The Place of Ethics in Business: Shifting Paradigms?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon M. Shepard ◽  
Jon Shepard ◽  
James C. Wimbush ◽  
Carroll U. Stephens

Abstract:This article uses concepts from sociology, history, and philosophy to explore the shifting relationship between moral values and business in the Western world. We examine the historical roots and intellectual underpinnings of two major business-society paradigms in ideal-type terms. In pre-industrial Western society, we argue that business activity was linked to society’s values of morality (the moral unity paradigm)—for good or for ill. With the rise of industrialism, we contend that business was freed from moral constraints by the alleged “invisible hand” of efficient markets (the amoral theory of business). Armed with this understanding of the intellectual history of the moral unity and amoral business-society paradigms, we suggest that some variant of the moral unity paradigm may be recurring in post-industrial society.

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 56 (6) ◽  
pp. 1064-1064

For those of us who enjoy history, the publication of Bremner's two volumes on the history of children and youth in America' provides enormous satisfaction and pleasure. And yet the skeptic of Santayana says, "But how does that help solve our current problems in social policy?" Featherstone in a review of these volumes gives at least one answer. In the coming post-industrial society the major tension, he says, will be between the present dominant economic view and what others believe will be the greater emphasis on social goals. The history of children and the family "is more deeply rooted in American life than entrepreneurial, economic values. In the coming battles over national priorities and a new social policy, children and their families may be more important as symbols of social values than ever." Reading the history of children may guide us more surely toward these social goals.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Charles Turner

Social types, or types of persons, occupy a curious place in the history of sociology. There has never been any agreement on how they should be used, or what their import is. Yet the problems surrounding their use are instructive, symptomatic of key ambivalences at the heart of the sociological enterprise. These include a tension between theories of social order that privilege the division of labour and those that focus on large-scale cultural complexes; a tension between the analysis of society in terms of social groups and an acknowledgement of modern individualism; sociology’s location somewhere between literature and science; and sociology’s awkward response to the claim – made by both Catholic conservatives and Marxists – that modern industrial and post-industrial society cannot be a society of estates. These ambivalences may help to explain why the attempts to use social types for the purpose of cultural diagnosis – from the interesting portrait of arbitrarily selected positions in the division of labour to more ambitious guesswork about modern culture’s dominant ‘characters’ – have been unconvincing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 1133-1161
Author(s):  
STUART MIDDLETON

This article traces a history of the literary critic and theorist Raymond Williams’s idea of the “structure of feeling”, the formation of which is situated within debates about the place of artistic and moral values in democratic politics during the 1940s and 1950s. It demonstrates that the “structure of feeling” was intended to circumvent an equation of collective normative legislation with totalitarianism in the early cultural Cold War, by conceiving the definition of values as a process upon which all individuals in a society were always, necessarily, engaged. In articulating this quasi-democratic account of the production of artistic and moral standards, Williams also sought to escape the various theories of “minority culture” that dominated literary and cultural criticism in mid-century Britain. However, his concept of the “structure of feeling” required him to maintain a privileged role for artistic and intellectual arbiters, which constrained his vision of a properly democratic culture. In conclusion, the article argues that the problem of “democratic values” that Williams addressed in his work of the 1950s was a major factor in the marginalization or exclusion of moral criticism from political argument in Britain after 1945, and suggests that this passage of intellectual history may therefore be of considerable importance to contemporary debates about the lineages and reform of, in a broad sense, neoliberal political economy.


Author(s):  
N.Yu. Anisimova

The article considers various theoretical and methodological concepts of the evolution of industrial and labor relations as the basis for the socio-economic development of society. From the point of view of the history of industrial revolutions, theories of socio-economic formations and information (post-industrial) society, the essential characteristics of industrial and labor relations and the stages of their transformation were revealed. It is shown that the systematic formation of industrial and labor relations began in close relationship with social and labor relations during the period of industrialization of the economy. It is justified that, most conceptually, the further periodization of their development is represented by a civilizational approach, according to which the change of paradigms is carried out not at the expense of social, but at the expense of scientific and technical revolutions. The global digitalization of labor processes has led to the individualization of industrial and labor relations, their intellectualization, and the transition to remote forms of personnel work. The contradictions of the conceptual provisions of industrial and labor relations revealed during the study lead to the need for further theoretical and methodological justification of their internal content.


Worldview ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
James V. Schall

The attention of the Western world has been concentrated very forcibly in recent years on the meaning and the place of the university in contemporary society. Student unrest and political “activisim” have gained widespread publicity in all communications media and in every legislature. In France, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the United States, the university confrontation has occasioned grave civil crises that have shaken the very stability of government itself. The origin and nature of this phenomenon is rooted in the intellectual history of the modern world which has sought to effect a humanism totally subject to man's intellectual and technological control. What we are now seeing is how this control is passing from thought and technique to political and messianic action, to movements which profess to “re-create” man in the midst of his most pressing crises of poverty, race, war, and equality.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 99-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Potts

This essay charts a brief intellectual history of the futures – both utopian and dystopian – conceived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It traces perspectives on the future since 1909, when the term ‘futurism’ was coined in the publication of the ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’. The essay maps changes in the vision of the future, taking a chronological approach in noting developments in the discourse on the future. A prominent theme in pronouncements on the future is technological progress, first in relation to industrial technology, later in the context of post-industrial or information technology. A turning-point in this discourse can be isolated around 1973, when ideas of technological progress begin to be challenged in the public sphere; from that date, environmental concern becomes increasingly significant in discussions of the future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 277 ◽  
pp. 06003
Author(s):  
Тetyana Zhyzhko ◽  
Nataliia Krokhmal ◽  
Оlha Horpynych ◽  
Natalia Riezanova

From the very first day of his birth until his death, man is under the watchful eye of society. Economic or industrial relations form the basis of society and social life. But, according to most sociologists and philosophers of the XX-XXI centuries, for thousands of years there were other, not less important laws and relationships that impeccably «guide» human actions – these are moral values. Thus, economics, morality and politics are so closely intertwined in modern post-industrial society that it is simply impossible to separate them from each other. After all, today «man as a person» and «man as a citizen» define two main directions of progress of human existence: the direction of development of the «inner world» of man the formation of new moral and psychological principles of existence; the direction of development of the «external world» of man – the formation of new economic, political and socio-psychological principles of existence. But a person’s freedom of action in a post-industrial society does not absolve himself of responsibility to society. Responsibility itself keeps a person from uncontrolled intentions.


Author(s):  
Clio Flego

A group of visual activists, architects, software developers and archaeologists as well as a multicultural team composed of artists, investigative journalists and lawyers – an organic organization. Forensic Architecture ‘Investigative aesthetic’ is based on visual aggregation on data allowing viewers to enhance their perception-cognition of events by the integrated use of augmented photography. Their works have been presented in front of a court, but also exhibited at international shows all around the world. FA expanded use of photography, integrating in the urbanistic reconstruction of frames of any kind of multimedia information collected, consider it not simply as a medium, but as a proper tool for triggering critical reflections and political action. Forensic Architecture have mainly been investigating the area of conflicts with the aim to present counter- investigation on unclear circumstances, often underlining social constructs in the public forum. The particular role that FA plays, claiming social truth and assigning to photography the function to be a “civil act,” remarks its place in the history of war photography, and underlines the importance of also having a contra-culture in a post- industrial society, permeated by the presence of technology. Keywords: evidence, Forensic Architecture, forensic reconstruction of event, photography, truth-value


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