This institutional collection is focusing on documents from or related to The European Business Ethics Network, which supports initiatives at cross-European, National and regional levels. EBEN's mission is to promote ethics and excellence in businesses, to increase awareness about ethical challenges in the global market­place and to enable dialogue on the role of business in society. EBEN has 18 National Networks established in several countries. There are active groups in over 40 countries and always the possibility of forming more established National EBEN Networks.

Recent Submissions

  • Management education and the ethical mindset: Responsibility to whom and for what?

    Pless, N; de Jongh, D; Maak, T; Bird, Fred; Case, Peter; Gosling, Jonathan (2013-02-12)
    Paper presented at the European Business Ethics Network (UK) Conference, Ethics in Crisis: a call for alternatives, April 7-9, 2010 at Queen Mary, University of London. Final version published by Springer in Journal of Business Ethics. Original title: Management education and the ethical mindset: Responsibility to whom and for what? Available online at http://www.springer.com/
  • Foreword: Professional Ethics in Business and Social Life

    Sison, A.J. (Alejo José) (Springer Academic Publishers, 2009-01-01)
    Foreword for a special issue of the Journal of Business Ethics comprises selected papers from the 21st Annual Conference of the European Business Ethics Network (EBEN) held in Antalya, Turkey, 17–19 October, 2008.
  • Firms, the Business Ethics and Society: from an academic to a protestant standpoint

    Laboratoire d'Innovation, Prospective Stratégique et ORganisation (LIPSOR); Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers [CNAM]; Pesqueux, Yvon; Vergniol, Bertrand (HAL CCSD, 1995-09-15)
    Ce papier est construit sur l'argumentation suivante: - l'hypothèse de Max Weber (image de la responsabilité, primauté des droits de propriété, tradition du service public) - la notion de firme d'un point de vue académique à un point de vue protestant - la demande éthique des entreprises
  • New Tools to Foster Corporate Socially Responsible Behaviour

    A. Tencati; F. Perrini; S. Pogutz (EBEN - European Business Ethics Network, 2003)
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  • Small acts of resistance: Can these lead to a positive change?

    Rowland Curtis, Emma Dowling and Stefano Harney; Issa, Theodora; Pick, David (European Business Ethics Network UK (EBEN), 2011)
    The aim of this paper is to examine whether and how business ethics scholars can be engaged with students in critical public debate about business ethics issues. The question of whether small acts of resistance by business ethics scholars can enhance pedagogy and public engagement will be explored using data from a variety of sources including student course evaluations and reflective learning journals by students and reflections on teaching by lecturers. The paper will conclude with a discussion of issues and questions, limits and possibilities arising from the research that are worthy of further examination, particularly in relation to the support rendered by universities to business ethics scholars to enhance their engagement in both local or global debates as they seek to make a difference in the global community they are part of.
  • Practical wisdom for management from the Christian tradition. Metaprofit managerial style and the role of gratuitousness for the development of practical wisdom

    Mion G. (2012)
    The paper is aimed to highlight the relation between Christian tradition – and, in particular, Catholic Social Thought – and management.
 In particular, the paper describes the origin of a “metaprofit” managerial style and his principal characteristics. From among these, the most important is gratuitousness, considered a useful element helping practical wisdom to develop into managerial praxis.
  • Quantitative measures of corporate responsibility

    Κουϊκογλου Βασιλης(http://users.isc.tuc.gr/~vkouikoglou); Kouikoglou Vasilis(http://users.isc.tuc.gr/~vkouikoglou); Φιλλης Ιωαννης(http://users.isc.tuc.gr/~yphillis); Yannis Phillis(http://users.isc.tuc.gr/~yphillis) (Published )
    Summarization: Corporate responsibility has many facets. It can be viewed as an interaction with the society to the mutual benefit of both partners. A corporation produces goods or services that the society demands. Production should be conducted so that its environmental impact is minimal, the economic state of the corporation is viable, labor conditions are good, and compliance with laws and regulations is satisfactory, among others. A model is presented that uses hierarchical fuzzy reasoning that assesses a facet of corporate responsibility, called sustainability, given a number of inputs, called basic indicators. Inputs are normalized on a scale (0, 1) according to their sustainability status and then combined to obtain a sustainability index on (0, 1) for each facet of the corporation. A sensitivity analysis pinpoints the most important indicators affecting sustainability. Two case studies of multinational companies, one of which is headquartered in Greece, are presented in detail. Both are producers of cement and other related building materials.
  • Foreword: Professional Ethics in Business and Social Life

    Sison, A.J. (Alejo José) (Springer Academic Publishers, 2009)
    Foreword for a special issue of the Journal of Business Ethics comprises selected papers from the 21st Annual Conference of the European Business Ethics Network (EBEN) held in Antalya, Turkey, 17–19 October, 2008.
  • Budgeting as a Means for Communication of Business Ethics

