The Business Ethics Blog

(My last day of blogging live from the Society for Business Ethics meeting.)

The session I attended during this final session of the conference featured three papers.

The first paper was by Waheed Hussain (Wharton School of Business), on “Corporations and Consequentialism.” which argued that welfare consequentialist theories don’t provide a compelling account of the moral obligations of corporations and their managers (roughly because he suggests that welfare consequentialism requires profit-seeking in a way that’s inconsistent with certain kinds of social responsibility and with the operation of at least some non-profits).

Next, Anne Barraquier (CERAM/Sophia Antipolis) presented on “Exploring Knowledge Creation Mechanisms of Socially Responsible Organizations As a Factor Of Value Creation.” She presented the results of a qualitative study of the fragrance and flavours industry, and in particular of the relationship between knowledge creation activities and social responsibility.

Finally, Kalynne Hackney Pudner (Auburn University), gave a presentation called “Respect and the Googled Employee.” (Actually the title in the programme, which I like slightly better, was “MySpace Friends and the Kingdom of Ends.”)  The presentation was about the ethics of companies mining on-line resources to find out information about employees (e.g., Googling them or digging through their MySpace pages.)