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Morality, Ethics, and Values Outside and Inside Organizations: An Example of the Discourse on Climate Change

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Abstract

The public debate on climate change is filled with moral claims. However, scientific knowledge about the role that morality, ethics, and values play in this issue is still scarce. Starting from this research gap, we focus on corporations as central decision makers in modern society and analyze how they respond to societal demands to take responsibility for climate change. While relevant literature on business ethics and climate change either places a high premium on morality or presents a strong skeptical bias, our sociological model depicts morality as an indeterminate force: it can lead to both workable solutions or merely reinforce the status quo, depending on what different corporations make of it. We describe, on the one side, the diffusion of moral values in the media discourse on climate change and, on the other side, the specific responses of corporations. While the media discourse generates a pressure on corporations to act responsibly, their moral claims do not provide clear advice for action. As a result, morality becomes available to organizations as a medium that can be re-specified according to their internal dynamics. Corporations transform moral values into something compatible with their own structures through a variety of different responses: introducing formal ethical structures (e.g., codes of conduct), initiating value-oriented projects, or developing informal moral norms, and so on. In some occurrences, morality becomes a mere façade, while in others it serves as a decision-making criterion and deeply influences core activities in firms.

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Notes

  1. In the following, we will use ‘morality’ to refer to the complex of terms discussed in this paragraph in general, and ‘values’ and ‘ethics’ when further specification is required.

  2. An analysis of contemporary media communications should also include the Internet. However, since the traditional media still play a central role in structuring the news, setting the agenda of priorities, and framing problems (e.g., Jarren 2008), we only focus on studies that examine coverage of the climate issue in newspapers and on television. We regard this as sufficient, as our focus it to identify central frames and not to analyze differences between media.

  3. This does not mean that communication in the media can be interpreted as a series of unilateral descriptions by the mass media. Indeed, the media’s depictions of social problems necessarily build on the ways in which other social actors construct issues in their multifarious discourses (e.g., Carvalho 2008, p. 164).

  4. Although it would be interesting to include the media coverage of climate change in developing countries, we focus exclusively on developed countries due to the lack of available studies on developing countries to date.

  5. A ‘frame’ is a pattern of interpretation which gives meaning to different facts and in this way acts as a basic structure in a discourse. Frames can contain different elements: the definition of the problem, causal relationships, actors, sets of criteria for judging behavior, and so on (Entman 1993).

  6. While systems theory offers well-established tools for the analysis of function systems, organizations, and interactions, there have been very few efforts to introduce concepts capable of describing networks and fields (Hasse and Krücken 2005). Such analytical concepts would be of central importance for explanations involving the re-specification of morality and ethics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Sociology, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Cristina Besio

  2. Faculty of Humanities, University of Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland

    Andrea Pronzini

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  1. Cristina Besio
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Correspondence to Cristina Besio.

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Besio, C., Pronzini, A. Morality, Ethics, and Values Outside and Inside Organizations: An Example of the Discourse on Climate Change. J Bus Ethics 119, 287–300 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1641-2

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