RETRACTED ARTICLE: Modern Business Ethics Research: Concepts, Theories, and Relationships

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to explore and map the intellectual structure of business ethics studies during 1997-2006 by analyzing 85,000 cited references of 3,059 articles from three business ethics related journals in SSCI and SCI databases. In this article, co-citation analysis and social network analysis techniques are used to research intellectual structure of the business ethics literature. We are able to identify the important publications and the influential scholars as well as the correlations among these publications by analyzing citation and co-citation. Three factors emerged in this study are: (1) ethical/unethical decision making, (2) corporate governance and firm performance, and (3) ethical principles and code of conduct.

Patterns of Research Productivity in the Business Ethics Literature: Insights from Analyses of Bibliometric Distributions

“…The findings from our study stand to shed systematic insights into the relative degree to which ''success breeds success'' when it comes to publication in the leading business ethics journals. Also, our study's focus into the nature of aggregate patterns in research productivity across publishing authors in the business ethics discipline nicely complements recent studies in the discipline that have investigated the disaggregate levels of productivity among individual researchers (Sabrine, 2002) or the collaborative structure among individual researchers (Tseng et al, 2010). It also complements past studies that investigate the intellectual nature and merit of research in the business ethics discipline (Dean, 1997;Robertson, 2008).…”

“…Although the process of identifying the leading research journals in any disciplinary area is not an ''exact science'' based on ''unanimous conclusions,'' generally a consensus emerges among the respective researchers in a discipline (Mittal et al, 2008;Rainer and Miller, 2005). In the business ethics disciple, such consensus arguably points to the following two as its leading journals (Karen, 2004;Tseng et al, 2010;Wicks and Derry, 1996): viz., Business Ethics Quarterly (BEQ) and Journal of Business Ethics (JBE). Accordingly, in this study, we select both these journals for our analyses.…”

Leadership and Change: The Case for Greater Ethical Clarity

“…In organisational terms, as in life in general, ethics are beliefs about what is right or wrong, they provide a basis for judging the appropriateness of behaviour and they guide people in their dealings with other individuals, groups and organisations (Tseng et al 2010;Jones et al 2000). As Wines (2008, p. 484) commented: 'At bedrock, those who profess ethics believe that human beings are autonomous moral actors capable of making meaningful choices'.…”

Business ethics research in the hospitality industry: topics, methods and trends

“…On the other hand, the most popular topics were corporate social responsibility and natural environmental issues. When one compares hospitality journals with the general business ethics literature, there has a recent paradigm shift in the direction of corporate social responsibility (Stevens, 1997;Ma, 2009;Tseng et al, 2010). There are a number of studies that thoroughly discuss social responsibility topics although the discussions of the fundamental topics of business ethics topics, including ethics, ethic codes, ethical decision making, and ethics and performance relationship, are rare.…”