Tag Archive for: righteous mind
Featured Ethics and Social Science Expert: Jonathan Haidt
Interview with Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind and Thomas Cooley Professor of Business Ethics at NYU Stern
What are your main areas of research/work around business ethics?
What I discovered when I moved to NYU-Stern in 2011 is that there’s a lot of great research on behavioral ethics going on at business schools, which I had not known about as a social psychologist studying morality, and which ethics and compliance officers generally didn’t know about. What was needed was a way to gather up all the existing research and make it available and accessible to businesspeople. That’s why I created the first iteration of Ethical Systems back in 2011 – it was originally just a simple website to bring together all the varied worlds of knowledge that one needs before one can try to improve these complicated things called corporations. In 2014 the site was re-launched as the much larger collaborative project that it is today. Through our collaborative approach, we are researching topics where we think business could benefit, such as culture measurement.
Is Political Ideology a Compliance and Ethics Risk?
Cross posted with permission from ES Collaborator Jeffrey Kaplan's Conflict of Interest blog
In a post last week on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, Danling Jiang, Associate Professor of Finance at Florida State University, summarizes a recent article she authored with Irena Hutton, Associate Professor of Finance at Florida State University; and Alok Kumar, Professor of Finance at the University of Miami: “Political Values, Culture, and Corporate Litigation,” which was published in the latest issue of Management Science and which “examine[s] whether the political culture of a firm defines its ethical and legal boundaries as observed by the propensity for corporate misconduct.”
In a post last week on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, Danling Jiang, Associate Professor of Finance at Florida State University said of recent research, “Using one of the largest samples of litigation data to date, [they] show that firms with Republican culture are more likely to be the subject of civil rights, labor, and environmental litigation than Democratic firms, consistent with the Democratic ideology that emphasizes equal rights, labor rights, and environmental protection. However, firms with Democratic culture are more likely to be the subject of litigation related to securities fraud and intellectual property rights violations than Republican firms whose Party ideology stresses self-reliance, property rights, market discipline, and limited government regulation.”
This is interesting – if not necessarily surprising – stuff, and particularly so in an election year. But does it bear on the work of C&E professionals? And does it have anything to do with conflicts of interest?