Moses L. Pava

Yeshiva University | YU · Sy Syms School of Business

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, in his recent book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (2007), rejects outright the call for increased corporate social responsibility. He believes that social responsibility advocates are wasting resources and efforts on a doomed project. This article suggests t...

In his book, Five Minds for the Future (2006), Howard Gardner offers both a constructive critique of current educational practices and an alternative vision for the future of education. Gardner, best known for his seminal work on multiple intelligences, grounds his major conclusions primarily on the results of his impressive, decade-long, and massi...

This paper is divided into two sections. In the first section, I discuss “what is spirituality?â€\x9D and in the section that follows, I examine some of the implications of my definition to the teaching of spirituality in an undergraduate business ethics course. For the purposes of this paper, spirituality is defined as the planned experience (th...

When Fr. Patrick Primeaux, S.M. and I set out to edit Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations, our guiding light was that research in business ethics should serve to promote the search for meaning in organizations. Further, we understood and wanted to promote the notion that organizational ethics (and the ideology of organizations) directly imp...

This article explores and examines some of the findings from the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology. How important are these results to our understanding of morality and ethics? In addition, more specifically, how important are theses results to our understanding of business ethics? I believe that the jury is still out on these questions....

Wayne Norman and Chris MacDonald launch a strong attack against Triple Bottom Line or 3BL accounting in their article "Getting to the Bottom of 'Triple Bottom Line'" (2004). This response suggests that, while limitations to 3BL accounting do exist, the critique of Norman and MacDonald is deeply flawed.

Robert L. Bunting (2005), the newly installed chairman of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), recently remarked as follows:A great profession takes a long view. Its members inherit a legacy from the past, derive benefit from it, build on it and pass it on to the next generation even stronger than they found it. A great p...

Part C of this three part series is the presentation from the Oxford style debate held at the Tenth Annual International Conference Promoting Business Ethics between Laura Hartman, J.D., and Dr. Moses Pava on topics related to the EverQuest® v. EverCrack case (Part B). In a traditional Oxford style debate, two debaters take opposing viewpoints and...

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No abstract available.

This paper defines and explores the concept of intelligent spirituality. It is a deeply-grounded, emotionally-inspiring, spirituality that is human-centered, pragmatic, and intelligent. While the name is new, the idea itself has a well-respected pedigree. The American pragmatist philosopher, educator, and activist, John Dewey, more than anyone else...

This paper examines three popular and important books on spirituality in business: Mitroff and Denton''s A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America, Nash and McLennan''s Church on Sunday, Work on Monday, and Lerner''s Spirit Matters. Interestingly, none of these books can find satisfactory examples of legitimate spirituality in business.This paper sugg...

This paper, following the work of the sociologist Philip Selznick, identifies three stages of moral development in organizations: ethical improvisation, ethical institutionalization, and ethical revival. I argue here that the developmental perspective is inherent in the structure of biblical narrative, especially in the stories of Genesis and Exodu...

Many corporate managers are increasingly looking to the covenant model for inspiration, guidance, and most of all, practical business wisdom. While some managers seemingly exploit the religiously inspired language of covenant for purely self-interested reasons, other managers and executives like Tom Chappell of Tom's of Maine, Max De Pree of Herman...

Community standards, ethical norms, and perceptions of fairness often serve as constraints on pure profit maximizing behavior. Consider the following examples: Most hardware stores refrain from raising prices on snow shovels after a major snow storm, even where short term profits might be increased. Most employers do not lower wages for existing em...

Increasingly many business practitioners and academics are turning to religious sources as a way of approaching and answering difficult questions related to business ethics. There now exists a relatively large literature which attempts to integrate business decisions and religious values. The integration, however, is not without difficulties. For m...

Philosophers generally agree that meaningful ethical statements are universal in scope. If so, what sense is there to speak about a business ethics particular to Judaism? Just as a Jewish algebra and a Jewish physics are contradictions in terms, so too, is the notion of a particularly Jewish business ethics. The goal of this paper is to deny the ab...

Predicting how we will come to understand corporate social responsibilities in the future is inextricably linked to today’s definition of the corporation. As numerous business ethicists have come to realize, discussions of corporate social responsibilities necessarily entail more broad-based and fundamental discussions of the definition, nature, an...

The specific purpose of this introductory paper is to explicitly introduce readers to some of the important Biblical, Talmudic, and post-Talmudic texts which deal with business ethics. As the discussion will show, Judaism’s traditional texts treat an amazing variety of issues emphasizing responsibilities in the business context. These texts are bot...

The goal of this paper is to provide a general discussion about the legitimacy of corporate social responsibility. Given that social responsibility projects entail costs, it is not always obvious under what precise conditions managers will have a responsibility to engage in activities primarily designed to promote societal goals. In this paper we d...

This paper examines the method of Jewish business ethics. MichaelWalzer, in his work, Interpretation and Social Criticism (1987), suggeststhree common and important approaches to moral philosophy. He labels thesethe path of discovery, the path of invention, and the path ofinterpretation. The first part of this paper argues that Jewish businessethic...

The idea of corporate social responsibility is neither new nor radical. The core belief is that business managers, even in their role as managers, have responsibilities to society beyond profit maximization. Managers, in pursuing their primary goal of increasing shareholder value, have social responsibilities in addition to meeting the minimal requ...

It is generally assumed that common stock investors are exclusively interested in earning the highest level of future cash-flow for a given amount of risk. This view suggests that investors select a well-diversified portfolio of securities to achieve this goal. Accordingly, it is often assumed that investors are unwilling to pay a premium for corpo...

This paper reports the results of an extensive study of the effectiveness of MD&As. Our primary research question can be stated as follows: To what extent do MD&As, as currently issued, meet the self-perceived needs of individual investors? To answer this question, we examine the responses to a survey questionnaire. The content of the questionnaire...