How should we view the relationship between ethics and economics? One of the most salient differences between the two—at least as they are traditionally conceived—involves the different intentions or motivations of agents. They are often regarded as mutually exclusive: ethical motives are other-regarding, while economic ones are self-regarding (and perhaps selfish). If markets give rise to material benefits and, furthermore, those benefits are a consequence of market agents pursuing their self-interest, does that mean we must accept the legitimacy of selfishness or greed? In this chapter we suggest that this picture is too simplistic. We accept that self-interest in the marketplace gives rise to material benefits, and hence we accept forms of behaviour that might elsewhere (in other areas of social life) be condemned, but our analysis shows that morality still has a role to play. This is the moral leeway approach at work, and it involves distinguishing between different varieties of the profit motive.

The BRI, formally known as the One Belt, One Road Initiative, is a global development initiative initiated by the Chinese government arousing significant academic and policy interest. Since 2005, China has completed close to USD2.3 trillion in foreign projects since with 41% (USD966 billion) financing infrastructure projects and an even larger amount (USD1.4 trillion) towards investment in foreign assets – port facilities, mining and energy assets, and acquisitions of foreign firms. This chapter reviews the role of the BRI in infrastructure development including its contributions and challenges in advancing sustainable development alongside efforts at engagement with local communities. A number of approaches to addressing BRI disputes have emerged at the pre- and post-dispute stage. These include both formal and informal dispute mitigation and resolution mechanisms. Conversations with project coordinators highlight the importance of neutrality and relationship preservation. Systems are emerging to increase community access to grievance mechanisms including China’s mediation and consultation mechanism for the mining industry.

This chapter presents conclusions and relevant recommendations. Project data, survey findings and comparative case studies suggested that the introduction of heightened pre-project community consultation and grievance mechanisms within global multilateral development banks in the mid 2010–2020s have corresponded with a drop in the percentage of grievances per project from 15.4% in 2019 to 7.1% in 2021. Survey findings of fifty-five practitioners engaged in infrastructure-related dispute prevention in the Asia Pacific region likewise found that prior community consultation was considered the most effective approach to preventing infrastructure disputes. Overall, most disputes arose because of lack of adequate consultation with members of the community. Similarly, the twelve community–investor dispute case studies showed that in circumstances of increasingly heightened standards for pre-project community consultation compared with ad-hoc discretionary consultation practices, the number of stalled/cancelled and litigated case declined by 33%, the percentages of cases referred to local courts declined by 16%, and the number of cases pursuing party agreement through mediation or negotiation increased by 50%. These findings support the development of increasingly robust community consultative engagement channels, particularly for multilateral and national banks that have not yet implemented such policies. Such engagement channels, far from aggregating complaints, conversely correlate with a reduction in the overall proportion of project disputes.

Global community-infrastructure engagement and accountability norms have emerged out of crises, decentralised shared knowledge generation amongst national and multilateral banking institutions, resulting in legal innovations. This process has accelerated in the context of cross-border infrastructure development projects, which often involve coordination between national and multilateral standards. A learning orientation, accompanied by the creation of shared learning spaces such as the International Financial Institution Meetings, which are hosted by the world’s multilateral development banks on a rotating basis on themes such as information disclosure and stakeholder engagement, have resulted in growing agreement on relevant underlying principles and good practices in community engagement in the context of infrastructure planning.

Medieval economic theorists developed a theory of the just price – that is, a theory about what the fair or just price for any commodity should be. Nowadays the idea seems odd, since prices are set by markets. But is it that odd? For we still have strong intuitions about the wrongness of exploitation of labour, or the immorality of exchanges undertaken under duress. The central question of this chapter concerns what a plausible theory of business or economic ethics should say about prices and pricing behaviour. What should it tell us about the price of goods and of labour? We argue that the moral leeway approach helps us to strike a balance between the insights of both economics and ethical theory.

Questions about the social responsibilities of corporations or businesses are regarded by many as the most fundamental issues for business ethicists to solve. In the business ethics literature, debate has been starkly divided between stakeholder theory and stockholder theory, which at its most basic level means choosing either for or against the very idea of corporate social responsibility. This chapter gives a comprehensive and systematic overview of this extensive literature. In response to it, we develop a more nuanced view in line with our moral leeway approach. We argue that the justification of corporate social responsibility depends on a broad range of factors, including the urgency of the problem, the company’s ability to provide assistance, the cost of doing so, the importance of business as usual, and the availability of alternatives.

