In this article I examine corporate social reporting as a form of New Governance regulation termed “democratic experimentalism.” Due to the challenges of regulating the behavior of corporations on issues related to sustainable economic development, New Governance regulation—which has a focus on decentralized, participatory, problem-solving-based approaches to regulation—is presented as an option to traditional command-and-control regulation. By examining the role of social reporting under a New Governance approach, I set out three necessary requirements for social reporting to be effective: disclosure, dialogue with stakeholders, and the moral development of the corporation. I then assess current social reporting practices against these requirements and find significant problems. In response, I propose one option for solving those problems, and encourage future researchers to consider the demands of these three requirements and the possible trade-offs between them when attempting to find ways to improve social reporting practices.

In this paper the problematic nature of the morality of management, in particular related to business organisations operating under Anglo-American capitalism, is explored. MacIntyre’s critique of managers in After Virtue (1985) serves as the starting point but this critique is itself subjected to analysis leading to a more balanced and contemporary view of the morality of management than MacIntyre provides. Paradoxically perhaps, MacIntyre’s own virtues-goods-practice-institution schema is shown to provide a way of re-imagining business organisations and management and thereby holds out the possibility of resolving the issue of the morality of management within such organisations. Implications for management practice are drawn out.

Moral identity has been touted as a foundation for understanding moral agency in organizations. The purpose of this article is to review the current state of knowledge regarding moral identity and highlight several promising avenues for advancing current understandings of moral actions in organizational contexts. The article begins with a brief overview of two distinct conceptual perspectives on moral identity—the character perspective and the social-cognitive perspective—that dominate extant literature. It then discusses varying approaches that have been taken in attempting to measure moral identity. The final two sections of the article review empirical findings regarding the antecedents and consequences of moral identity, respectively. Mechanisms and situational factors that are pertinent to moral agency in organizations are emphasized in both sections.

Distinguishing “business” concerns from “ethical” values is not only an unfruitful and meaningless task, it is also an impossible endeavor. Nevertheless, fruitless attempts to separate facts from values produce detrimental second-order effects, both for theory and practice, and should therefore be abandoned. We highlight examples of exemplary research that integrate economic and moral considerations, and point the way to a business ethics discipline that breaks new ground by putting ideas and narratives about business together with ideas and narratives about ethics.

Sandberg documents with admirable precision nine rather diverging renderings of Freeman’s call for the rejection of the separation thesis (ST). A more careful consideration of the propriety of importing phrases such as “the rejection of ST” from more established academic disciplines so as to serve in the field of normative business ethics would seem to make that precision premature and maybe even superfluous. This may well be generalized to an observation concerning current working methods in normative business ethics.

Is business intimately related to ethics or can the two be separated? I argue that examining this question by focusing on how the two areas might be separated is logically flawed. Examining how business and ethics are connected, however, can bear fruit. This examination shows that business is a proper subset of ethics. Understanding this intimate connection has two practical benefits. It removes the seemingly incommensurable conflict between financial and ethical responsibilities of managers and it gives us new and positive insights into Milton Friedman’s view that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

In my article “Understanding the Separation Thesis” I noted that most scholars in the business ethics field seemed to have accepted R. Edward Freeman’s argument to the effect that what he calls “the separation thesis” should be rejected. I argue, however, that they seemed to understand this thesis (and its rejection) in quite different ways. This volume contains three responses to my article which, interestingly enough, can be taken to corroborate my original argument. I here make some brief comments on these responses.