RT Article
T1 Recognizing Business Ethics: Practical and Ethical Challenges in Awarding Prizes for Good Corporate Behaviour
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 86
IS 3
SP 257
OP 271
A1 Norman, Wayne
A1 Roux, Caroline
A1 Bélanger, Philippe
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2009
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1785634208
AB There seems to be a proliferation of prizes and rankings for ethical business over the past decade. Our principal aims in this article are twofold: to initiate an academic discussion of the epistemic and normative stakes in business-ethics competitions; and to help organizers of such competitions to think through some of these issues and the design options for dealing with them. We have been able to find no substantive literature – academic or otherwise – that addresses either of these two broad topics and audiences. Our modest aim, therefore, is to suggest an agenda of issues, and to begin to explore and analyse some of the possible arguments for and against various philosophical or practical solutions. Part I explores the challenges facing a prize-organizing committee, including problems derived from what Rawls calls the “fact of pluralism” in democratic societies (reasonable people will always disagree over some basic values, including those relevant to evaluating business practices), and epistemic issues about how we can justify qualitative judgments on the basis of incomplete quantitative data. We also try to identify risks and opportunity costs for ethics-prize granters. In Part II we spell out (a) a range of design options and (b) some advice about how any particular prize-awarding committee might select among these options to best achieve its goals (which typically involve highlighting and publicizing best practices for ethical business).
K1 social and ethical auditing and reporting
K1 rankings
K1 Prizes
K1 Corporate Citizenship
K1 Business Ethics
DO 10.1007/s10551-008-9846-5