Remembering to Forget: The Historic Irresponsibility of U.S. Big Tobacco Abstract Society increasingly demands corporations to be accountable for their past misbehaviours. Some corporations engage in forgetting work with the aim of avoiding responsibility for their wrongdoings. We argue that whenever social actors have their past actions called into question and engage in forgetting work, an ethics of remembering takes place. A collective project of social forgetting is contingent on the emergence of coordinated actions among players of an industry. Similarly, sustained efforts of forgetting work depend on the continuity of the project through various generations of employees, which presumes the existence of frameworks of remembering in place. We analysed this paradox through a historical case study of the U.S. tobacco industry. We conclude that forgetting work may be a double-edged sword. It might be beneficial in the short run, to the extent that corporations can successfully maintain the public ignorance about their deceitful pasts. In the long run, however, it creates additional layers of historical irresponsibility and may turn into a compounded liability in the event the memory of the collective strategy of social forgetting becomes public.

Towards a Grainier Understanding of How to Encourage Morally Responsible Leadership Through the Development of Phronesis: A Typology of Managerial Phronesis Abstract Aristotle’s philosophical insights into ethics, wisdom and practice have drawn the attention of scholars. In the current professional context where ethics are often compromised, this debate assumes a necessary urgency. This subject is highly relevant to business schools, given the general neglect of this quality in executive management development. Our research involved an analysis of contemporary literature on phronesis in the management scholarship, practice and teaching domains. Our definition of phronesis identifies themes and paradoxes distilled from this literature. Stories are by nature multi-layered and paradoxical, embracing ambiguity and contradiction, so we incorporate narrative as essential to our enquiry. While it appears to be easily grasped, phronesis is complex, nuanced and paradoxical, seen as an unorganised set of characteristics in the management scholarship domain. We argue that the neglect of phronesis in modernity flows from the challenging nature of developing it, itself the consequence of its indistinctness. It calls for Einstein’s words “I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity”. This article argues that developing this virtue as a form of practical wisdom, should be an integral part of executive management development if we are to cultivate morally responsible leadership. A typology of managerial phronesis will encourage contextually appropriate leadership excellence based on the virtue-attributes of managers-as-scholars. The typology we propose is based on a Grounded Theory synthesis of relevant literature. We adopt a phenomenological stance. Through incorporating Grounded Theory second order themes, we offer a grainier understanding of the qualities of managerial phronesis.

The Information Role of Earnings Conference Call Tone: Evidence from Stock Price Crash Risk Abstract This paper investigates whether and how the disclosure tone of earnings conference calls predicts future stock price crash risk. Using US public firms’ conference call transcripts from 2010 to 2015, we find that firms with less optimistic tone of year-end conference calls experience higher stock price crash risk in the following year. Additional analyses reveal that the predictive power of tone is more pronounced among firms with better information environment and lower managerial equity incentives, suggesting that extrinsic motivations for truthful disclosure partially explain the predictive power of conference call tone. Our results shed light on the long-term information role of conference call tone by exploring the setting of extreme future downside risk, when managers have conflicting incentives either to unethically manipulate disclosure tone to hide bad news or to engage in ethical and truthful communication.

Reconceptualizing Entrepreneurial Performance: The Creation and Destruction of Value from a Stakeholder Capabilities Perspective Abstract Although scholars have long known that entrepreneurship involves the interaction of countless individuals beyond the entrepreneur, traditional performance metrics are limited to capturing the economic value that is created for shareholders. Multiple scholars have suggested that it should be possible to develop a more complete assessment that is able to simultaneously capture both the economic and non-economic consequences of entrepreneurship that exist for the broader network of firm stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to provide a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurial performance by operationalizing the concept of stakeholder capabilities. Building on concepts from stakeholder theory and the human development and capability approach in welfare economics, we argue that the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities can either create or destroy value for multiple stakeholders, and that this value is best conceived in terms of increases and decreases in individual capabilities (social, psychological, economic, physiological and intellectual). Approaching entrepreneurial performance from a stakeholder capabilities lens has implications for how we view entrepreneurs’ impact on society, what we mean by the creation and destruction of “value,” and how we define failure and success in entrepreneurship.

Envisioning the ‘Sharing City’: Governance Strategies for the Sharing Economy Abstract Recent developments around the sharing economy bring to the fore questions of governability and broader societal benefit—and subsequently the need to explore effective means of public governance, from nurturing, on the one hand, to restriction, on the other. As sharing is a predominately urban phenomenon in modern societies, cities around the globe have become both locus of action and central actor in the debates over the nature and organization of the sharing economy. However, cities vary substantially in the interpretation of potential opportunities and challenges, as well as in their governance responses. Building on a qualitative comparative analysis of 16 leading global cities, our findings reveal four framings of the sharing economy: ‘societal endangerment,’ ‘societal enhancement,’ ‘market disruption,’ and ‘ecological transition.’ Such framings go hand in hand with patterned governance responses: although there is considerable heterogeneity in the combination of public governance strategies, we find specific configurations of framings and public governance strategies. Our work reflects the political and ethical debates on various economic, social, and moral issues related to the sharing economy, and contributes to a better understanding of the field-level institutional arrangements—a prerequisite for examining moral behavior of sharing economy organizations.

