Corporate Responsibility

Corporate Responsibility

Introduction

Twenty years ago in The Concept of Corporate Strategy, Kenneth Andrews (1980: 10-11) linked corporate strategy and ethics by making three references to “worth”:

The prototype of the chief executive that we are developing is, in short, the able victoryseeking organizational leader who is making sure in what is done and the changes pioneered in purpose and practice that the game is worth playing, the victory worth seeking, and life and career worth living. (Emphasis added)

Subsequently, Andrews (1980: 11) designated “the chief executive as architect of purpose.” Purposeful human participation in worthy pursuits is a subject in which corporate strategists and ethicists alike are keenly interested. According to LaRue Hosmer, this convergence of interests has a long history in American business thought. Hosmer (1994: 17) traces the link between corporate strategy and ethics to the writings of Chester Barnard in the early twentieth century. An argument can be made that Hosmer's genealogy is too abbreviated.

Spanning the 1868 publication of Ragged Dick and the 1890 publication of Struggling Upward, Horatio Alger (1985) explained variation in economic performance, the dependent variable that interests several generations of corporate strategists, in terms of ethics. Alger's successful businessmen, Greyson in Ragged Dick and Reed and Armstrong in Struggling Upward, possessed the virtues of purposefulness, honesty, and humility (Gilbert, 1996a: 152). A line linking corporate strategy and ethics connects the work of Alger with the work of novelists Frank Norris and Sloan Wilson. In The Octopus, Norris (1901) wrote of nineteenth-century California farmers who vainly sought competitive advantage - a foundational concept of corporate strategy - and justice every day in their dealings with managers of the railroad monopoly. The corporate strategists in Wilson's (1955) The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit search for worthy games, worthy victories, worthy lives, and worthy careers. Richard Wheeler (2000) writes The Buffalo Commons is a moving story about corporate strategists who try to preserve worthy ways of living and working on the American Great Plains, and who struggle with the incompatibility of their respective pursuits. Linking corporate strategy and ethics is an American literary tradition.

The first purpose of this chapter, then, is to survey contemporary thinking about corporate strategy and ethics as a useful pairing. What has become of the ethical proposition that Andrews expressed poetically a generation ago? At first glance, an affirmative answer to this question seems improbable. Contemporary conversations about the concept of corporate strategy are conducted in the languages of economics, social psychology, and biology, not ethics (Hosmer, 1994). Nonetheless, a number of American educators keep alive Andrews' proposition that corporate strategy and ethics can share a common vocabulary that is anchored by “the game is worth playing, the victory worth seeking, and life and career worth living.” In this chapter, you will meet some of us and our work.

The central theme of this chapter is that corporate strategy and ethics are now customarily linked in three distinct ways. Two of these connections between corporate strategy and ethics involve the incorporation of ethical considerations into ...