This paper examines two recent trends relative to boards of directors’ compensation, and their potential incompatibility. There has been some progress in increasing board diversity, specifically the inclusion of women and minorities on boards. The increasing trend requiring directors to hold/purchase equity as a requirement of board membership may seriously compromise further improvements in diversifying boards. Also, an increasing number of companies compensate directors partially or fully in stock grants and options. These compensation policies may be exclusionary, especially for women and minorities, impacting the quality of boardroom discussions and decisions. This study systematically examines whether corporations requiring director equity are exclusionary toward women and minority directors. Contrary to being exclusionary, companies with director stock requirements and annual stock awards have greater representation by women and minorities on their board. Moreover, larger companies are both more likely to have such policies and have higher proportions of women and minorities on the board.

Donaldson and Dunfee (1999) suggest in a brief discussion that a manager may in some cases rely on his or her own values in making organizational decisions. Our paper examines the role of diversity in values in an organizational context. Our central contention is that value diversity among managers, employees, and other stakeholders on dimensions such as prudence-boldness, clarity-flexibility, and rigor-mercy is highly useful for an organization. We introduce nontechnical models of individual and board decision-making in which value diversity cuts across group interests that would otherwise control the decision. In these models, decision-makers who are influenced by values such as prudence or boldness as well as by their group interests are more likely to avoid suboptimal decisions, because their weaker but not their more intense group interests are likely to be overridden by their cross-cutting value inclinations.

Employee-employee conflicts are common occasions for managerial intervention. In judging such disputes, managers bring to encounters a frame that is not conducive to employee due process. Making managers aware of their legal responsibilities in resolving employee disputes is a poor substitute for managers’ understanding and implementation of their ethical due process obligations. Moreover, moral imagination is necessary in order to counter the effects of the managerial frame that employees are either not worthy of due process protections or that such protections are not a priority.

The term stakeholder is a powerful one. This is due, to a significant degree, to its conceptual breadth. The term means different things to different people and hence evokes praise or scorn from a wide variety of scholars and practitioners. Such breadth of interpretation, though one of stakeholder theory’s greatest strengths, is also one of its most prominent theoretical liabilities. The goal of the current paper is like that of a controlled burn that clears away some of the underbrush of misinterpretation in the hope of denying easy fuel to the critical conflagration that would raze the theory. We aim to narrow its technical meaning for greater facility of use in management and organizational studies. By elaborating a number of common misinterpretations – critical and friendly – of the theory, we hope to render a stronger and more convincing theory as a starting place for future research.

Extrapolating from Carroll’s four domains of corporate social responsibility (1979) and Pyramid of CSR (1991), an alternative approach to conceptualizing corporate social responsibility (CSR) is proposed. A three-domain approach is presented in which the three core domains of economic, legal, and ethical responsibilities are depicted in a Venn model framework. The Venn framework yields seven CSR categories resulting from the overlap of the three core domains. Corporate examples are suggested and classified according to the new model, followed by a discussion of limitations and teaching and research implications.

I address three topics. First, I argue that the issue of corporate moral responsibility is an important one for business ethics. Second, I examine a core argument for the claim that the corporate organization is a separate moral agent and show it is based on an unnoticed but elementary mistake deriving from the fallacy of division. Third, I examine the assumptions collectivists make about what it means to say that organizations act and that they act intentionally and show that these assumptions are mistaken in their failure to understand the nature of intentional causality and of “as-if” intentionality. In exposing these mistakes I set out my own view in the form of two theses, the first of which states that individual members of an organization are always causally responsible for any corporate act, and the second of which states that attributions of intentions to corporations are always either descriptive or prescriptive attributions of “as if” intentionality.

The following address considers the relevance of business ethics education to our students. Is our concept of ethics one of practice and application? And, if so, are we accountable to our students, our institutions and ourselves, for the practical impact that we have or, conversely, that we do not have? Aren’t we responsible in part if one of our students ventures forth and does not act in an ethical manner? Though a positive response to this query may not be popular, what is the alternative? If we are not responsible for the impact (or lack thereof) that we have on our students, then what is our purpose? The discussion further explores the nature of this impact and the process by which we can amplify the results.