Michael Rion’s The Responsible Manager provides a distinctive contribution to the field of business ethics. A short text written primarily for the business practitioner, it embodies the rare combination of focused attention to the context and practice of management as well as careful and thoughtful attention to distinctions and tools of ethical analysis. As such, it might serve as one of the most effective primers yet available for the practitioner who desires to benefit from the field of business ethics, without the jargon and flights to linguistic abstraction that characterize much of the academic field. As a resource for managers, teachers of managers and prospective managers the book avoids two pitfalls typical within the literature. It is superior to many texts written by academic theorists (e.g., philosophers) for whom ethics in business proceeds at high levels of theoretical abstraction and with little explicit attention to managerial practice and organizational context. It also succeeds where texts such as Ken Blanchard's The Power of Ethical Management fail—in being sensitive to management practice but lacking in ethical sophistication and theoretical clarity. Indeed, Michael Rion's academic training in ethics (Yale University) and his extensive experience in corporate practice both as resident corporate ethicist (Cummins Engine Company) and as external ethics consultant provide a unique combination rare to the field.

A growing number of organizational theorists have become skeptical about some of the more hallowed ideas of their field. They sense that there is a serious divergence between the nature of organizational life as it is described in theory and as it is experienced in practice. And they believe, therefore, that some corrective efforts are in order to redress this problem.

In their article, “Shrewd Bargaining on the Moral Frontier,” J. Gregory Dees and Peter C. Crampton challenge us with a puzzle about deception in bargaining. How can the practice of misleading others about our settlement preferences—the terms on which we are willing to come to an agreement —possibly be justified? On any standard ethical theory, they claim, Brer Rabbit's trick of professing fear of the briar patch in order to avoid being eaten by the fox would seem to be wrong, and yet we read this tale to our children for their moral edification. The discussion by Dees and Crampton of this apparent inconsistency is penetrating, instructive, and well-informed. It is also a delight to read.

The topic of Manuel Velasquez's clear and persuasive paper is of great significance today—far greater than is commonly realized. For multinational corporations have come to play an extraordinary—and largely unchecked—role in shaping the conditions of life today around the world. It is not so much that they have begun to control legislative processes—although there is some of this—as that they have increasingly escaped governmental control by playing governments off one another. Accordingly, the board rooms in New York, Toronto, and Amsterdam have more and more replaced the legislative chambers in Washington, Ottawa, and the Hague as internationally significant centers of power. And where the interests of business and government have tended to merge, there one finds the most powerful international forces in the world today—witness Japan, Inc.

When studying retailing and its role in developing the American mass market, historians traditionally have focused their attention on large department stores. An analysis of the influence of small department stores in the growth of underdeveloped sections of the American West provides a different emphasis. The following article traces the history of T. C. Power & Bro.—a small, family-run department store in Montana—before the early 1900s. The article demonstrates that the firm's service was tailored to the economic and social needs of urban and rural settlers on the western frontier, helping to create a consumer society in the West.

The role of fiduciaries with conflicting interests has received considerable attention recently. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of a fiduciary casting votes under conflicting interests in proxy contests that seek to control the corporation and those waged solely for the purpose of deciding an issue. By deriving comparisons across types of contests, we provide implications concerning differences in success probabilities and resolution effects for the two types of contests. The empirical verification (refutation) of such effects would provide insight regarding the (ir)relevance of fiduciary conflict-of-interests in proxy contests.