Business & Society and Business Ethics: Two Distinct Fields of Business

As a field of business, business and society (which includes the topic of corporate social responsibility (CSR)) can be viewed as falling within the rubric of the environment of business. Business and government can as well. Indeed, the environment goes beyond stakeholders. Although sometimes deemed as falling within this rubric, business ethics actually does not, as it is internal to a business even as unethical policies and decisions can impact stakeholders. In fact, business ethics and business and society are two distinct fields, even though they share a common border and are often fused as if they were one seamless country.

The full essay is at "Business & Society and Business Ethics."

Bureaucratizing Leadership into Management

Fuqua/COLE surveyed 205 executives of public- and private-sector companies. Based on the results, I provide a critique that renders transparent some of the questionable assumptions that leadership-advisors and even business leaders themselves may have without realizing it. 

The full essay is at "Bureaucratizing Leadership."

Business Culture Forming Higher Education

“Publish or perish” is the infamous mantra of those intrepid scholars who work at research universities and many prestigious Liberal Arts & Sciences colleges dotting the map of the world. The need to demonstrate regular output is perhaps nowhere more stressed (hence, stress) than in the United States. As if the declining number of tenure positions (amid increasing reliance on adjuncts, not coincidentally) at colleges and universities in the U.S. were not enough of a challenge for the newly-minted doctors aspiring to the intellectual freedom that goes with the protection of tenure, that the young scholars are increasingly being subjected to an "assembly-line" process wherein faculty administrators treat their junior colleagues' published journal articles like chocolates on a conveyer belt puts scholarship at odds with itself and thus is utterly self-defeating from the standpoint of society gaining new knowledge.

The full essay is at "Business Culture Forming Higher Education"

Predicting Future Events in Political Risk Analysis: On the European Debt Crisis

Political risk assessment is a nasty business in that the future has a stubborn habit of not wanting to be too predictable. Even though tomorrow displays a remarkable tendency to be similar to the world of today—the status quo enjoying the right of default—forecasting future events is notoriously difficult. To use statistics to nail down probabilities may actually involve considerable luck. Not even the stature of the person making the predictions may be decisive, after all. I have in mind the predictions of Alexei Kudrin, the former Russian finance minister, on the European debt crisis and the euro.

                                                             

The full essay is in Essays on the E.U. Political Economy, available at Amazon.