Introduction and Overview

Abstract

This book originated in a symposium on business ethics that took place in the faculty of commerce, at the University of Canterbury, in September 1997. Professor Werhane, who was a visiting Erskine Fellow, provided the keynote address. Contributions to the proceedings were inter-disciplinary, spanning theory and practice. Subsequent contributions were obtained from within New Zealand and from Asia. The book starts off on rather a pessimistic note: the new managerialism (the kind of thing Scott Adams jokes about in the world-famous Dilbert cartoons) is economically suspect and psychologically damaging. In contrast, the ending section sounds a more optimistic note: the trend is one of moral progress, with morality slowly but surely constraining commercial practices and the new technologies of design enabling us to overcome many conflicts between ethics and economics. In the intervening territory, we encounter many insights. We consider the role of managerial narratives and discourse, we engage in the meta-theoretical dialogue between empiricism and normative ethics and we examine the cultural contexts of business practices, in New Zealand, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Japan. An overview of each chapter is set out below.