Review of Business and the Greater Good: Business Ethics in an Age of Crisis, by Knut J. Ims and Lars Jacob Tynes Pedersen. Elgar Publishing, 2015.
David C. Jacobs
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Business and the Greater Good: Rethinking Business Ethics in an Age of Crisis, edited by Knut. J. Ims and Lars Jacob Tynes Pedersen (2015), was the product of the Seventh TransAtlantic Business Ethics Conference (TABEC) in Norway 2012. Many of the writers are active in the European Business Ethics Network and others are familiar names in the US. The themes of the book might be unusual in the constrained “professional ethics” context that characterizes much business ethics instruction in the US….
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In his “Whither Business Ethics,” Wayne Norman identifies a rather different sort of crisis for the business ethics discipline:
“I will suggest that business ethics, as a field, is passing into a crisis phase. And part of the explanation for this crisis is that theorizing at any of the three levels [macro, mezzo, and micro] tends not to be well connected to theorizing at the other two levels.”
Click to access NORWBE.pdf
Adding to this dilemma are the twin concerns of legitimacy among moral philosophers and relevance to business practitioners. On the other hand, the conception of crisis animating “Business and the Greater Good”
focuses on the larger society and the impact of such phenomena as rising inequality and climate change.
Are these perspectives reconcilable?