Organizations today typically include statements about organizational values on their web pages. However, such value statements often occur in separate places, are of different sorts, and leave unclear messages of what values the organization creates or adheres to. This paper argues that value statements would be clearer and at the same time more suitable for strategic decision-making purposes if they were structured according to the classical ethical categories of virtue, duty and consequence. Virtue values would include what is commonly known as core values. Examples are honesty, integrity, openness, and impartiality. Core values are enduring principles that tell people how to think and act. They are meant to help create and sustain an organizational culture that influences people's conduct and sets the organization apart from others. By duty values we mean rules that the organization has voluntarily chosen to subscribe to, beyond laws and regulations. Examples of such rules are ISO standards regarding health, safety and environment issued by the International Organization for Standardization. Such standards typically describe verifiable rules and procedures to be in place, without actually measuring real end impacts. Consequential values are connected to the raison d'être of the organization. Consequences are end impacts of organizational activities. In the perspective of corporate social responsibility, an organization exists for the purpose of the stakeholders-with the owners usually considered as a preferred stakeholder. In this perspective, consequential values are identified with stakeholders' interests such as owners' yield, workers' salary, health and safety, costumers' satisfaction, and society's concern about environmental impacts (Barney, 1997). The three value categories are connected to different ethical mindsets of decision-makers. Therefore, to portray the full set of values of the organization in a meaningful way, the categories should be separated, but juxtaposed. Although one may argue that virtues and duties are instruments for consequential values, virtues and duties do have a natural status as intrinsic values. This leads to a value structure where the three sets of values are portrayed on the same level, but separate. As a refinement, the consequential values can be developed into a strategic goal hierarchy that may be used for decision-making purposes. The paper reports from a survey of Norwegian and American companies that are compared with regard to how they emphasize the three value categories on their web pages. The general conclusion is that a substantial proportion of companies make references to all three value categories, but they are immature when it comes to well-structured value statements.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate perceptions of the relative importance of different stakeholders (owners, employees, customers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governmental authorities) as agents motivating managers to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR). The aim is to determine which stakeholders are viewed as key motivators and which the respondents think ought to be key stakeholders.Design/methodology/approach -This is an empirical study. Three stakeholder groups -corporate leaders, MSc business students and NGOs -were consulted through a paper survey ðn ¼ 264Þ: Findings -The findings reveal that the three stakeholder groups roughly agree that owners are the main motivators for managers to pursue CSR, followed by customers, governments, employees and NGOs, in that order. The paper then turned from perceptions of how things are to opinions about how things ought to be, asking who should be the main motivator. In this case, customers moved up to first place, followed by employees, owners, government and NGOs. Age, but not gender, was a significant variable. The older the respondents, the smaller the discrepancy between perceptions of what is and opinions about what ought to be.Research limitations/implications -This study was conducted in Norway and generalization is therefore limited. By replicating the study in other countries cultural differences can be investigated.Practical implications -The findings are applicable for evaluating different avenues for understanding and influencing managerial and stakeholder CSR behaviour.Originality/value -Several studies have concluded that stakeholders are of key importance in the CSR setting. However, few studies so far have compared the perceived relative ''power'' held by stakeholders. This type of knowledge can provide a key to understanding the development of CSR.

This paper discusses the paradigm of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), and relates it to other disciplines. It concludes that MCDA needs a larger, not smaller, emphasis on values and subjectivity to increase rationality in decision-making.The paper bases the argument on a conciliation of ethics, philosophy, neuro-psychology and management paradigms. It observes that the MCDA 'mindset' relates to consequentialism, as opposed to virtue ethics and rule based ethics. Virtues and rules play an important role in practical decision-making, however.Findings in neuro-psychology show that reliable decision-making requires emotions. Elicitation of emotions is therefore required in MCDA value trade-off processes. This leads to a concept of emotional rationality, which defines rationality as a four-dimensional concept that includes well-founded values and breaks radically with common notions of rationality.Virtues do not easily lend themselves to value trade-off, but questions of virtue usually creates strong social emotions, as opposed to the feebler global emotions that may arise in connection conventional trade-off of end values. The conclusion is that MCDA should not be shy of subjectivity and emotion, but instead put more emphasis on it to increase rationality. A part of this challenge is how to deal with questions of virtue in decisionmaking.

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