Business ethics as a discipline leans on cases but flourishes by thorough analysis and reflection. The present volume offers both. After three introductory chapters into business ethics eight recent European cases, mainly stemming from The Netherlands and Belgium and all of them with a clear moral impact, are extensively described and analysed. Among them are the Lernout and Hauspie speech technology disaster, Heineken’s struggle with the promotion girls selling beer in Cambodia, cartels in the Dutch construction industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the Aids crisis, and Unilever allegedly making use of child labour in the cotton industry in India. Each case is followed by two expert comments, from the fields of general ethics, but also of law, economics, management and organisation theory, sociology and social psychology. Cases and comments together offer an unique entrance in varieties of moral reasoning and in the personal and institutional dimensions to be taken into account when facing a corporate case saturated with moral ambiguities. This book will be of interest to researchers as well as teachers of undergraduate and graduate courses in Business Ethics, Business in Society, Management and Organisation Theory and Strategic Management. It will also be useful for business practitioners eager to find moral guidance in their specific field.
EUROPEAN BUSINESS ETHICS CASES IN CONTEXT Issues in Business Ethics VOLUME 28 Series Editors: Wim Dubbink, Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University, The Netherlands Mollie Painter-Morland, Department of Philosophy, De Paul University, USA Consulting Editor: Pat Werhane, Director, Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, De Paul University, USA Former Series Editors: Brian Harvey, Henk van Luijk† , Pat Werhane Editorial Board: George Enderle, University of Notre Dame, USA William C. Frederick, University of Pittsburg, USA Campbell Jones, University of Leicester, United Kingdom Daryl Koehn, University of St. Thomas, USA Andreas Scherer, University of Zurich, Switzerland Horst Steinmann, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany Hiro Umezu, Keio University, Japan Lu Xiaohe, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, P.R. China For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6077 European Business Ethics Cases in Context The Morality of Corporate Decision Making edited by WIM DUBBINK Tilburg University, The Netherlands LUC VAN LIEDEKERKE Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and HENK VAN LUIJK 123 Editors Wim Dubbink Tilburg University Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities PO Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg The Netherlands
[email protected] Luc van Liedekerke Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Centre for Economics and Ethics Naamsestraat 69 3000 Leuven Belgium
[email protected] Henk van Luijk (deceased) ISSN 0925-6733 ISBN 978-90-481-9333-2 e-ISBN 978-90-481-9334-9 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9334-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011921121 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is pa