Some observers of the data economy have proposed that we treat data as labor. But are data contributions labor? Our folk conception of work emphasizes its importance and effort, such that work has a special interpersonal priority and deserves appreciation and compensation. The folk conception does not generally favor counting data as work, and so it serves as an error theory for reluctance to regulate data as labor. In contrast, labor regulation and policy focus on the political economy of labor, and in particular the bargaining dynamics that participants in a labor market face. Labor regulation aims to protect workers against the threats characteristically posed by such bargaining dynamics. Data-transferring interactions between internet platforms and users share similar bargaining dynamics, and so there is a promising functional similarity between labor regulation and proposals for data regulation that would facilitate data strikes and data unions.

Studies of non-standard, project-based forms of work prevalent in the creative industries have typically theorized the relational dynamics of work as a competitive process of social capital accumulation involving an individualistic, self-enterprising, zero-sum, and winner-takes-all struggle for favourable social network-positioning. Problematizing this prevailing conceptualization, our empirical case study draws on fifty in-depth interviews and two focus groups with creative workers in Ghana to show how relations of mutual aid, including elaborate efforts to live harmoniously with others, are intricately intertwined with economic practices of getting by and getting ahead. Our analysis abductively mobilizes insights from Afro-communitarian ethics to theorize the mutual aid we observed as a complex socio-economic practice of relational resource redistribution contingent on degrees of social proximity. In applying “a theory from the South” to foreground the role of moral obligations, social harmony, and hands-on practices of mutual aid in non-standard forms of work, we contribute a “decolonial critique” of relationality of relevance to scholars of creative work and business ethicists.

We take the opportunity in this editorial that marks the end of our tenure, to offer some reflections on our experiences. It is an occasion for looking back, for reflection on the scholarship and practice of business ethics, and for celebrating some of the outstanding work that is being done in and for the journal.

Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981, tensions inherent to the relationship between morally educative practices and the institutions that house them have been widely noted. We propose a taxonomy of the ways in which the pursuit of external goods by institutions undermines the pursuit of the internal goods of practices. These comprise substitution, where the institution replaces the pursuit of one type of good by another; frustration, where opportunities for practitioners to discover goods or develop new standards of excellence are frustrated by institutional priorities and resource allocation; and injustice, which undermines the integrity of relationships within the organization and/or with partners. These threats, though analytically distinct, are often mutually reinforcing. This conceptual contribution is illustrated both by the extant literature and by a novel context, the three-ring circus.

We share the world we live and die in with others, in ways that are organized and disorganized. The authors of this special issue address life-and-death as a compound term, foregrounding the vital and deadly outcomes of (dis)organization and their (business) ethics implications as they play out in the context of growing inequalities and ongoing health, geopolitical, environmental, refugee crises and egregious war crimes. Organizations and organizing can shape such contexts by engaging in the ethics of care and politics of inclusivity, redefining “essential” or “front line” work, managing relationships between bodily health and work, or ethically relating to non-human forms of life. Considering the roles of organizations in terms of life-and-death can help scholars redefine organizations and/in/for/with the world by stressing the ethical dimensions of organizing for life which involves human and other-than-human relatedness and the obligation of care for all forms of life.

Free riding involves benefiting from common resources or services while avoiding contributing to their production and maintenance. Few studies have adequately investigated the propensity to overestimate the prevalence of free riding. This is a significant omission, as exaggeration of the phenomenon is often used to justify control and coercion systems. To address this gap, we investigate how the common good approach may mitigate the flaws of a system excessively focused on free-riding risk. In this conceptual paper featuring illustrative vignettes, we argue that the common good perspective is realistic and effective in preventing this excessive attention by promoting trust as an unconditional gift and a response to vulnerability. We discuss the common good perspective’s originality over the dominant approaches and propose a set of ethical and managerial recommendations that may be the best protection against this excessive focus and maybe even against free riding itself.

When considering the implications of the shareholder-stakeholder debate in defining the purpose of a company, epistemological clarity is vital in this emerging theory of the firm. Such clarity can prevent recurrence based solely on rephrasing key terms. To understand how various stakeholders develop and interpret a shared purpose, I argue for the necessity of a pragmatist approach that is normative and process-oriented. Mental models play a crucial role in interpretive processes that define decision-making, where individual perspectives converge. The figures of Milton Friedman and Ed Freeman serve as “beacons,” as artefacts, in the transmission of knowledge through which we, as individuals, shape a shared understanding. In current societies, profound polarization obstructs solutions to grand challenges. Pragmatism starts by questioning the underlying values of everyone involved. It assumes that sound deliberative processes are the only way to reach real solutions—not only for the mind but, above all, for the heart.

