For forty years, successive editions of Ethical Theory and Business have helped to define the field of business ethics. The 10th edition reflects the current, multidisciplinary nature of the field by explicitly embracing a variety of perspectives on business ethics, including philosophy, management, and legal studies. Chapters integrate theoretical readings, case studies, and summaries of key legal cases to guide students to a rich understanding of business ethics, corporate responsibility, and sustainability. The 10th edition has been entirely updated, ensuring that students are exposed to key ethical questions in the current business environment. New chapters cover the ethics of IT, ethical markets, and ethical management and leadership. Coverage includes climate change, sustainability, international business ethics, sexual harassment, diversity, and LGBTQ discrimination. New case studies draw students directly into recent business ethics controversies, such as sexual harassment at Fox News, consumer fraud at Wells Fargo, and business practices at Uber.

Ethical Theory and Business

The effects of television advertising on materialism, parent-child conflict, and unhappiness: A review of research

The sociology of consumption pays relatively little detailed and systematic theoretical attention to children, while the sociology of childhood tends to view children’s consumption through what can be called the ‘production of consumption’ approach. This is surprising given the range of empirical and theoretical debate in the sociology of consumption, where ‘mode of consumption’,‘consumption as aesthetics’ and ‘material culture’ represent a further three approaches. By bringing together the sociologies of childhood and consumption, a framework for empirical research is advanced. Four inter-related themes are suggested: learning to consume; lifestyle and identity formation; children’s engagements with material culture; and the parent-child relationship. It is argued that such a framework offers scope to further understandings of how cultures of consumption impact on children, children and parents, and construct notions of childhood. A focus on children’s consumption also represents an opportunity to clarif...

Bringing children (and parents) into the sociology of consumption: Towards a theoretical and empirical agenda

In this article, we argue that what is now known as the ‘tween’ cannot be understood apart from its inception in, and articulation with, the market exigencies of childhood - specifically girlhood - as they have emerged since the Second World War. Drawing upon trade discourses from the children’s clothing industry since the 1940s, interviews with children and views expressed by children’s market observers, we demonstrate how ‘the tween’ (or subteen/preteen) has been constructed and maintained as an ambiguous, age-delineated marketing and merchandising category. This category tends to produce and reproduce a ‘female consuming subject’ who has generally been presumed to be white, middle or upper middle class and heterosexual. Building upon historical materials, we focus much of our efforts on analyzing contemporary cultural commercial iterations of the tween as they have arisen since the early 1990s, a time when clothing makers and entrepreneurs of childhood redoubled their efforts to define a market semanti...

Betwixt and be Tween: Age Ambiguity and the Sexualization of the Female Consuming Subject

The use of animated spokes-characters in advertising to young children is a strategic communication tactic frequently examined, debated, and criticized by parents, researchers, child advocates, and government officials. Although public opinion suggests that spokes-characters influence young children's product desires, academic research has generally failed to demonstrate this effect. The present study extends previous studies examining spokes-character influence on children, and specifically examines the effects of character action and voice. Results of two studies support previous findings that although character action and voice may influence a young child's attention to an ad, character, and product recognition, and even a positive attitude toward the product, the relation between spokes-characters and a child's preference, intention, and choice of a product is uncertain.

USING ANIMATED SPOKES-CHARACTERS IN ADVERTISING TO YOUNG CHILDREN: Does Increasing Attention to Advertising Necessarily Lead to Product Preference?

The two-career American household has spawned a generation of wise-beyond-their-years children with unprecedented influence over all kinds of family purchases, from food and clothes to cars and computers - worth $70 billion in sales a year. This work teaches marketing and advertising professionals how to tap into this largely overlooked and powerful consumer bloc. Based on recent focus group research, it shows marketers how to spot and take advantage of emerging trends in the lucrative kids' market. In addition, there is demographic and psychographic information, plus numerous real-world examples of how companies are discovering what works - and what doesn't - in marketing to children as purchasers themselves, as well as instigators of their parents' purchases.

Selina S. Guber

Papers

Marketing to and Through Kids