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2014 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. The Basic Ideas

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Abstract

This chapter examines the theoretical foundations of Governance Ethics and in doing so, it challenges pertinent aspects of the standard economic theory of the firm, in particular the exclusion of ethical and political aspects from the epistemic interests of economics. Governance ethics has to be understood as a contribution to the development of a new economics of organization. Its aim is to combine foundations and findings of ethics, social theory, organization theory and economics of governance in a productive way in order to improve the practical relevance and the theoretical explanatory force of an economic theory of the firm. What is at issue is the integration of organizational, social, psychological, cultural and above all moral phenomena in an economics of governance which takes an interdisciplinary understanding of economics and a comprehensive concept of governance as its starting point. This endeavor is based on the assumption that a general and at the same time application-oriented theory of economic organization and monitoring cannot be achieved without this ethical, social-theoretical and organization-theoretical extension of standard and mainstream economics.

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Footnotes
1
For a paradigmatic treatment in the Anglo-Saxon discourse see Etzioni 1987; Bowie 1998, 1999 and for the European discourse see Ulrich 2008.
 
2
Except in the following text passage: “Barnard’s frequent references to moral codes, moral factors, moral elements, and so forth – in the context of executive responsibility – are, pehaps, his way of dealing with (finessing) concern over subgoal pursuit (Chapter 17)” (Williamson 1990a, 177). A possible reason why Williamson is ignoring the third aspect of every transaction (ethics) could be that he includes moral as immoral (namely opportunism) into his theory.
 
3
See the list of publications in Appendix.
 
4
See for a brief selection: Williamson 1985, p. 23, 51, 1986, p. 98, 1990a, p. 193, 1993, p. 476.
 
5
As an overview: Daily et al. 2003.
 
6
See Chap. 3 in this volume and Wieland 1996, Part I.
 
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Metadata
Title
The Basic Ideas
Author
Josef Wieland
Copyright Year
2014
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07923-3_1