    Roostalu, Lea; Kooskora, Mari (2010)
    This case study focuses on communication of business ethics via budgeting in the capital of Estonia during the last 75 years. Historically, Estonia was under the rule of Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Russia for a long time. The first period of Estonian independence lasted for 22 years, beginning in 1918. In 1940, the Republic of Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union. Estonia regained independence in 1991. The authors of the present article analysed and compared the annual budget books of the city government in all these three periods from the viewpoint of the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility and business ethics. As a result of the study an original model for measuring changes in CSR orientation was designed.
  • Ethical Leadership Behaviour and Employee Satisfaction

    Mägi, Priit; Kooskora, Mari (2010)
    In our modern business world corporations have significantly broadened their role in the society and this role impacts many both inside and outside the organization. There is much evidence of the growing demand for businesses to conduct themselves with a greater regard for moral and ethical considerations (e.g. Werhane and Freeman, 1999; Paine 1997; 2003; Freeman, 2000; Goodpaster, 2004; Gini, 2004, etc) and the responsibility to respond to these growing demands has largely been put on the organizational leaders (Mendonca and Kanungo, 2007). The behaviour of organizational leaders has strong impact on others and it is strongest on the employees. It is indicated that there is a direct relation between ethical leadership behaviour and employee job satisfaction and outcomes (Zhu et al, 2004); however empirical research in this field is still lacking (Toor and Ofori, 2009). Our study investigates the association between ethical leadership behaviour and employee satisfaction. The attempt is made to explore the impact of ethical leadership behaviour on employee satisfaction expressed in the dimensions such as employee trust, loyalty towards organization and leaders, pride about the company, organizational commitment, workplace environment and organizational climate, employee recognition and empowerment, awareness of the organizational activities, and participation in decision-making. A total of 175 employees from Estonian financial and telecommunication companies took part in the study. The results indicated a strong relation between the components of ethical leadership and the components of employees’ job satisfaction. However it was found that the relation of ethical leadership between employee trust, loyalty, pride and commitment was slightly weaker among male respondents than among female respondents, whereas the association of pride about the organization and participation in decision-making was not revealed among female respondents. Clear differences were found in the answers of respondents from different age groups, for example, young employees (under 25 years) did not value recognition and awareness of the organizational activities as highly as other 2 groups, however they considered the importance of participation in decision making higher than employees from other age groups. The results of this study further strengthen the argument about positive impact of ethical leadership behaviour on employee satisfaction. Differences in respondents’ answers from different age groups and gender indicate to the need for further studies in this area.
  • Corporate Moral Development and Stakeholder Issues

    Kooskora, Mari; Kujala, Johanna (2008-06-16)
    The purpose of this paper is to discuss the linkage between corporate moral development and stakeholder issues in the Estonian business community context during the rapid and radical changes in the past two decades. The paper is based on a larger study analyzing corporate moral development, business ethics and corporate social responsibility in the Estonian business community during 1985–2005 (Kooskora, 2008). During this time period, Estonia moved out of the former Soviet Union’s sphere of control and became one of the front running countries among the new member states of the European Union. In this paper we first introduce the concept of corporate moral development (CMD) using the Reidenbach and Robin’s (1991) original model of CMD and then describe the different time periods in Estonian business context during last two decades relating these to the levels of CMD in the Estonian business context (cf. Kooskora, 2008). After that, we take a deeper look at the stakeholder issues during each of the described time period by using the elements of actors, actions and outcomes (cf. Kujala et al., 2007) as a research tool in our analysis. Finally, we present a framework illustrating the five stages of corporate moral development occurred in Estonian business community during the analyzed time period along with a summary of the most important stakeholder issues in each time period. As the result of our analysis we can say that the changes in the stakeholder considerations can be directly related to the changes in the environment. At different developmental stages, different kinds of stakeholders were considered important for the businesses, this is seen from give-and-take relations at the lower levels of corporate moral development, the relationships moved towards reactive or even proactive ways of interaction. However we have to admit that understanding relations with stakeholders as truly collaborative or mutually beneficial is still very rare in the Estonian business community.
  • Strategic Corporate Responsibility

