The Employer–Employee Relationship as a Building Block for Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility

Excerpt

One of the great challenges of pursuing the ideals of ethical behavior is discovering how to implement such an ideal at the applied level. As the unremitting stream of bad ethical news flows from the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets testifies, academicians have not performed especially well in applied ethics. In fact, as of this writing, business schools tend to downplay the importance of ethics relative to functionalist skills, or resist the alternative of establishing a course in ethics, let alone, minors or concentrations in the topic. Consequently, we were delighted to be called upon to forge this special issue addressing ways to balance ethics, social responsibility and the rights of employees and employers. …