Business Ethics and Business History: Neglected Dimensions in Management Education

This article highlights two large gaps in the business school curriculum: the neglect of historical and ethical dimensions. An overview is provided of progress made so far in the UK in the evolution of business history as an academic discipline; and also of the take–up of business ethics in university teaching. Both have had some success, but overall the response to these areas has been somewhat lacklustre — at least in the UK. A justification is provided for adding both components to a fully relevant business education. When the two are combined, the result can be a highly rewarding combination that provides insights that may not be possible for management writers, who work only in the present. Corporate ethics, the social responsibility of companies, disclosure, the environment, the actions of multinational companies overseas, the dilemmas of whistle–blowing, the impact of lobby groups and health and safety issues can all be understood more fully by students if they approach these subjects from an ethical and historical standpoint.     

The Ethics of Management Research: An Exploratory Content Analysis

Management academics have tended to rely on ethics codes developed by social researchers in related fields to inform their research practice. The point of this paper is to question whether this remains a viable approach in the current climate that is characterized by a significant increase in ethical regulation across the social sciences. We suggest that management researchers face ethical issues of a different nature to those most frequently confronted by other social science researchers, and argue for more explicit acknowledgement of contextual factors involved in management research. An exploratory analysis of the content of ethics codes formulated by nine social scientific associations is undertaken to identify the main ethical principles they cover and to analyse their underlying ethical tone. Drawing attention to the principle of reciprocity, which is found in very few codes, we suggest that an ethics code could be used to formulate new ways of thinking about management research relationships. Despite the risk that ethics codes may encourage instrumental compliance with minimal ethical obligations, we suggest they also have the potential to reflect a more aspirational agenda. The development of an ethics code for management research should therefore be seen as a potentially worthwhile project.     

Risk Communication,Public Engagement,and Climate Change: A Role for Emotions

This article discusses the potential role that emotions might play in enticing a lifestyle that diminishes climate change. Climate change is an important challenge for society. There is a growing consensus that climate change is due to our behavior, but few people are willing to significantly adapt their lifestyle. Empirical studies show that people lack a sense of urgency: they experience climate change as a problem that affects people in distant places and in a far future. Several scholars have claimed that emotions might be a necessary tool in communication about climate change. This article sketches a theoretical framework that supports this hypothesis, drawing on insights from the ethics of risk and the philosophy of emotions. It has been shown by various scholars that emotions are important determinants in risk perception. However, emotions are generally considered to be irrational states and are hence excluded from communication and political decision making about risky technologies and climate change, or they are used instrumentally to create support for a position. However, the literature on the ethics of risk shows that the dominant, technocratic approach to risk misses the normative‐ethical dimension that is inherent to decisions about acceptable risk. Emotion research shows that emotions are necessary for practical and moral decision making. These insights can be applied to communication about climate change. Emotions are necessary for understanding the moral impact of the risks of climate change, and they also paradigmatically provide for motivation. Emotions might be the missing link in effective communication about climate change.     

An organizational climate regarding ethics: the outcome of leader values and the practices that reflect them

In this article, we argue that the organizational climate regarding ethics — the shared perception of what is ethically correct behavior and how ethical issues should be handled within an organization — is an outgrowth of the personal values and motives of organizational founders and other early organizational leaders. We begin by arguing that one common label for the climate regarding ethics construct — “ethical climate” — is inappropriate. We also argue that climate regarding ethics has an impact on organizational outcomes, including organizational outcomes that do not have explicit ethical components. We propose that this impact largely occurs through the mediating mechanisms of organizational cohesion and morale. We conclude by discussing the variety of antecedents and outcomes related to climate regarding ethics.     