    Kooskora, Mari; Vau, Krista (University of Tartu, 2011-04-01)
    Increasing number of studies supports the positive impact of corporate responsibility (CR) in long-term perspective and for securing sustainable performance (e.g. Freeman, 2000; McElhaney, 2008; Hollander, 2008), moreover several recent studies (see Carroll, 2010; Hansen and Reichwald, 2009; Googins et al., 2009) found that organisations which performed according to their principles and core values were significantly less influenced by the economic recession and were able to restore their business easier than those who cut corners or neglected ethics and / or responsibility in their activities. Therefore we can argue that corporate responsibility is a key to sustainable performance and helps organisations to survive and succeed through turbulent times. However it is suggested that corporate responsibilities activities are sustainable only when they are tightly linked to the core business goals (Schreck, 2009) and are lead strategically (e.g. Mele and Guillen, 2006). Jonker and de Witte (2006) maintain that although the roots of corporate responsibility are strong, the strategic approach is still relatively new. The discussion is illustrated with a brief overview of a study among Estonian organisations. The purpose of our study is to find out whether and how CR is related to strategic management, business objectives and leadership competences, and whether the responsible activities of an organisation correspond to the attributes of strategic corporate responsibility (SCR). The study is conducted among Estonian organisations who took part in Responsible Business Index (RBI) study in 2009 and 2010 (csr.ee homepage), research methods are combined, including analysis of the RBI questionnaires, the organisations’ home-pages, annual reports and personal conversations with organisations’ representatives.
  • Why to Talk about Ethical and Responsible Business?

    Kooskora, Mari (2010)
    "[...] In this essay I will discuss about the topics of ethics and responsibility in business, arguing that this is nothing new and unnatural, not something additional to the business activities, but in important and even decisive integral part of everyday business. For understanding the essence of ethics and responsibility in business I am taking a more holistic view, which combines together the concepts of Corporate Governance (CG), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Ethical Leadership (EL) and follows the Stakeholder approach. Similarly I have used the same concepts in my work about Corporate Moral Development (see Kooskora, 2008), but during the last years I’ve even more convinced that this model can be used for more general discussions about ethics and responsibility in business as well. [...]", p. 2
  • La dimensión ética en la profesión del ingeniero técnico en topografía

    Falgueras Bosch, Jordi (EBENUniversitat Politécnica de Catalunya, 2013-06-04)
    La presente investigación pretende analizar la dimensión ética en la profesión del Ingeniero Técnico en Topografía, centrándose en particular en el caso de España. A tal fin, se toma como referencia el código ético propuesto por la Federación Internacional de Topógrafos, para averiguar si tales propuestas han tenido una efectiva repercusión en la conducta de la comunidad topográfia de nuestro país, o si, por el contrario, han quedado reducidas a unas recomendaciones abstractas que no han podido todavía llevarse a la práctica. De esta manera, a través del análisis de diferentes aspectos de esta profesión, se intenta desarrollar una reflexión adecuada sobre las causas y las posibles soluciones de los conflictos hallados, para ofrecer una contribución positiva y original para el debate ético en torno a esta profesión.
  • The Journal of Business Ethics: 2001-2010

    Martínez, Hugo; Galvis, Jhuliana; Bravo Ibarra, Edna Rocío (EBENUniversitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2013-06-04)
    The objective of this paper is to characterize through bibliometric tools the intellecual development of the Journal of Business Ethics from 2000 to 2010. The methodology used had three big phases: The collection of relevant information from the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) on the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), the transformation of information by descriptive and co-occurrence analysis and the results generation. The main results shows patterns and regularities related to the scientific productivity, main authors, journals, institutes, countries and the relevant key topics and their relations. The results indicate that major key topics studied are corporate social responsibility, ethics and stakeholder; and some important emergent topics are job satisfation, value based management, innovation and social network.
  • Integrando la ética, la responsabilidad social y la sostenibilidad en la formación universitaria

    Setó Pamies, Dolors (EBENUniversitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2013-05-30)
    El contexto actual provoca en las empresa la necesidad de adquirir y desarrollar las habilidades y las competencias apropiadas en el el ámbito de la ética, la responsabilidad social y la sostenibilidas. En este sentido, las universidades ocupan una posición estratégica desde la que pueden contribuir a desarrollo de las mismas. Ello hace que se plantee la necesidad de revisar el sistema educativo y aplicar los ajustes pertinentes que permitan a los futuros profesionales hacer frente a la era de la globalitzación creando un crecimiento económico y un futuro sostenible para las personas y el planeta. El objetivo de este trabajo es doble, en primer lugar, pretendemos reflexionar sobre la importancia de la incorporación de contenidos relacionados con la ética, la RSE y la sostenibilidad en la formación universitaria, y en segundo lugar proporcionar un marco conceptual que nos permita analizar las principales variables que deben ser consideradas en las estrategias de integración, teniendo en cuenta la existencia de factores contextuales que pueden ejercer cierta influencia en su adopción. Finalmente concluimos señalando que cada universidad debe adoptar la estrategia de integración que más encaje con su propio contexto, y además para coseguir su efectividad será necesario que perciba su importancia formando parte de una estrategia mucho amplia de la universidad.
  • La ética y la sostenibilidad en comparación con un sistema de gestión de la calidad

    García Benedí, Albert; Quiñones, José Miguel (EBENUniversitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2013-06-04)
    El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar la funcionalidad, la sostenibilidad así como el sentido común y ética en comparación de la implantación de un sistema de gestión de la calidad dentro de la organitzación sea pública y/o privada.

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