Business Ethics Scholarship

Conceptual Scholarship

To properly understand and assess the practice of business and to prescribe specific constraints on businesspeople and business organizations, philosophers and [Page 228]social theorists have analyzed key concepts and defended particular understandings of those concepts. For example, there is an extensive literature on the ontological status of organizations that seeks to clarify our knowledge of concepts such as corporate intentionality, corporate personhood, corporate agency, corporate moral responsibility, moral imagination in business, and both negative and positive deviancy in business. It is only after such concepts are clarified that questions concerning the moral status of organizations can be understood. For example, if a corporation is properly understood as a moral agent, then it is possible to praise or blame corporations and not just the directors, executives, managers, and workers of a corporation at a particular time. Punishment of the corporation, and not just the corporate personnel, is thereby justified when corporate intentions are morally objectionable. Without such conceptual scholarship, such judgments would be difficult to render.

Another important area of conceptual scholarship concerns stakeholder theory. The notion of a stakeholder was initially developed by R. Edward Freeman in response to the stockholder conception of the corporation. The stockholder conception holds that a corporation is an organization whose function is to serve the interests of shareholders. In this view, the obligation of the manager is to increase value for shareholders. Freeman has argued for more than 20 years that the stockholder conception of the corporation fails to accurately capture the purposes of the modern corporation. He argues that all corporations have stakeholders, persons who are helped or harmed by corporate actions and whose rights are either respected or violated by corporate managers. Stakeholder theorists seek to identify and prioritize stakeholders and thereby clarify the purposes of the modern corporation.

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