This weekend offered an interesting opportunity
to discuss, dissect and reflect on the state of the art of business ethics
research and some of its future trajectories. At the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania a small group of business ethics scholars gathered from
all around the globe to celebrate and honor the work of one of the faculty
members, Professor Thomas Donaldson. Donaldson, a philosopher by training, can
be considered one of the pioneers of the business ethics field and one of its
most longstanding and certainly most influential voices over the last four
decades.
Some of the speeches at the event focused
on appraising and celebrating Donaldson’s impressive body of work, including
many humorous interjections on Donaldson as a person by some of his
contemporaries such as Norman Bowie, George Brenkert, Ed Freeman, or Pat Werhane. Most of the day though was dedicated to work by scholars who build on,
extend, refine, and continue some of Donaldson’s work, including also entering
a critical dialogue with his ideas.
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| Thomas Donaldson |
Taking a step back after reflecting on
Donaldson’s work for 1½ days, it strikes that next to his solid contributions
it is both his approach and his choice of topics decades ago which have maybe
the strongest potential to inform work in business ethics for decades to come.
Donaldson deserves credit for breaking out of the extant consensus in both, the
narrower business ethics field as well as the general gist in management
studies with an innovative take on at least three core research topics.
What is the unit of analysis in business ethics?
For most of its short history, certainly until the mid 1990ties
scholarly work in business ethics was mostly looking at the organizational
level, or even below that, at the level of individual decision-making. What is
to admire about Donaldson as a scholar is that he broke out of that consensus,
most remarkably when publishing his book and papers around ISCT. The basic
tenet of ISCT is that whatever happens in terms of ethical or unethical
behavior in businesses is intricately linked to the outside world of business,
to institutions that govern business, to wider socio political processes that
incentivize or constrain whatever businesses – let alone individuals within
them – are doing.
There are solid
grounds to argue that this approach to researching ethical issues in business
is still of highest relevance today. On
the opening panel of the conference Professor Margaret Blair gave a somewhat
sobering account of recent court decisions in US corporate law. Blair, a
longstanding authority and critic of the current shareholder dominated view of
the firm, gave a short tour d’horizon of court rulings reflecting shareholder
dominance as being stronger as never before (Ebay vs Newmark, Trado, CitizensUnited, Hobby Lobby). When the strongest institutions (in this case the law) governing
business advocate a model of the firm which flies in the face of much of the
basic tenets of the field of business ethics it appears that the odds are very
much stacked against any of the aspirations of the field ever coming to
fruition in the real world.
The inspiration
then from Donaldson’s work for business ethics scholars may be to further and
refine some of the ‘Donaldsonian Themes’ (so the title of the conference); but
it is fair to argue that the vision, courage and intellectual entrepreneurship
to come up with new approaches of conceptualizing business in its wider
societal context is maybe the biggest example and benchmark Donaldson has left
for a next generation of business ethics scholars. Be it the relation of
business and politics, be it the role of business in economic inequality, or be
it the role of business in new technologies and big data – these are all new
ethical challenges which ask for wider and deeper conceptualizations of the
role of business and its embeddedness in wider society.
Business ethics is not an epiphenomenon
For most of its history, and to some degree still today, business ethics has been considered as a subfield of management that deals with side-effects of business, with fringe occurrences, with phenomena, that maybe are of interest to the odd practitioner here and there. Certainly many scholars in the core disciplines of management, such as strategy or finance would echo such a view.
During the conference many colleagues highlighted that Donaldson throughout his career has worked in overcoming this categorization of business ethics work. That includes a lot of his writings but also his service to the academic community of management scholars. He was actively leading the subgroup ‘Social Issues inManagement’ of the Academy of Management but also engaged in a number of ‘field constituting’ ventures. Most notably his time as Associate Editor of Academy of Management Review (the top journal for management theory) in the mid 2000s has led to a spate of work originating from scholars in the business ethics field, which was developed under his editorship into papers that speak to the core of the management discipline.
The purpose of the firm, the effect of business on the ecology, the role of business in development or peace – just to name a few examples of business ethics topics – are no longer side-shows. Many of these questions - certainly post financial crisis – are topics that touch the core of the management discipline. Donaldson has left a great example that business ethics scholars have to raise their voice louder and speak to a wider community. Business ethics has something to bring to the party, and Donaldson in is writing and service, has shown how to do this really well.
Management research is a multi-disciplinary venture
One of the things that stands out when looking at Donaldson’s work
over four decades is that research in management as an applied discipline is
best when it is phenomenon driven. That partly explains the enormous variety of
issues he has taken on. The intellectual rigour, theoretical precision and an
impressive skill at interesting and accessible writing is what has set a
benchmark for ongoing scholarly work. What strikes most is his success –
together with other colleagues – to establish philosophy as a legitimate core
discipline in management research.
Many management
scholars still consider economics to be the main theoretical foundation of
management studies – a view maybe still strongest reflected in some of the
management studies communities in Europe. In the 1960s, certainly with the rise
and growth of marketing and parts of organizational behavior research, we can
now consider psychology as a legitimate member of the canonized disciplines of
management inquiry.
But this project
of widening the theoretical and disciplinary avenues to management research is
not over yet. In his writing Donaldson has certainly elevated philosophy as a
strong candidate; in his editorial work at AMR he has contributed to make
approaches from political science, sociology and others more familiar to the
core community of management researchers. We can argue that continuing to widen
the disciplinary focus of research in management is truly a ‘Donaldsonian
Theme’ and a task for current and future generations of business ethics
scholars.
To conclude then, just this week Rolling Stone magazine ran a story on the influence of the Koch brothers on American politics. So as an afterthought - at the end of the
conference there was arguably one topic conspicuously absent during the
discussion: namely the phenomenon of power (corporate or political, alike).
Looking at contemporary debates on, for instance, income inequality or on the
roots and fallout of the financial crisis, this seems a somewhat conspicuous
omission. One explanation though could
be that – as Richard DeGeorge, chair of the philosophy department during
Donaldson’s PhD studies, pointed out at the conference – Donaldson as a student
did not take too much liking in Karl Marx’ writings…
The good news then is that this weekend’s
conference was not a celebration of Donaldson’s retirement. He will continue as
Wharton faculty to be an active scholar and thus surprise, challenge and
inspire us hopefully for many more years to come.
Top photo by frankrizzo805, reproduced under the Creative Commons License.
This is an excellent post and one that any of us who describe ourselves as management scholars would benefit from reading. Thomas Donaldson's work transcends boundaries to provide for relevant insights. Many of us are stuck in tweaking trivial variables in the hopes of pumping out a publication or two. Thankfully this was not the path of Thomas Donaldson.
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