Business’ Environmental Obligations and Reasoned Public Discourse: A Kantian Foundation for Analysis Abstract The Kantian categorical imperative process of rational reflection and reasoned social discourse is theoretically capable of forming the moral environmental maxims applicable to business. This article argues that rational environmental discourse demands that business has an imperfect duty to develop relevant unbiased information, and perhaps to disseminate this information through participation in business-public coalitions. For the environmental problem, this “rationality” particularly concerns (i) our obligations toward future generations and distant people while recognizing that they cannot participate in current discourse, and (ii) the rules for gathering and assessing the evidence that should govern our environmental preservations and enhancements. Both these concerns demand certain scientific information requirements, as well as logical decision criteria that are perceived as stable across both overlapping generations, and affected peoples (as argued by Rawls in a different context). The criteria for Rawls’ “considered moral judgments” are shown to apply to resolutions of these business-related ethical conundrums. In a way similar to Kant’s anthropological examinations of humanity’s antisocial behaviors, this article also examines various biases that inhibit this social reasoning.

What’s in an App? Investigating the Moral Struggles Behind a Sharing Economy Device Abstract In recent years, the sharing economy (SE) has attracted considerable attention, both scholarly and popular, relating to its capacity to enforce or undermine extant economic conventions. However, the process through which technological developments can effectively have this outcome of altering extant conventions on what is morally acceptable or desirable is still unclear. In this paper, we draw on the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (On justification: economies of worth. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2006) and the notion of agencement to investigate the moral and performative dimension of controversies related to the SE. The research stems from a qualitative case-based study of the controversy following Uber’s implementation in Montréal’s taxi market. We contribute to the literature on the SE through an empirical study of the moral debates entailed in the unfolding in situ of a SE device. We also add to the literature using the ‘Orders of Worth’ framework (2006) by showing how a compromise is solidified. We find that beyond discursive strategies, it is the concrete recomposition of laws, conventions, devices, persons, etc. that harmonised different definitions of the common good. Finally, we contribute to the literature on the relationship between technology, ethics, and social change by capturing the specific values that legitimise Uber, and by following their unfolding throughout a controversy.

Ethical Issues in the Assurance of Sustainability Reports: Perspectives from Assurance Providers Abstract The objective of this paper is to investigate, through a qualitative study based on 38 semi-structured interviews with agents who provide assurance of sustainability reports, how they perceive and manage ethical issues underlying the verification of sustainability reports. Most of the ethical issues observed involve four interconnected aspects: the commercialism underlying sustainability assurance, the symbolic nature of the verification process, interdependency between auditing and consulting activities, and familiarity with the audited companies. The findings shed light on the reflexivity of assurance providers on these issues and the legitimation strategies used to explain how they reconcile the independence and impartiality required for auditing activities with commercial aspects related to client–provider relationships. The study also shows the role of contextual variables in the ethics of assurance services. The paper contributes to the literature on the legitimacy of sustainability assurance and commercialism of the audit function. Practical implications and avenues for future research are also developed.

Denouncing Odious Debts Abstract Economists have suggested it was optimal to signal the odious character of bonds when they were issued. However, since the odious debt doctrine has not been recognized by any court, one could argue that denouncing odious debts is useless. Exploiting a unique historical episode, this paper quantifies the impact of protests on odious debts. In 1906, the Russian government floated a bond in Paris to cover the costs of its war against Japan but also to raise money to crush the political movements wishing to reform Russia’s political system. Issued without parliamentary consent, this loan met with fierce opposition. Press campaigns in Great Britain, France and Germany denounced its odious character. If failure or success is determined solely by the ability to prevent a loan from being issued, then the campaign failed. We argue, however, that failure or success should be determined in light of the financial costs imposed on the issuer for future loans and even the ability to force a postponement of these loans. We show that these campaigns increased the yields of all Russian bonds traded in Paris, and thus Russia’s future borrowing cost. Yields on the 1906 loan, which was specially targeted by the campaigns, rose even more. However, once the press campaigns stopped, yields experienced a declining trend, highlighting the important role the press may have on odious debts.

Putting the Law in Its Place: Business Ethics and the Assumption that Illegal Implies Unethical Abstract Many business ethicists assume that if a type of conduct is illegal, then it is also unethical. This article scrutinizes that assumption, using the rideshare company Uber’s illegal operation in the city of Philadelphia as a case study. I argue that Uber’s unlawful conduct was permissible. I also argue that this position is not an extreme one: it is consistent with a variety of theoretical commitments in the analytic philosophical tradition regarding political obligation (i.e. the moral duty to obey the law because it is the law). I conclude by showing why business ethicists would have a better rejoinder to the “dominant view” of business ethics associated with Milton Friedman if they dispensed with the assumption that illegal implies unethical.