Ethics beyond the model: How social dynamics can interfere with ethical practice in operational research/management science

Responding to a call for more attention to be given to ethics within operational research, Marc Le Menestrel and Luk Van Wassenhove have recently outlined a perspective on the relationship between OR models and ethics that squarely ties ethical engagement to daily practice and, more specifically, to the manner in which a practitioner uses a model or other technique in a particular setting. They refer to this approach as “ethics beyond OR models”.This paper seeks to extend the debate on this topic by examining some of the difficulties of ethical action when it is defined in these terms. Specifically the paper seeks to show how the social dynamics that circumscribe much professional practice can easily override good intentions on the part of the people concerned. Ethical practice dictates that those involved in OR/MS practice should seriously contemplate their own involvement in the process of knowledge production and be fully aware of the wider ramifications of employing particular modelling techniques and other tools. However, this is not always easy since the complex social dynamics that surround an inquiry can surreptitiously undermine these intentions. In extreme cases, these processes can create an ethical trap that those involved may not be fully recognise until after the event.In exploring such a disjuncture between ethical intentionality and outcomes the paper re-examines and reflects upon a major consulting assignment which was led by the author and subsequently published through a leading journal and text.     

The Blind Spot in Risk Ethics: Managing Natural Hazards

Many risk scholars recognize the importance of including ethical considerations in risk management. Risk ethics can provide in‐depth ethical analysis so that ethical considerations can be part of risk‐related decisions, rather than an afterthought to those decisions. In this article, I present a brief sketch of the field of risk ethics. I argue that risk ethics has a bias toward technological hazards, thereby overlooking the risks that stem from natural and semi‐natural hazards. In order to make a contribution to the field of risk research, risks ethics should broaden its scope to include natural and semi‐natural hazards and develop normative distribution criteria that can support decision making on such hazards.     

Modeling Microbial Growth Within Food Safety Risk Assessments

Risk estimates for food-borne infection will usually depend heavily on numbers of microorganisms present on the food at the time of consumption. As these data are seldom available directly, attention has turned to predictive microbiology as a means of inferring exposure at consumption. Codex guidelines recommend that microbiological risk assessment should explicitly consider the dynamics of microbiological growth, survival, and death in foods. This article describes predictive models and resources for modeling microbial growth in foods, and their utility and limitations in food safety risk assessment. We also aim to identify tools, data, and knowledge sources, and to provide an understanding of the microbial ecology of foods so that users can recognize model limits, avoid modeling unrealistic scenarios, and thus be able to appreciate the levels of confidence they can have in the outputs of predictive microbiology models. The microbial ecology of foods is complex. Developing reliable risk assessments involving microbial growth in foods will require the skills of both microbial ecologists and mathematical modelers. Simplifying assumptions will need to be made, but because of the potential for apparently small errors in growth rate to translate into very large errors in the estimate of risk, the validity of those assumptions should be carefully assessed. Quantitative estimates of absolute microbial risk within narrow confidence intervals do not yet appear to be possible. Nevertheless, the expression of microbial ecology knowledge in "predictive microbiology" models does allow decision support using the tools of risk assessment.     

Should the Model for Risk‐Informed Regulation be Game Theory Rather than Decision Theory?

Risk analysts frequently view the regulation of risks as being largely a matter of decision theory. According to this view, risk analysis methods provide information on the likelihood and severity of various possible outcomes; this information should then be assessed using a decision‐theoretic approach (such as cost/benefit analysis) to determine whether the risks are acceptable, and whether additional regulation is warranted. However, this view ignores the fact that in many industries (particularly industries that are technologically sophisticated and employ specialized risk and safety experts), risk analyses may be done by regulated firms, not by the regulator. Moreover, those firms may have more knowledge about the levels of safety at their own facilities than the regulator does. This creates a situation in which the regulated firm has both the opportunity—and often also the motive—to provide inaccurate (in particular, favorably biased) risk information to the regulator, and hence the regulator has reason to doubt the accuracy of the risk information provided by regulated parties. Researchers have argued that decision theory is capable of dealing with many such strategic interactions as well as game theory can. This is especially true in two‐player, two‐stage games in which the follower has a unique best strategy in response to the leader's strategy, as appears to be the case in the situation analyzed in this article. However, even in such cases, we agree with Cox that game‐theoretic methods and concepts can still be useful. In particular, the tools of mechanism design, and especially the revelation principle, can simplify the analysis of such games because the revelation principle provides rigorous assurance that it is sufficient to analyze only games in which licensees truthfully report their risk levels, making the problem more manageable. Without that, it would generally be necessary to consider much more complicated forms of strategic behavior (including deception), to identify optimal regulatory strategies. Therefore, we believe that the types of regulatory interactions analyzed in this article are better modeled using game theory rather than decision theory. In particular, the goals of this article are to review the relevant literature in game theory and regulatory economics (to stimulate interest in this area among risk analysts), and to present illustrative results showing how the application of game theory can provide useful insights into the theory and practice of risk‐informed regulation.     