From where does management acquire its authority to act in the name of the corporation? The orthodoxy that shareholders alone authorise management is frequently criticised for treating the corporation as the property of shareholders, rather than as a distinct legal person in its own right (Ciepley, 2013; Deakin, 2012; Robé, 2011; Stout, 2012). However, Hobbes’s theory of incorporation in Leviathan shows this influential critique of shareholder primacy to rest on a non sequitur. It does not follow from the (correct) observation that the corporation is a legal person to the conclusion that its interests are distinct from those of shareholders. Just as individuals become citizens of a state when they authorise a sovereign, shareholders are incorporated when they authorise a representative assembly to act in their interests. Shareholders thereby form a single corporate person and are ultimately responsible for whatever is done in their corporate name.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of managerial capitalism is well known, with some arguing that MacIntyrean thought is antithetical to contemporary capitalist business. Nevertheless, substantial efforts have been taken to demonstrate how different business activities constitute MacIntyrean practices, which points to an incoherence at the heart of MacIntyrean business ethics scholarship. This article proposes a way of bridging these perspectives, suggesting a reimagined MacIntyrean approach to business that is thoroughly ‘practice-led.’ A detailed comparison of accounting and management shows that while neither are practices in ‘good order,’ they differ in significant ways: where management does not meet the criteria for a MacIntyrean practice, accounting is a ‘distorted’ practice. This leads to a categorisation of practice-led business activity, whereby the traditional tasks of management are subsumed, shared or subordinated to practices and practitioners. Insights on how this can be implemented are drawn from the ‘communities of practice’ literature and a consideration of professions.

Despite crowdfunding platforms’ growing involvement in financing welfare, related ethical issues have received little scholarly attention. To address this gap, we focus on GoFundMe, the leading welfare crowdfunding platform in the US, to examine whether it facilitates the establishment of a just society that democratizes access to funding. Informed by Rawls’s ethics, we conduct a comprehensive analysis, arguing that GoFundMe’s modus operandi merits criticism. We advance three interrelated arguments for why GoFundMe is morally problematic. First, it distributes information and primary goods unfairly, perpetuating inequalities that disadvantage the most vulnerable. Second, it uses narratives that may distract public attention from systemic flaws in welfare provision, potentially reducing social pressure for institutional reform. Third, its emphasis on individual choice and responsibility may contribute to momentum for neoliberal policymaking. We show why scholars, policymakers, and platforms should engage in debate about regulating welfare crowdfunding activities to improve their ethicality.

Global multi-stakeholder initiatives (global MSIs) have become a cornerstone of modern governance. However, critics disparage MSIs (1) for giving too much power to private actors, specifically corporations, and (2) for allowing organizations from one state to influence another’s affairs. This criticism holds true in particular for the Habermasian approach to political corporate social responsibility (political CSR). By contrast, this paper grounds global MSIs in John Rawls’s theory of justice, arguing that both legitimacy issues can be overcome when all those affected by a global MSI possess a means of contestation able to effectively contest the MSI’s activities. This entails that global MSIs, when affecting states that are unwilling or unable to protect their own citizens, must themselves provide their stakeholders with such means. It is argued that this Rawls-based approach to political CSR can rectify the shortcomings of the Habermasian approach without requiring a change in the composition of MSIs.

Contemporary human-centered organization and management practices endanger the planet’s health, affecting the life and death of multiple species—including humans. Drawing on insights from multispecies ethnography and feminist new materialism, this article contributes to the business ethics literature by developing a theoretical framework for multispecies organizing as a matter of care. Going beyond existing understandings of human-animal relations, we show how ethico-political dynamics shape multispecies relations in three ways: how we and other species relate to ecologies-in-place (affective relationalities); what we and other species do (vital doings); and, finally, what kinds of worlds we—through our ethical sensibilities—commit to bringing into being (ethical obligations). Using an illustrative example of a rewilding site in England, this article shows how multispecies organizing plays out in a specific ecology-in-place. Our argument has important implications for the conception and contemporary practices of the organizational ethics of life and death.

Consistent with the idea that business ethics is a form of applied ethics, many virtue ethicists make use of an extant (pure) moral philosophy framework, namely, one developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. In doing so, these authors have refined MacIntyre’s work, but have never really challenged it. In here questioning, and developing an alternative to, the MacIntyrean orthdoxy, I illustrate the merit of business ethicists adopting a broader philosophical perspective focused on constructing (new) theory. More specifically—and in referring to action sports (e.g., mountain biking, snowboarding)—I propose that an external good motive is not only much more consistent with virtuous practical excellence than MacIntyreans acknowledge, but that such a motive is fundamental to identifying and explaining how practices can be deliberately created (by businesses). Consequently, and in stark contrast with MacIntyre’s deeply pessimistic outlook on modern business and society, I propose that those who value practices might celebrate our current era.

