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Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics
Ethics And Network Organizations, Robert Phillips
Ethics And Network Organizations, Robert Phillips
Robert Phillips
As value chains become longer with increases in outsourcing and subcontracting, the challenges of fixing responsibility become more difficult. Using concepts from the literature on social networks, this paper considers issues of diffusion of responsibility and plausible deniability in such relationships. Specifi cally, this paper isolates three sources of denial of – or defense against – attributions of responsibility: connection, control and knowledge. It goes on to consider the effects on network density and actor centrality as third parties (tertius illuminans) alter the structure of these networks. Finally, preliminary conclusions are considered including suggestions for addressing these new challenges as …
Stakeholder Legitimacy, Robert Phillips
Stakeholder Legitimacy, Robert Phillips
Robert Phillips
This paper is a preliminary attempt to better understand the concept of legitimacy in stakeholder theory. The normative component of stakeholder theory plays a central role in the concept of legitimacy, therefore, though the elaboration of legitimacy contained herein applies generally to all “normative cores” this paper relies on Phillips’s principle of stakeholder fairness and therefore begins with a brief description of this work. This is followed by a discussion of the importance of legitimacy to stakeholder theory as well as the general ambiguity of the term. A distinction is then drawn between normative and derivative legitimacy. Reference to this …
Stakeholder Theory And A Principle Of Fairness, Robert Phillips
Stakeholder Theory And A Principle Of Fairness, Robert Phillips
Robert Phillips
Recent decades have witnessed an increase in the number and quality of discussions concerning the corporation’s obligations to other groups other than its share owners. Possibly the most frequent way framing such discussions is in terms of stakeholders. Hence stakeholder theory has become a central issue in the literature on business ethics / business and society. There has been, however, relatively little attention given to the source of these obligations that a firm has to its stakeholders. Many students of stakeholder theory are content to assert such obligations and move on to what they believe the substance of these obligations …