Mesothelioma: Risk Apportionment Among Asbestos Exposure Sources

The mesothelioma epidemic in the United States, which peaked during the 2000–2004 period, can be traced to high‐level asbestos exposures experienced by males in occupational settings prior to the full recognition of the disease‐causing potential of asbestos and the establishment of enforceable asbestos exposure limits by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1971. Many individuals diagnosed with mesothelioma where asbestos has been identified as a contributing cause of the disease have filed claims seeking compensation from asbestos settlement trusts or through the court system. An individual with mesothelioma typically has been exposed to asbestos in more than one setting and from more than one asbestos product. Apportioning risk for mesothelioma among contributing factors is an ongoing problem faced by occupational disease compensation boards, juries, parties responsible for paying damages, and currently by the U.S. Senate in its efforts to formulate a bill establishing an asbestos settlement trust. In this article we address the following question: If an individual with mesothelioma where asbestos has been identified as a contributing cause were to be compensated for his or her disease, how should that compensation be apportioned among those responsible for the asbestos exposures? For the purposes of apportionment, we assume that asbestos is the only cause of mesothelioma and that every asbestos exposure contributes, albeit differentially, to the risk. We use an extension of the mesothelioma risk model initially proposed in the early 1980s to quantify the contribution to risk of each exposure as a percentage of the total risk. The percentage for each specific discrete asbestos exposure depends on the start and end dates, the intensity, and the asbestos fiber type for the exposure. We provide justification for the use of the mesothelioma risk model for apportioning risk and discuss how to assess uncertainty associated with its application.     

Influence of Safety Measures on the Risks of Transporting Dangerous Goods Through Road Tunnels

Quantitative risk assessment (QRA) models are used to estimate the risks of transporting dangerous goods and to assess the merits of introducing alternative risk reduction measures for different transportation scenarios and assumptions. A comprehensive QRA model recently was developed in Europe for application to road tunnels. This model can assess the merits of a limited number of "native safety measures." In this article, we introduce a procedure for extending its scope to include the treatment of a number of important "nonnative safety measures" of interest to tunnel operators and decisionmakers. Nonnative safety measures were not included in the original model specification. The suggested procedure makes use of expert judgment and Monte Carlo simulation methods to model uncertainty in the revised risk estimates. The results of a case study application are presented that involve the risks of transporting a given volume of flammable liquid through a 10-km road tunnel.     

Ethical Issues in Risk Communication: Continuing the Discussion

Proposed in this article is one possible framework for classifying multiple types of ethical issues in risk communication research and practice to help continue a discussion initiated in 1990 by Morgan and Lave. Some of the questions that each stage of the process for planning risk communication strategies appears to pose for ethics are discussed (e.g., selecting issues to be communicated, knowing the issue, dealing with constraints). Also discussed briefly are some issues raised by the possibility that risk communicators aspire to the status of a profession. The purpose is to foster discussion rather than issue a conclusive statement on the topic, because its very nature makes a definitive pronouncement indefensible.     

How Does the General Public Evaluate Risk Information? The Impact of Associations with Other Risks

There is a considerable body of knowledge about the way people perceive risks using heuristics and qualitative characteristics, and about how risk information should be communicated to the public. However, little is known about the way people use the perception of known risks (associated risks) to judge an unknown risk. In a first, qualitative study, six different risks were discussed in in-depth interviews and focus group interviews. The interviews showed that risk associations played a prominent role in forming risk perceptions. Associated risks were often mentioned spontaneously. Second, a survey study was conducted to confirm the importance of risk associations quantitatively. This study investigated whether people related unknown risks to known risks. This was indeed confirmed. Furthermore, some insight was gained into how and why people form risk associations. Results showed that the semantic category of the unknown risks was more important in forming associations than the perceived level of risk or specific risk characteristics. These findings were in line with the semantic network theory. Based on these two studies, we recommend using the mental models approach in developing new risk communications.     

