Gary R. Weaver’s research while affiliated with State of Delaware and other places

Virtue theory’s emphasis on moral character, the feelings associated with it, and the actions that often habitually flow from it create parallels and affinities with empirical social science research on moral identity and moral intuition. The latter two fields, in turn, have implications for understanding how situational contexts, such as life within work organizations, can contribute to the development of virtue. This chapter indicates that organizational influences on virtue development include factors such as relationship quality, behavioral modeling, discourse practices, and opportunities to practice virtue – all factors one might expect, given the typical implications of virtue theory itself. More generally, there is a clear sympathy between the practical dictates of virtue theory and the findings of much research on ethics in organizations.

In this interview based article, a panel of business ethicists explores the relationship between behavioral and normative approach to business ethics. Spurred by the meteoric rise of behavioral ethics over the last decade, the interview probes whether normative and behavioral ethics can and should be integrated as a matter of pedagogy. While the panelists diverge in the extent to which they emphasize normative or behavioral ethics in their teaching, a consensus emerges around the proposition that a business ethics course must tackle the integration of normative and behavioral approaches. In the course of the interview, a variety of strategies for doing so are introduced, and we conclude with two different conceptions for synthesizing the approaches, each proposed to make these insights accessible to instructors, whether trained in social science, philosophy or law. The "map and car" conception relies upon normative ethics to define one's desired path and behavioral ethics to address the means for getting there given what we are like as humans, whereas the "spaghetti" model—drawing precedent from virtue ethics—conceives as intertwined the numerous threads of normative and behavioral ethics. Concrete teaching concepts for experimenting with these ideas are presented.

Virtue theory’s emphasis on moral character, the feelings associated with it, and the actions that often habitually flow from it create parallels and affinities with empirical social science research on moral identity and moral intuition. The latter two fields, in turn, have implications for understanding how situational contexts, such as life within work organizations, can contribute to the development of virtue. This chapter indicates that organizational influences on virtue development include factors such as relationship quality, behavioral modeling, discourse practices, and opportunities to practice virtue – all factors one might expect, given the typical implications of virtue theory itself. More generally, there is a clear sympathy between the practical dictates of virtue theory and the findings of much research on ethics in organizations.

Past Trends and Future Directions in Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility Scholarship - Volume 25 Issue 4 - Denis G. Arnold, Kenneth E. Goodpaster, Gary R. Weaver

Social welfare, or the good society, is of central concern to the Academy of Management. We begin by observing that, in theory and practice, social welfare appears to be a multifarious, multidimensional, pluralistic concept. In light of this, we develop an account of a multiobjective corporation as a means for enabling a greater range of management decisions so as to permit more direct corporate engagement in the diverse goals of various stakeholders. In the course of doing this, we critique aspects of single-objective theories of corporate function and argue that a key objection to multi-objective views can be avoided. Our analysis is built on a stakeholder agency framework wherein corporate actions reflect the outcome of an intracorporate "marketplace." We suggest that improvements in social welfare are more likely when intracorporate markets among stakeholders can operate unconstrained by some single-valued objective.

This entry reviews the key distinctions between normative (philosophical) and descriptive (empirical social scientific) methods in business ethics, considering differences in language, institutional roots, assumptions about human agency, role of empirical evidence, and bases for evaluation of theoretical claims. Keywords: business ethics research; methods; methodologies; quantitative; qualitative; normative; social science; philosophy

Micro-level behavioral research on ethical and unethical behavior within organizations flourished over the past decade, as scandals have hurt businesses’ bottom lines and undermined their legitimacy. While important antecedents of (un)ethical behavior have been identified, the field has devoted little attention to macro-level or meso-level influences on (un)ethical behavior. This is somewhat remarkable because the definition of (un)ethical behavior itself revolves around social structure (i.e., broadly accepted societal norms). This symposium will bring together researchers who draw on different macro-level or meso-level theories in their study of behavioral ethics phenomena. Specifically, panelists will discuss an institutional work perspective of unethical behavior, an actor network perspective on values, and a symbolic interactionist perspective on moral disengagement. The goal of this panel is to highlight the potential contribution of macro-perspectives in a field that is dominated by a micro-perspective, and to foster research interest in the area through an interactive discussion among the panelists, discussants, and audience members.

Despite the importance of individual¡¯s moral self-regulation at work, moral emotions as a self-regulation property have received sporadic attentions in the organizational wrongdoing context. However, since individuals differ in the intensity and pattern of moral emotion experience from organizational wrongdoing involvement, this study investigates the individual differences in ways in which moral emotions are experienced. Drawn from self-discrepancy (Higgins, 1987) and self-construal theories (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), we hypothesize that moral identity and national culture contribute to the individual variances in moral emotion experience. We found that the intensity and pattern of moral emotion experience vary upon the centrality of moral identity as well as national culture within which moral emotions are embedded. This study contributes to unpacking the hidden mechanism that accounts for individual differences in moral emotion experience from organizational wrongdoing.