Symposium Review: 25th Anniversary of Moral Boundaries by Joan Tronto

Normal accidents. Living with high-risk technologies

The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. By Virginia Held. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 220p. $45. In her latest book, Virginia Held elaborates on themes from previously published articles to explicate and defend the ethics of care. For those unfamiliar with this well-developed tendency of feminist thought, she reviews its evolution from the 1980s writings of Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, and Nel Noddings to the more recent work of theorists including, among many others, Eva Kittay, Annette Baier, Joan Tronto, and Selma Sevenhuijsen. Held also underlines the differences between the ethics of care and dominant moral and political perspectives, including Kantian universalism, utilitarianism, liberal contract theory, and virtue theory. She proposes that care is, compared with justice, the more basic value, on the grounds that society can exist without the latter but not without the former. She recommends that men and women participate equally in care activities; that care infuse citizen as well as familial relations; and that society beat back the imperializing thrust of the market ethos and the conflict-mongering thrust of the militarized state to improve the well-being of children, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the community, culture, the environment, and deprived regions of the world.

The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global

Built to last: successful habits of visionary companies

This article is a first step towards addressing a gap in the field of organisational resilience research by examining how small and medium enterprises (SME) manage the threat and actuality of extreme events. Pilot research found that the managerial framing of extreme events varied by a range of organisational factors. This finding informed further examination of the contextual nature of the resilience concept. To date, large organisations have been the traditional focus of empirical work and theorising in this area; yet the heterogeneous SME sector makes up approximately 99% of UK industry and routinely operates under conditions of uncertainty. In a comparative study examining UK organisational resilience, it emerged that SME participants had both a distinctive perspective and approach to resilience when compared to participants from larger organisations. This article presents a subset of data from 11 SME decision-makers. The relationship between resilience capabilities, such as flexibility and adaptation, is interrogated in relation to organisational size. The data suggest limitations of applying a one-size-fits-all organisation solution (managerial or policy) to creating resilience. This study forms the basis for survey work examining the extent to which resilience is an organisationally contingent concept in practice.

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Creating resilient SMEs: why one size might not fit all

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how entrepreneurial behaviors support small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) resilience, refine the concept of entrepreneurial resilience, and identify how SME resilience might be promoted.,Qualitative data were collected in the UK via 11 focus groups which provided a sub-sample of 19 SME participants.,Because of their experience operating in uncertain environments, their direct experience of adversity, and the informal organizational settings they inhabit, entrepreneurs are often highly resilient and possess capabilities that enable SMEs to be resilient. Entrepreneurial resilience provides a basis for SME resilience that differs significantly from best practices as understood in larger firms.,Exploratory qualitative research on a small sample (n=19) limits the generalizability of this work. Further research could quantitatively test the paper’s findings and/or examine the link between entrepreneurial resilience and the resilience of larger firms.,Rather than encouraging formal planning and redundancy, policy and practice designed to promote the resilience of SMEs should pay greater attention to building capacities to cope with uncertainty, generating and leveraging personal relationships, and activating the ability to experiment and think creatively in response to crises.,This paper draws on organizational psychology research to refine understanding of entrepreneurial resilience and to empirically examine and inductively theorize the multi-level relationships between entrepreneurial resilience and SME resilience.

How entrepreneurial resilience generates resilient SMEs

COVID-19 is profoundly affecting almost all aspects of economic and social life globally. Governments have closed borders, banned mass gatherings, and enforced social distancing, generating a new n...

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Covid-19, societalization, and the future of business in society

Addressing climate change is among the most challenging ethical issues facing contemporary business and society. Unsustainable business activities are causing significant distributional and procedural injustices in areas such as public health and vulnerability to extreme weather events, primarily because of a distinction between primary emitters and those already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Business, as a significant contributor to climate change and beneficiary of externalizing environmental costs, has an obligation to address its environmental impacts. In this paper, we explore the role of firms’ climate change targets in shaping their emissions trends in the context of a large multi-country sample of companies. We contrast two intentions for setting emissions reductions targets: symbolic attempts to manage external stakeholder perceptions via “greenwashing” and substantive commitments to reducing environmental impacts. We argue that the attributes of firms’ climate change targets (their extent, form, and time horizon) are diagnostic of firms’ underlying intentions. Consistent with our hypotheses, while we find no overall effect of setting climate change targets on emissions, we show that targets characterized by a commitment to more ambitious emissions reductions, a longer target time frame, and absolute reductions in emissions are associated with significant reductions in firms’ emissions. Our evidence suggests the need for vigilance among policy-makers and environmental campaigners regarding the underlying intentions that accompany environmental management practices and shows that these can to some extent be diagnosed analytically.

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Managing carbon aspirations: the influence of corporate climate change targets on environmental performance

The COVID-19 pandemic threatens both lives and livelihoods To reduce the spread of the virus, governments have introduced crisis management interventions that include border closures, quarantines, strict social distancing, marshaling of essential workers and enforced homeworking COVID-19 measures are necessary to save the lives of some of the most vulnerable people within society, and yet in parallel they create a range of negative everyday effects for already marginalized people Likely unintended consequences of the management of the COVID-19 crisis include elevated risk for workers in low-paid, precarious, and care-based employment, over-representation of minority ethnic groups in case numbers and fatalities, and gendered barriers to work Drawing upon feminist ethics of care, I theorize a radical alternative to the normative assumptions of rationalist crisis management Rationalist approaches to crisis management are typified by utilitarian logics, masculine and militaristic language, and the belief that crises follow linear processes of signal detection, preparation/prevention, containment, recovery, and learning By privileging the quantifiable - resources and measurable outcomes - such approaches tend to omit considerations of pre-existing structural disadvantage This paper contributes a new theorization of crisis management that is grounded in feminist ethics to provide a care-based concern for all crisis affected people

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/gwao.12491

Layla Branicki

Papers

Creating resilient SMEs: why one size might not fit all

How entrepreneurial resilience generates resilient SMEs

Covid-19, societalization, and the future of business in society

Managing carbon aspirations: the influence of corporate climate change targets on environmental performance

COVID-19, Ethics of Care, and Feminist Crisis Management.