In an era when the public and shareholders increasingly demand greater accountability from institutions for racial injustice and slavery, scholarship on corporate reparations is more and more essential. This article argues that corporations have played a significant role in the cultural dehumanization of Blackness and therefore have a particular responsibility to make repair. Cultural dehumanization refers to embedding anti-Blackness into US culture in service of capitalist profit accumulation, which has resulted in status and material inequalities between Blacks and whites that have persisted from slavery to the present. More specifically, the article argues corporations have a moral duty to offer reparations to Black Americans regardless of any redress offered by other perpetrators of anti-Blackness. It appeals to tort law in providing a moral justification for corporate reparations to Black Americans.

This article examines how hospital workers engage in embodied mobilizations drawing on the life-affirming power of death and love to resist the demise of the French public hospital system. Drawing on Butler’s work on “What is a livable life” (2022a, 2022b) and Notes toward a performative theory of assembly (2015), the study analyses a four-year data collection of Facebook posts, from two activist collectives of hospital workers. Our findings highlight three forms of ethical resistance. First, hospital workers mobilize the symbolism of death to denounce the erosion of public healthcare infrastructure and to urge the public to help save it. Second, they use this symbolism to shed light on the precariousness of their working conditions and to elicit compassionate care from citizens. Third, they make the symbolism of love for public healthcare visible, prompting reflection on the importance of public service values in a society rooted in solidarity and mutual care. This work contributes to the literature at the intersection of social mobilization and ethics of care: first, it brings to the front death and love as symbols that illuminate the radical political potential of care in social movements; second, it advances the theoretical construct of “ethics of publicness.”

There is an ongoing debate over the moral limits of the market. Many participants endorse the plausible idea that a market’s moral status depends, at least in part, on its consequences. For example, Satz holds that markets whose operation undermines citizens’ ability to interact as equals are bad. And Brennan and Jaworski maintain that markets trading in any good or service permissibly possessed may be arranged to operate without bad consequences. This plausible normative claim about markets depends on a descriptive one. Namely, that individual markets have descriptive properties which would provide a suitable basis for their consequentialist evaluation. This descriptive claim, I argue, is false. Markets’ consequences are a joint production. There is no principled means by which the consequences of one may be distinguished from those of another. Thus, the plausible idea is false. A market’s moral status cannot depend on its consequences.

Employees’ organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is an important determinant of organizational effectiveness; hence, scholars and practitioners are particularly interested in the factors, mechanisms, and conditions that promote such behaviors. Guided by the ability–motivation–opportunity framework, we draw on the social cognitive theory of moral thought and action to conceptualize a model that delineates the role of ethics-oriented human resource management (HRM) systems in promoting OCBs through the mediating role of employees’ moral attentiveness. We also refer to the job demands–resources theory to describe the moderating role of work-family balance in the indirect relationship between HRM systems and OCBs. The findings of an experiment involving 157 working adults (Study 1) and a three-wave field survey of 328 employees (Study 2) converge to support the hypothesized direct and indirect (via moral attentiveness) relationships between ethics-oriented HRM systems and OCBs as well as the first-stage moderating role of work-family balance.

What can we learn about organizational ethics from studying cemeteries as organizational/organized manifestations of our mutual, embodied vulnerability? How does, and how should, the ethico-political imperative of death and the deceased materialize in the cemeterial space? With reference to a comparative analysis of two island cemeteries, Venice’s San Michele and New York’s Hart Island, this paper makes three contributions to the emerging literature on organizational ethics of life and death. First, it makes an empirical contribution based on an organizational study of two “resting places” that highlights the importance of understanding organizational life and death with reference to ethics. Second, it makes a theoretical contribution to scholarship on the organization of death and on grieving as embedded in a politics and ethics of recognition. Third, the paper shows how our desire to be recognized as valid, viable subjects comes to be organized, and situated, in ways that perpetuate precarity and vulnerability, a point that is illustrated with reference to cemeteries as ethically significant organizational settings.

This article explores the moral permissibility of sweatshop boycotts. We build explicitly on Tomhave and Vopat’s (2018) framework for evaluating the moral permissibility of boycotts in general for the specific case of sweatshop labor. We argue that sweatshop boycotts are more likely to be morally justified when targeting forced labor compared to free labor and we explore the relevant moral tradeoffs associated with boycotts of free labor sweatshops. We analyze the morality of three cases of sweatshop boycotts—Indonesia in the 1990s, Bangladesh following the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, and the Uyghur region in China—and then discuss how insights from these cases might provide a model to guide activists and business ethicists in analyzing the morality of other sweatshop boycotts.

Alan Strudler’s “Lying about Reservation Prices in Business Negotiation: A Qualified Defense” challenges a number of claims I make in a prior essay, “A Lie Is a Lie: The Ethics of Lying in Business Negotiations.” Here, I examine Strudler’s critique and seek to refute his various arguments—in particular, those based on assumption of risk and the signalling value of reservation price lies.