Compressed Natural Gas Bus Safety: A Quantitative Risk Assessment

This study assesses the fire safety risks associated with compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicle systems, comprising primarily a typical school bus and supporting fuel infrastructure. The study determines the sensitivity of the results to variations in component failure rates and consequences of fire events. The components and subsystems that contribute most to fire safety risk are determined. Finally, the results are compared to fire risks of the present generation of diesel-fueled school buses. Direct computation of the safety risks associated with diesel-powered vehicles is possible because these are mature technologies for which historical performance data are available. Because of limited experience, fatal accident data for CNG bus fleets are minimal. Therefore, this study uses the probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) approach to model and predict fire safety risk of CNG buses. Generic failure data, engineering judgments, and assumptions are used in this study. This study predicts the mean fire fatality risk for typical CNG buses as approximately 0.23 fatalities per 100-million miles for all people involved, including bus passengers. The study estimates mean values of 0.16 fatalities per 100-million miles for bus passengers only. Based on historical data, diesel school bus mean fire fatality risk is 0.091 and 0.0007 per 100-million miles for all people and bus passengers, respectively. One can therefore conclude that CNG buses are more prone to fire fatality risk by 2.5 times that of diesel buses, with the bus passengers being more at risk by over two orders of magnitude. The study estimates a mean fire risk frequency of 2.2 x 10(-5) fatalities/bus per year. The 5% and 95% uncertainty bounds are 9.1 x 10(-6) and 4.0 x 10(-5), respectively. The risk result was found to be affected most by failure rates of pressure relief valves, CNG cylinders, and fuel piping.     

Ethical leadership supports safety voice by increasing risk perception and reducing ethical ambiguity: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Misconduct by business and political leaders during the pandemic is feared to have impacted people's adherence to protective measures that would help to safeguard against the spread of COVID-19. Addressing this concern, this article theorizes and tests a model linking ethical leadership with workplace risk communication—a practice referred to as ‘safety voice’ in the research literature. Our study, conducted with 511 employees from UK companies, revealed that ethical leadership is positively associated with greater intention to engage in safety voice regarding COVID-19. We also find that this association is mediated by relations with the perceived health risk of COVID-19 and ambiguity about ethical decision making in the workplace. These findings therefore underscore the importance of good ethical conduct by leaders for ensuring that health and safety risks are well understood and communicated effectively by organizational members particularly during crises. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study and highlight further opportunities for future research to address the ethical dimensions of leadership, risk management, and organizational risk communication.     

In Defense of a Utilitarian Business Ethic

In this article, I suggest and support a utilitarian approach to business ethics. Utilitarianism is already widely used as a business ethic approach, although it is not well developed in the literature. Utilitarianism provides a guiding framework of decision making rooted in social benefit which helps direct business toward more ethical behavior. It is the basis for much of our discussion regarding the failures of Enron, Worldcom, and even the subprime mess and Wall Street Meltdown. In short, the negative social consequences are constantly referred to as proof of the wrongness of these actions and events, and the positive social consequences of bailouts and other plans are used as ethical support for those plans to right the wrongs. I believe the main cause of the neglect of the utilitarian approach is because of misguided criticisms. Here, I defend utilitarianism as a basis for business ethics against many criticisms found in the business ethics literature, showing that a business ethics approach relying on John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism supports principles like justice, is not biased against the minority, and is more reasonable than other views such as a Kantian view when dealing with workers and making other decisions in business. I also explain utilitarian moral motivation and use satisficing theory to attempt to defend utilitarian business ethics from questions raised regarding utilitarian calculus.     

