1st Edition

Ethics, Misconduct and the Financial Services Industry Towards a Theory of Moral Business

By Barbara Fryzel Copyright 2021
152 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

152 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

152 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book explores how ethics and the moral context of business have evolved historically in inf luential management theories and concepts. It looks at how managerial thought accommodates morality, values, and ethics and demonstrates the emerging patterns of ethical conduct to illustrate how moral aspects of management and organizational practice can become peripheral. The author... Read more

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface

Introduction

1. Traps for a moral management

1.1 Moral management against commercial ethics

1.2 Rigour of efficiency

2. What makes management moral

2.1 Behaving individuals

2.2 Prevailance of common interest and emotional control

2.3 A threat of gradual justification of self-interest

2.4 Dominant features of moral management

3. Organized morality

3.1 Morality as contract

3.2 Corporation as a moral vehicle

3.3 Corporate leadership relieving laymen ignorance

3.4 Good or bad managers in a workplace

3.5 Organization conditioning morality

4. Dominant narratives – relativizing a moral imperative

4.1 Rise of business ethics and dominating utilitarian undertones

4.2 A rule of market

4.3 Moral markets

4.4 A limited liability morality

5 More compliance less moralizing. A case of financial services

5.1 The context of the financial crisis

5.2 Morality outside of a day-to-day practice?

5.3 A danger of systemic dysfunctionalities and centrality of the regulatory doctrine

5.4 Future avenues

6. A possibility of a moral theory

6.1 Challenges

6.2 A narrative theory of moral business.

6.3. Moral vagueness of the rule of organizing?

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix

General method

Financial services study - method and data collection

Considered influential papers

Themes in key management and organization conferences

Index

Biography

Barbara Fryzel is an economist and Associate Professor of Management at

Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She is a laureate of the Foundation for

Polish Science for the postdoc fellowship at the University College London as

well as a management practitioner with business development and corporate

advisory experience in multinational firms. Her research interests cover corporate

social responsibility, behavioural ethics, and organizational culture.

"The book aims at developing a new analytical as well as historical framework for understanding and enhancing our corporate civilization. Barbara sets out her vision of moral behaviour and discusses the changes needed to using business as a force for good. Managers need to embrace a sense of purpose beyond making profits and to find new business opportunities to meet society’s needs.

The emerging proposal advocated by the Author is to favour the transition from Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Civil Responsibility. Companies, in fact, are not purely private associations, rather they are little governments created by the State legislation to advance public ends.

Barbara provides corporate executives clear evidence that taking ethics not just as a constraint to their behaviour, but as an argument of their objective function constitutes the surest path to success, especially in such turbulent times as the present ones. This is a book for the realist with conscience." — Stefano Zamagni, Professor of economics,University of Bologna and SAIS Europe, Johns Hopkins University