic? tive) approaches are so distinct as to raise an issue of whether they can or should be united, the debate then proceeds as if the distinction they posit is real. Or when Bart Victor and Carroll Stephens ask us to accept the desirabil? ity of synthesizing normative philosophy and descriptive social science, it is easy to overlook the possibility that they have posed a false dichotomy. Even as Thomas Donaldson impressively argues for the importance of keeping prescription and description separate, it is possible to question the source of the pre? sumed divide between a deliberately normative inquiry and one that is deliberately empirical. Quite clearly, all of the authors accept as fact that this distinction is valid as a descriptive category. But there is more here than mere descriptive agreement. The dialogue conveys an impression of finality, of inevitability, of a logic of some sort that from the beginning and forever into the future holds these two components apart. Then, in varying degrees and for varying reasons, the debaters speculate on the prospects and/or risks of modifying this situation.

The Next Development in Management Science: A General Theory

The article discusses the evolution of management science through 1963. Classic management principles have been outlined as functions including planning which emphasizes that management is a ration...

An Appalachian Coda: The Core Values of Business

This article briefly characterizes the core values of business as manifestations of natural processes. They include the values of economizing, power-aggrandizing, ecologizing, technologizing, and X-factor, with each separate value cluster a response to identifiable forces of nature. The inconsistencies and contradictions between these various value systems are reconciled by resorting to two kinds of normative phenomena: the rationality and creativity found within the techno-symbolic value cluster, and a global culture of ethics.

Relativism, Feminism, and Theology A Naturalist Response

This article argues that the normative issues that arise (a) from business operations in other cultures, (b) from the normative outcomes of early value inculcation by parents, and (c) from a quest for transcendent meaning within the workplace can be understood best when seen within a naturalist framework. Cultural relativist, feminist morality, and theological views can only be enriched, not diminished, by tracing their kinship with nature.