Trust‐Level Risk Evaluation and Risk Control Guidance in the NHS East of England

In recent years, the healthcare sector has adopted the use of operational risk assessment tools to help understand the systems issues that lead to patient safety incidents. But although these problem‐focused tools have improved the ability of healthcare organizations to identify hazards, they have not translated into measurable improvements in patient safety. One possible reason for this is a lack of support for the solution‐focused process of risk control. This article describes a content analysis of the risk management strategies, policies, and procedures at all acute (i.e., hospital), mental health, and ambulance trusts (health service organizations) in the East of England area of the British National Health Service. The primary goal was to determine what organizational‐level guidance exists to support risk control practice. A secondary goal was to examine the risk evaluation guidance provided by these trusts. With regard to risk control, we found an almost complete lack of useful guidance to promote good practice. With regard to risk evaluation, the trusts relied exclusively on risk matrices. A number of weaknesses were found in the use of this tool, especially related to the guidance for scoring an event's likelihood. We make a number of recommendations to address these concerns. The guidance assessed provides insufficient support for risk control and risk evaluation. This may present a significant barrier to the success of risk management approaches in improving patient safety.     

An Integrated Physical Dispersion and Behavioral Response Model for Risk Assessment of Radiological Dispersion Device (RDD) Events

A radiological dispersion device (RDD) or "dirty" bomb is a conventional explosive wrapped in radiological material. Terrorists may use an RDD to disperse radioactive material across a populated area, causing casualties and/or economic damage. Nearly all risk assessment models for RDDs make unrealistic assumptions about public behavior in their health assessments, including assumptions that the public would stand outside in a single location indefinitely. In this article, we describe an approach for assessing the risks of RDD events incorporating both physical dispersion and behavioral response variables. The general approach is tested using the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a case study. Atmospheric models simulate an RDD attack and its likely fallout, while radiation exposure models assess fatal cancer risk. We model different geographical distributions of the population based on time of day. We evaluate aggregate health impacts for different public responses (i.e., sheltering-in-place, evacuating). We find that current RDD models in use can be improved with the integration of behavioral components. Using the results from the model, we show how risk varies across several behavioral and physical variables. We show that the best policy to recommend to the public depends on many different variables, such as the amount of trauma at ground zero, the capability of emergency responders to get trauma victims to local hospitals quickly and efficiently, how quickly evacuations can take place in the city, and the amount of shielding available for shelterers. Using a parametric analysis, we develop behaviorally realistic risk assessments, we identify variables that can affect an optimal risk reduction policy, and we find that decision making can be improved by evaluating the tradeoff between trauma and cancer fatalities for various RDD scenarios before they occur.     

Using Related Samples in Assessing Conformance to Safety Goals: A Nuclear Reactor Safety Application

Quantifying safety goals is a key to the regulation of activities which are beneficial on the whole but entail some risks in being performed. Determining compliance with safety goals involves dealing with uncertainties. A recent article by Bier^(I) describes some of the difficulties encountered using measures with uncertainty to determine compliance with safety goals for nuclear reactors. This paper uses a hierarchical Bayes approach to address two practical modeling problems in determining safety goal compliance under uncertainty: (1) allowing some modeling assumptions to be relaxed, and (2) allowing data from previous related samples to be included in the analysis. The two issues effect each other to the extent that relaxing some assumptions allows the use of a broader range of data. The usefulness of these changes and their impact on assessing safety compliance for nuclear reactors is shown.     

Ethics and Choosing Appropriate Means to an End: Problems with Coal Mine and Nuclear Workplace Safety

A common problem in ethics is that people often desire an end but fail to take the means necessary to achieve it. Employers and employees may desire the safety end mandated by performance standards for pollution control, but they may fail to employ the means, specification standards, necessary to achieve this end. This article argues that current (de jure) performance standards, for lowering employee exposures to ionizing radiation, fail to promote de facto worker welfare, in part because employers and employees do not follow the necessary means (practices known as specification standards) to achieve the end (performance standards) of workplace safety. To support this conclusion, the article argues that (1) safety requires attention to specification, as well as performance, standards; (2) coal-mine specification standards may fail to promote performance standards; (3) nuclear workplace standards may do the same; (4) choosing appropriate means to the end of safety requires attention to the ways uncertainties and variations in exposure may mask violations of standards; and (5) correcting regulatory inattention to differences between de jure and de facto is necessary for achievement of ethical goals for safety.