What role should morality or ethics play in economic interactions on markets? Much previous thinking on business ethics is unhelpful since it is polarised between two implausible extremes. Some neoclassical economists such as Milton Friedman believe ethics has no place in the market. We call this idea ‘economism’ and argue that it sits oddly with general intuitions about the importance of morality. On the other side are those philosophers who hold that traditional ethical theories, such as deontology or virtue ethics, can be applied just as readily in the business realm as they can in all other areas of social life. We call this idea ‘moralism’ and argue that it is unrealistic and unhelpful for typical interactions on competitive markets. We finally outline a more plausible alternative which is more balanced in this regard – the moral leeway approach to business ethics. Moral leeway accepts that the market is, in one sense, exceptional, in that actions which would be sanctioned in other spheres of life are accepted. But such leeway is only permissible in the context of a strong social network that ameliorates the sharp edges of the market.

To investigate the micro-level interdependence between technological advancements and institutional diversity in IPR within business corporations, this chapter integrates the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework with the Institutional Complementarities (IC) approach. The former recognizes the importance of informal rules and community characteristics in knowledge governance, while the latter reveals inefficiencies arising from the interdependent nature of knowledge ownership and creation. The combined GKC–IC framework reveals the interplay between the characteristics of knowledge as a shared resource and the formal and informal rules governing its production. This offers insights into how corporations can be understood as knowledge commons within today’s environment that is increasingly shaped by the extensive use of IPR in governing knowledge assets. The chapter shows that the interdependence dynamics between IPR and technology excludes knowledge workers from accessing and utilizing the knowledge they produce, leading to the gradual deterioration of their skills and expertise. This vicious cycle further erodes the institutional diversity of corporate knowledge governance in favour of IPR-based governance mechanisms.

Building on the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, this chapter examines how processes of knowledge production, transmission, and utilization give rise to various collective action problems and how firms address these problems. Drawing on stakeholder theory in management studies, the chapter distinguishes three governance models – the hub-and-spoke model, the lead role governance model, and the shared governance model – each offering different solutions to these challenges. A case study of the famous Czech firm Bat’a Enterprises in the early twentieth century demonstrates the practical application of the lead role governance model, which grants employees high autonomy while maintaining management’s central role in strategic decisions. Through profit-sharing schemes, decentralized workshops, and internal education, Bat’a effectively aligned individual incentives with the firm’s goals, mitigating collective action problems and fostering innovation. By analyzing Bat’a’s success, this chapter contributes to the understanding of knowledge governance in firms and underscores the connections with the GKC framework and Ostrom’s design principles.

If we take commons to be a kind of institutional arrangement enabling community governance of shared resources, the challenge involved in taking the corporation-as-commons idea forward is to specify what we mean by corporation in this context. We also need to determine who shares the corporation and identify the rules and practices that enable its provision, production, and reproduction in relevant action arenas. This chapter is an attempt to chart this course. Drawing on insights from the literature on the firm, it argues that the firm’s most critical resource is its "corporate mask," a special kind of institutional resource provided by the legal system that enables the firm’s members to operate as a singular actor in the legal and commercial spheres. But the corporate mask is not merely a legal construct – the social recognition of the firm as a corporate actor, a reliable business partner, a reputable producer of goods or services, and so on matter a great deal as well. The corporate mask is a legal and epistemic focal point shared by insiders and third parties with whom the firm contracts and more generally interacts in a network of adjacent action situations.

The Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework draws attention to the content, quality, and consequences of the production, the institutionalized (community) governance, and the sharing of knowledge. In the domain of corporate governance, the key knowledge in question concerns the rules, mechanisms, and infrastructures that enable corporations to be governed. But how do actors understand what is going on and what is at stake in the field of corporate governance? Drawing on the sociological theory of Strategic Action Fields (SAF), this chapter provides an account of how different imaginaries of corporate status, architecture, governance, and purpose are actively created and promoted by different kinds of disciplinary specialists, standard setters, and practitioners. The chapter shows how the knowledge claims made by these epistemic communities up the 1960s and from the 1970s onwards underpin two competing social norms of corporate governance, which were expressed in different configurations of position, boundary, choice, aggregation, information, payoff, and scope rules.

This chapter examines the decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which rely primarily on sociotechnical infrastructures supplied by blockchain technology and consist substantially of combinations of shared computer code and shared data. The chapter considers DAOs using the governing knowledge commons (GKC) research framework, contrasting the GKC perspective with long-standing views of the corporate form as a nexus of contracts, as an instance of hierarchy and decision theory, and as a complex system. The analysis is set against the context of earlier work on the corporation as commons. The chapter concludes that the GKC framework focuses attention on elements of governance that often are not salient in conventional accounts. This is especially true of the important question of how governance responds to and generates social dilemmas associated specifically with practices of sharing knowledge, information, and data.