This essay articulates a crucial and neglected element of a general theory of the ethics of bureaucratic organizations, both private and public. The key to the approach developed here is the thesis that the distinctive ethical principles applicable to bureaucratic organizations are responses to the distinctive agency-risks that arise from the nature of bureaucratic organizations as complex webs of principal/agent relationships. It is argued that the most important and distinctive ethical principles for bureaucratic organizations express commitments on the part of bureaucrats that function to reduce the agency risks that are inherent in such organizations. This approach to the ethics of bureaucratic organizations is shown to be more illuminating than those that concentrate exclusively or primarily on determining the conditions for corporate responsibility or on the idea that the ethical obligations distinctive of bureaucracies are role-derived.

Employed professionals (e.g., accountants or engineers)—and those who study them—sometimes claim that their status as employees denies them the “autonomy” necessary to be “true professionals.” Is this a conceptual claim or an empirical claim? How might it be proved or disproved? This paper draws on recent work on autonomy to try to answer these questions. In the course of doing that, it identifies three literatures concerned with autonomy and suggests an approach bringing them together in a way likely to be useful both to philosophers interested in the concept and to social scientists interested in studying autonomy in the workplace.

Codes of conduct are viewed here as a community's attempt to communicate its expectations and standards of ethical behavior. Many organizations are implementing codes, but empirical support for the relationship between such codes and employee conduct is lacking. We investigated the long term effects of a collegiate honor code experience as well as the effects of corporate ethics codes on unethical behavior in the workplace by surveying alumni from an honor code and a non-honor code college who now work in business. We found that self-reported unethical behavior was lower for respondents who work in an organization with a corporate code of conduct and was inversely associated with corporate code implementation strength and embeddedness. Self-reported unethical behavior was also influenced by the interaction of a collegiate honor code experience and corporate code implementation strength.

This paper argues that moral thinking is an essential management capability which strengthens organizations and contributes to their performance in the marketplace. The paper explains what moral thinking is, and addresses the most common reasons for considering it inappropriate or irrelevant to managerial practice. The argument provides a compelling rationale for the corporate ethics initiatives undertaken in recent years.

The substantial work on cognitive moral development (CMD) by Lawrence Kohlberg and James Rest popularized the use of this construct in the literature on business ethics. This construct has been prominently used in models attempting to explain ethical/unethical behavior in management, marketing, and accounting, even though Kohlberg did not intend for the construct to be used in that manner. As a predictor of behavior, CMD has been attacked on the theoretical level, and its empirical performance has been weak. This article uses another established construct, which seems to satisfy the central criticisms of CMD, as a means of testing those complaints. The comparative multidimensional ethics scale (MES) substantially outperforms CMD, operationalized using Rest's Defining Issues Test, in every test. These results seem to suggest that other options perform better than CMD when the purpose is to model ethical/unethical behavior or even ethical judgment.

This review offers a cautious acceptance of the Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) developed by Robin, Gordon, Jordan and Reidenbach. While the contribution of the MES to future empirical research of individuals’ moral reasoning is welcomed, a number of reservations or criticisms are raised regarding theory confusion, instrument confusion, and fears arising when using the MES. I conclude that the MES is a valuable compliment to existing moral reasoning instruments — the Moral Judgment Interview and the Defining Issues Test — but not a replacement of these instruments.

I appreciate the opportunity to comment on two recent papers (Burton and Dunn, “Feminist Ethics as Moral Grounding for Stakeholder Theory” and Dobson, “The Feminine Firm: A Comment”—both in the April 1996 edition of BEQ) which deal with the subject of feminism in business ethics. Both raise important issues for how we think about the relevance and potential contribution of feminist thought to this area of research.